Salamander
Page 17
– We’re heading for London, he said. There’s nowhere else to go, now.
Pica turned the cuttlefish over, plunged her knife into the pale underside.
– I can set up shop there again, he went on when she had not spoken. If you want, you can help me. Work in the shop. We can’t sail around the world, after all.
She drew out the translucent, quivering ink sac.
– Why not?
She could not sleep.
She knew the Bee so well by this time that she could move easily, even in the near-darkness, through its formerly baffling interior. Every night she made her rounds, often closing her eyes, which had too often missed the ship’s well-disguised secrets, searching only with her fingers and toes for hidden recesses, sliding panels, undiscovered passages between decks. So far she had told no one about her nightly wanderings, nor about the phantom prowling just ahead of her through the sleeping vessel, not knowing for certain whether her fancy or the ship itself was playing tricks on her.
She thought for a while that it might be Darka, who could often be found in out-of-the-way corners of the ship, picking up after the children. But it made no sense for her to be doing this in the middle of the night, even considering her fanatical tidiness. And besides, Darka usually took watch on deck while Pica was creeping around below.
She took her turn at the helm, only half-listening as Turini lingered to puzzle over the fact that ever since Alexandria the Bee seemed to have developed a will of its own. Every day he fought against the winds and currents bent on driving them east, only to shorten sail for the night and the next morning find the ship had accomplished what he could not, having righted itself to their northwesterly course.
The next night she stood impatiently at the helm through her watch, and when at last the carpenter relieved her she went below and continued her search, creeping along passageways, listening, and then breathlessly hurrying after the fading creak of footfalls on the planks. Dawn neared, and heading at last for bed, on a sudden impulse she crouched in one of the hidden crawlspaces and waited without moving. After a while she heard the laboured breathing of someone moving through the cramped passage towards her. As the someone shuffled close she reached out a hand and clutched a bony wrist.
The phantom struggled, struck Pica on the breastbone with a flailing hand, pulled her hair. She would not let go.
– Very well, a woman’s voice muttered. You caught me.
She followed her unseen captive out of the crawlspace and into the light of the companionway lantern. The woman was dark-skinned, and wore a white blouse that hung untucked to her knees. Her face was streaked with dirt and shadowed by a tangle of woolly hair, through which her dark eyes glittered. There was no doubt any longer that the phantom was flesh and blood.
She would not tell them her name.
When everyone had been roused from sleep, they all gathered in the great cabin, watching the young black woman wolf down the bread and cheese that had been her first request. When she had finished her meal she sat back, belched, and commenced chewing at a fingernail, staring at each of them in turn from behind the matted ropes of her hair. Turini was the first to break the silence.
– You’ve been righting the ship’s course, he said. Why?
The young woman spat out a sliver of fingernail.
– You’re going to London, she said. So am I.
She would answer no more questions, and snatching up the spyglass on the chart table, she dashed from the great cabin and climbed out onto the quarterdeck. Like lost sheep they all followed.
She had the spyglass trained to the stern, where sea and sky were merged in a grey dawn haze.
– This ship is a madhouse, she muttered, lowering the spyglass. It took me days to figure out how everything worked. We’ve lost so much time.
– Time for what? Flood asked.
She looked at Pica and the twins and then turned again to Turini.
– Those guns in the hold. We need them up here.
– Antiques, the carpenter said. Ballast. They’ll probably explode the first time they’re fired.
– We will see.
Just then Miza pointed to the stern.
– Look.
They all turned and to Flood at first it seemed that a fragment of Alexandria had somehow broken away and followed after them. Out of the haze a shining white pyramid had materialized. He snatched the spyglass from the young woman. Into the scope jumped a huge ship under full sail, flying British colours.
– She’s called the Acheron, the young woman said. She’s after me.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE NOTORIOUS FEMALE BUCCANEER, AMPHITRITE SNOW, AND HER BLOODTHIRSTY CREW OF ADVENTURESSES, HARLOTS, AND JEZEBELS
The cargo ship Gold Coast, out of Southampton, was bound for New Providence in the Bahamas with a cargo of beef, beer, and women. It is not recorded that the beef or beer gave any trouble, but the young women were another matter. Most of them were serving girls, promised well-paying positions in good homes, although the real plan was to help redress the lamentable shortage of white female flesh in the troubled colony. In a letter to the king, the governor had warned that if something wasn’t done soon to provide the male population with marriageable (or at least beddable) white women, the entire island would soon be overrun with mulatto bastards.
Despite this commission, the Gold Coast also carried a few black females, to help defray the cost of the voyage. They were kept under watch in the hold, as somewhat less valuable cargo. The girl who would become Amphitrite Snow was one of them. She had been stripped of her real name and dubbed Amphitrite in the house of the nobleman who had first purchased her, an admiral in the navy. A goddess of the sea, he had called her one day when he and his wife were inspecting the kitchens. The admiral’s wife had watched her closely after that day and she was let go soon after, and brought aboard the Gold Coast.
The crew was loud and often drunk, and from the hold Snow could hear much of what went on elsewhere in the ship. Screams and sounds of struggle soon made it clear to everyone on board that the captain had permitted his men to enjoy some of the cargo, as compensation for the rigours of the voyage.
Those lads in New Poxidence, he could be heard encouraging them, aren’t likely to be too picky about used goods.
The crew eyed her often but never spoke to her as they did the others. When she was let up on deck for air one of the men gripped her arm and winked at her.
– You must be white as snow on the inside, my dear. The captain’s been saving himself for you.
So she acquired her names. Before being taken below decks, Amphitrite Snow got hold of a nail the ship’s carpenter had mislaid. The captain sent for her that night, had her brought to his cabin. When he climbed on top of her she drove the nail through the back of his hand and in between her ribs.
Goodness, you’ve crucified us, he said, plucking out the nail with a ghastly smile. She closed her eyes and tried to fall out of her body, certain of a beating, but only silence descended. She opened her eyes. The captain was inspecting the wound she had given herself.
Not as bad as it could have been.
He had a basin of hot water and a cloth brought to the cabin, and washed the blood from her body himself. She sat motionless, the water cooling on her skin.
We can’t mar the goods, he finally said, standing back to look at her. At least not until I’ve been paid. So first we’ll get you sold. Then, rest assured, I’ll be coming to pay you a visit, to catch up on old times.
Not long afterward the crew indulged in its most riotous night of drinking. Since there were no male slaves aboard, even the watch had been allowed a tot of rum or several, and were soon sprawled about the decks, incapacitated.
Snow led a party of seven other women who broke into the weapons locker and armed themselves. In a few minutes they had taken over the vessel and rounded up the half-uncomprehending crew. The first man who rushed them she shot at, hitting him in the belly. He sat down on the deck, holding his g
ut and crying until the captain growled at him to shut up. Once she had fired the gun her fear was gone, leaving the same emptiness she had felt when she was taken from her own country.
They drifted for the first few days, debating what to do next and where they might go, with the captain and his men howling at them from their prison in the hold. You’ll hang. You’ll be torn apart by horses. You’ll be burned at the stake as witches. Some of the women were for surrendering, for making some kind of arrangement with the captain so that the whole thing would be forgotten. She lowered a boat for them, told them to gather what they would need. No one took her up on it.
Eventually the men were brought out of the hold, herded at gunpoint into a longboat, and set adrift in the icy North Atlantic. All but the sailmaker, who was half-blind, and the doctor. Snow reasoned their skills would be needed, at least until the new crew of the Gold Coast could fend for itself.
They wandered the seas for months, afraid to anchor in any but the most remote places. When other ships approached, they ran up a plague flag. In time, however, they had enough contact with the rest of the world to hear about the reward of one hundred guineas for the capture, dead or alive, of Amphitrite Snow & her crew, for the Disruption of Trade & Commerce on the High Seas; & for their diverse Abductions of Young Women, with the manifest Intent of corrupting Morals & Persuading Others to a Life of Crime, Villainy & Murder.
They also heard two stories that interested them greatly.
The first was a rumour about the great arch-pirate, Henry Avery, who had never been caught. It was said he had sailed away to the South Seas in his ship, the Fancy, and founded a pirate republic on a remote tropical island.
– The island of Shekinar, Snow told the Bee’s crew. The world’s only truly free state. No kings, no magistrates, no jails. No buying and selling of men or women.
Their wandering now had a goal, however remote and unlikely. Perhaps somewhere in the world, they hoped, there was a place where they would be safe from retribution. But on remote beaches and in dark taverns at the edges of the world they also heard legends of the man known only as the Commander.
He could sniff out pirates a hundred miles distant through a raging gale. Predict the outcome of battles that had not yet begun.
… It was thirty-three days and nights in a longboat, drifting through ice and darkness. That’s what gave him his uncanny powers. Four of his men froze to death. One thought he was Christ and stepped off the boat into the sea. Another cut off the fingers on his left hand, to save for when they ran out of rations. He bled to death while they watched.
Parts of the Commander himself were frostbitten so badly that when the survivors were finally rescued, by a brig hauling salt to the Newfoundland fishery, bits of the man had to be pared away, like the stale corners of a block of cheese, to save the remainder.
Bits of me, he would repeat when he told the tale, as if the worst of it lay there. Not a hand, an entire eye, a complete limb. Just slices and scraps, here and there. Thirteen chunks of dumb flesh in all and no words to mourn their loss. Do you see? Hacked in two would have been preferable. But I was merely diminished, chipped away at, my name associated with no missing appurtenance of any definitive shape. The black witch knew what she was doing. If you’re going to lop away at a seafaring man, take something to which legend can give a name. Harry Two-Hooks. Noseless Ned. One-Stone Jack.
The Admiralty gave him command of the Acheron, their newest and most well-armed weapon against pirates, or at least those who did not have government sanction. In time, as one infamous sea-devil after another met the rope, the definite article became attached to the title and the real name of the former captain of the Gold Coast was all but forgotten. It was merely necessary to say The Commander and wary men in every port would nod, glance over their shoulders, and whisper their own stories about him.
The Commander’s dread fame, though, had come at a high price. The agonies of his abandonment at sea, it was said, combined with the humiliation of the aftermath, had seared something in him to such a white heat that his inner vision had acquired the ability to see, simply by sighting a coastline with his spyglass, whether or not that particular island or peninsula or country or continent would ever be part of the British dominions. Or, if the territory in question was already under the Union Jack, the Commander somehow knew whether or not it would cease to be British at some time in the future, date unspecified. From Cork to Madras he’d made his predictions of imperial acquisition and relinquishment with a recklessness so undisciplined that the Admiralty had at last been constrained to order the Acheron home to Spithead. What he was doing, did he not understand, was very bad for public morale. Not to mention the other nations with an interest in his predictions, such as the French, who were less than delighted to be advised that New France was fated to become Even Newer Britannia.
The Commander was disinclined to obey the homeward order from his superiors. He hadn’t found her yet, and until he had, the log of the Acheron would record only that the vessel was unable to return to port due to strong headwinds and the need for extensive repairs. Thus he became a renegade, a threat. The Admiralty issued orders to all its ships that the Acheron be attacked on sight.
There’s going to be war, soon, with France, he often said. Britannia’s going to win all of North America, and then she’s going to lose it. That was the one that tore their mainsheets, and I didn’t even have to use the gift to see it. The fact is baldly obvious. Remove the French threat and the colonials to the south will start looking around for someone else to go to war with. That’s why they will beg me to come back. Just you wait. They need someone with vision, a clear head.
His midday navigational ritual, so the stories told, took place on the quarterdeck around a table draped in white cloth like an altar, with an equally formidable array of arcane instruments lined up and ready for a mariner’s Mass. The ceremonies included compass readings, sextant readings, log and lead measurements, and lastly, the cocking of his truncated but supersensitive nose slantwise to the plane of the ecliptic, testing the telltale winds, as he liked to say, for traces of Snow.
He caught up to her at last off Cyprus, and the rest is swiftly told.
– They blasted us to bits, Snow said, as they watched the Acheron grow off their port quarter.
The Gold Coast was sunk. Those of the crew who did not perish in the waves, she assumed, were saved for the gibbet. Cat Nutley and Crook-Fingered Jane. Brigid O’Byrne. Lucy Teach.
– But not me, she said. He wasn’t finished with me yet.
First a brief stop at Alexandria to take on provisions, and then the Acheron was on its way home.
The first volley came when the warship was still a considerable distance off, taking even Snow by surprise. The whizzing shot fell short, sending up spray that drifted down like a mist over the decks.
– He’s impatient, Amphitrite said. He wants us to shorten sail and get this over with as quickly as possible.
– He wants you alive, Flood said, doesn’t he?
– I hope not.
As the Acheron closed, Amphitrite’s meagre armament of antiquated guns responded with a smattering of fire that appeared to have no effect on her massive adversary. Through the smoke of their ineffectual volley they watched the warship come on with carriage regally unhurried, her bows turning in a long slow arc to flank them, her starboard gunports snapping open briskly, ready for business.
Pica slipped unnoticed from the quarterdeck and descended the main hatchway. As she reached the press room there was a roar, the ship heeled violently, and she pitched forward onto the planks.
A ball from the Acheron had struck them somewhere, she knew. She picked herself up and saw that the impact had knocked over her father’s work table and dislodged two of the ink casks, which had smashed on the planks and were now furiously gushing ink. In the swirling black pool that was forming lay Ludwig the automaton, his head turned back to front, one of his arms pumping uselessly in the air.
She placed her hands on her hips, and then on the two long sides of the chase. The iron frame was slightly wider. Like one of the ship’s trapdoors. She would just fit.
Pica kicked her shoes into a corner, peeled off her stockings, and climbed up onto the bed of the press. Gripping the bar to keep her balance, she leaned forward and breathed on the forme. The metal continued to deliquesce until wavelets agitated its surface with every shudder of the hull.
Cautiously she dipped in a toe.
– Cold.
Gripping the sides of the chase, she leaned forward and gazed at her wavering reflection in the surface of the metal. On a sudden thought she hung her pocketwatch by its chain from the bar.
– Time slows down there, she whispered.
Taking a great gulp of air she plunged in headfirst.
As the metal closed over her she remembered someone, a girl who searched for trinkets at the bottom of a filthy canal, in a story told long ago.
She surfaced in the press room. At first she thought that in the depths of the metal she had somehow gotten turned around and come back out the way she had gone in. But hauling herself onto the bed of the press she saw the pocketwatch, halted at one end of its chain’s swing. The hands had stopped, seven seconds later than when she had gone in. She was on the other side. In the well of stories.
Where had she been for those seven seconds? There had been a darkness, and then a coming back to herself as if from a long sleep.
Shakily she climbed down from the press. Nothing moved, and there was no sound. Something had happened to the light in the cabin: it had darkened to thick gold and taken on texture, a fine, grainy substantiality like translucent jelly.