The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  “Captain!” Robin broke into his reverie, pointing to starboard.

  There, a couple of miles away, lay the maze of low islands—lost in the glare for the most part—stretching out from the Musandam Peninsula, climaxing in that pair of islands, used as a guide for uncounted generations, called the Quoins.

  They were going out through the doorway of the Gulf at last. Overcome by an unaccountable rush of elation, Richard decided not to wait until they had “turned the corner” at Rass Al Hadd: “Good. Tell Sparks to make a telex,” he ordered. “To the owner, Kostas Demetrios [wherever he is]:‘Left the Gulf at 11.10 local time, July twenty-first’…” He paused, then added. “‘All well so far, Prometheus.’”

  —INDIAN OCEAN—

  CHAPTER NINE

  They came for Robin six nights later when she was coming off watch at midnight as they crossed the Line.

  Two burly sea nymphs sprang from the shadows of the corridor and caught her tired arms. Surprised, she looked over her shoulder but Ben was oblivious—crouching over the chart table already, rechecking her calculations of their course and exact position.

  She opened her mouth but was immediately gagged. One of them giggled girlishly, reeking of alcohol, and she knew it would be useless to struggle against them. Although she hated the feeling of powerlessness even more than she had thought she would, she knew there was no alternative, so she gave a mental shrug and went along for the time being, wondering queasily what to expect.

  On bare feet, silent except for the swish of their seaweed skirts, they ran her to the lift, then crowded in beside her. The light had been put out of commission so they plunged downward in absolute darkness.

  Robin stood still and straight, her mind a whirl of possibilities, her long upper lip prickling with sweat. It was a stultifyingly hot night. The grip of the sea nymphs, one on each arm, threatened to bruise her tense flesh. She calmed herself by trying to work out who they were. She had been aboard a week now, after all, and she felt she was getting to know the officer complement well.

  Ben Strong was on the bridge. That ruled him out for the moment, though Robin was firmly of the opinion that he would be involved in this somewhere along the line. The two of them had not really hit it off. Strong was Richard’s godson, almost his adopted son, but no two men could be less alike. The first officer was brown-eyed, deeply tanned, sandy-haired, powerful but slightly plump. She felt he affected the languid, sarcastic airs of an aristocrat in a cheap romance: manners that only charm would have made acceptable. Ben did not charm her at all, for the strong-minded, energetic, enthusiastic young woman had found her superior officer either over-solicitous, patronizing, or bullying; constantly surprised that she knew what she was doing. And, if Ben was on the bridge, then Paul Rice, the Welsh first engineering officer, a dark, slight hard man from Tiger Bay who boasted a knife scar on his right cheek, would be in the Engine Room.

  Unless the mysterious, unreadable chief was relieving him. That was possible. Not probable—schoolboy pranks did not seem to have any place in Martyr’s character—but Robin had simply been unable to sum the man up; so anything was possible.

  John Higgins would be involved. On the one hand, the quiet Manxman—possibly under Richard’s unofficial direction—would be there to see things did not go too far. On the other hand, this was an important part of traditional sea lore and he would want to see it done right: she would have to keep an eye out for a strange sea creature sucking on an unlit pipe.

  David Napier would be there too. The second engineering officer. A hard-faced Mancunian bully, a great square ex-boxer with thin stubble-hair and a flattened nose, Napier would delight in making things as unpleasant as possible. She would be well advised to keep out of the clutches of his massive, apelike hands.

  That left McTavish and Tsirtos. They were the most likely candidates for sea nymphs. And while McTavish, good Glaswegian Presbyterian that he was, did not drink, Tsirtos most certainly did.

  She began to explore the black air around her for the exact source of the fumes.

  At no time did it occur to her that Richard might be directly involved in any of this.

  The lift jarred to a halt. The door opened to a blaze of light at whose heart stood a gargoyle figure half fish, half man, bewigged and hideously masked like the sea nymphs. Two green arms reached out toward her and even before her vision had cleared from the glare, a bag went over her head.

  During the last six days they had begun the voyage proper. As soon as the restrictions of the Gulf were left behind, Richard had ordered full ahead and Prometheus had answered with an easy fifteen knots.

  At this speed, never varying, day in day out, they had proceeded on a course a little south of east out of the Gulf of Oman and across Cancer; a degree or two east of south across the Arabian Sea, east of the Red Sea approaches and past Socotra.

  Now they were moving west of south, swinging toward southwest proper, preparing to pass down the inner arc of the Seychelles, the Amirantes, and Providence Island, to the Comoros and the Mozambique Channel approaches. They should reach the Comoros in eighty-four hours’ time—midday on the 29th.

  Now they were at the equator: 0 of latitude, 56 east longitude, at the heart of the Indian Ocean.

  Richard lay on his bunk fully clothed and wide awake. His shoulders were propped against the wall, feeling the easy movement of his great ship through the long ocean swells. Such was the size of her hull that Prometheus did not ride the water as a smaller ship might have done, pitching as the waves passed beneath her; but she had her own special movement and it was familiar to him now.

  The last six days had laid the ghosts of the Gulf to rest. The mysteries that had seemed so important then were in their proper place at last. Occasionally they nagged at the edge of his mind, like an unsolved crossword clue, but they remained secondary, a long way behind the efficient running of his ship.

  And Prometheus herself seemed different. He supposed he should have expected teething troubles, and thought now he had overreacted to them. For the deep blue waters of the Indian Ocean seemed to have brought out the best in her. Her mysterious, unsettling little ways had departed and she showed her true colors at last. She was a strong, pleasant, reliable ship.

  Worked by a strong, reliable, for the most part pleasant crew. Oh, Martyr might have been more approachable, but their discussion after Slope’s rescue seemed to have made him less suspicious and antagonistic; Ben could have been less of a bully at times; “Slugger” Napier less of a hard man at all times; and Paul Rice less of a pirate, he was talking of wearing an earring to emphasize his scar: here was a man born a couple of centuries too late—he should have served with that other great Welsh sailor, Henry Morgan. But by and large they were fine. And Robin seemed to have pulled them together. At times she seemed their mascot, almost their pet. They took endless delight in teasing her, being gruff, avuncular, patronizing; indulging her, teaching her, testing her.

  It was not a situation she enjoyed. She was her own woman, a fully trained, flawlessly competent officer. She deserved a great deal more respect than most of them tended to give her. But they had both known that this would be the case at first before he had agreed to take her on. And she was behaving perfectly under the added strain, slowly earning the respect of the most deeply entrenched male chauvinists among them. As he had never doubted that she would.

  At first she had put on an act, becoming a wide-eyed innocent with an inexhaustible fund of energy and an open, enquiring, apparently guileless nature. Trained in the dour rigors of the North Sea, on tankers a fraction of Prometheus’s size, she made a game of the simple joy it was giving her to be on her first Cape run. She treated the whole thing as an enormous lark; a huge adventure. And this ebullient enthusiasm, showered on one and all, had proved a perfect buffer. And a necessary one, keeping her at a distance from them during the long days sailing these vast blue waters, sun-filled and monsoon-cooled; and during the black velvet nights with their mother-of-pearl moons a
nd extravagant, gemstone stars.

  Only occasionally, when they were together not as captain and third mate, but as master and owner of the oil, did she put the mask away with him and show how much it was costing to perform the role.

  He worried about her, and wondered if that were patronizing. He was tempted to protect her a little, too aware that the others were watching them like a teacher with a favorite pupil. On the surface, the tip of the iceberg, his relationship with her was the same as everyone else’s, and turned around her efficiency as an officer and member of the crew. For the others, her sex made her an unknown quantity in a situation where unknown quantities were dangerous. It was the old story: their lives might depend upon her. They had to know how reliable she was under pressure. With a man, rightly or wrongly, they would take so much for granted. With a woman they would not. He found it distasteful, as did some of the others. But they could not protect her and nor should he.

  They would have been foolish to try. She wanted no protection; required no special treatment. She was perfectly capable of handling them, individually or all at once. However they chose to test her, she would pass. On their terms, perhaps: on her own terms, certainly.

  And below and abaft the bridge where he lay, she was undergoing her first real test—the ageless maritime ritual of the Crossing of the Line.

  A great roar of “GUILTY!” greeted the completion of the charges.

  “Guilty as charged!” thundered a single voice. “Remove the first prisoner for execution. Uncover the second prisoner.”

  At once, Robin stood blinking in the brightness.

  Unbelievingly, she looked around Prometheus’s a ft e r-deck. The security lighting revealed half a dozen weirdly dressed figures etched against the absolute blackness of the vast night, grouped around the ship’s swimming pool. Beside them stood a raised platform with a table on it.

  A GP seaman called Kerem Khalil was the only other person aboard who had never crossed the equator before. He was undergoing the ritual first. Having been charged, he was now being led, in chains, up toward the table. As he neared it, a huge figure, bizarrely dressed to resemble a cook, rose up to meet him, flourishing a massive meat ax.

  Struggling silently, Khalil was laid on the table. The ax rose and fell, apparently splitting him open. The cook reached down and pulled free string after string of raw sausages, seemingly disemboweling the struggling man. The spectators howled their approval. The victim was swept off the table and hurled into the pool.

  The two nymphs holding Robin’s arms were in motion at once, hurrying her round the end of the pool into the presence of Neptune himself. He sat on a throne of shells, cascading water from his great gold crown whenever he moved. Everything about him gleamed green—his trident, his curling beard, his flowing seaweed robes. The nymphs forced her to her knees. At least she wasn’t in chains like poor Khalil, whom she could hear trying to get out of the pool behind her.

  “Who dares enter my watery kingdom?” boomed the same mannered voice that had just sentenced Khalil.

  “Robin Heritage, third officer, Prometheus,” cried her escorts.

  “With what is she charged?”

  Another, more sinister, figure appeared beside the vivid god. Someone dressed as a lawyer. Wigged and masked like the rest. “With being a woman!”

  Raucous chorus of approval.

  “With being aboard a man’s ship…With doing aboard a man’s ship a man’s job…With doing it almost as well as the average man might do it…With robbing, therefore, the average man of his job…and so being guilty of the current levels of unemployment in the British Empire and of the collapse of the Western World!”

  “GUILTY!” they chorused.

  “Guilty as charged,” yelled Neptune. “Remove the prisoner for execution!”

  Robin was unceremoniously dumped in an empty chair that was immediately lifted onto the platform where the cook’s table had been. Before she could react in any way, a shaving brush the size of a mop was thrust into her face, spreading stiff, green, stinking foam everywhere from shoulders to ears. In a moment she was ready. Gasping for breath, she opened her eyes only to be confronted with a fish-man wielding a cutthroat razor as long as her arm. The blade was metal, and sharp enough to scrape away a little skin as she was shaved to the gleeful shouts of Neptune and his cohorts.

  After a few moments this, too, was over and she was lifted bodily from the chair. She saw Neptune rise to tower above her.

  “One!” he shouted. She was swung like a hammock between two of them.

  “Two!” The whole chorus as she went back, and…

  “THREE!”

  As she sailed through the air she twisted and landed badly. As soon as the water closed over her, she curled her body so her shoulders hit the bottom with a considerable bump. At once, she wedged her left hand into a filter on the pool’s floor and waited, her right fist closed around the scissors hidden in her pocket.

  The trick worked even better than she had dared hope.

  After no more than a minute, Neptune himself came floundering to her rescue.

  As soon as he plunged into the pool she was in motion, and before he knew what was going on, the sea king’s heroic gesture was undone. She swam around him, snipping away carefully but ruthlessly. After a few moments, she rose out of the water in the far corner to throw his robes onto the deck, the scissors skittering away across the metal. Then, lithe as a seal, she was out herself, turning to sit on the corner of the pool looking in; her uniform transparent, but beneath it, instead of her practical but flimsy underclothes, her best black swimsuit. And in her left hand the final revenge: the remains of a pair of swimming trunks.

  Neptune, on the other hand, was wearing only his mask and wig: the trunks, of course, had been his.

  There was a moment of stunned silence; then two of the nymphs had torn off their masks and were cheering: John Higgins and Andrew McTavish. And all the rest joined in. Gentle hands grabbed her from behind and carried her shoulder high all the way down to the Officers’ Bar, singing, “For she’s a jolly good fellow.”

  When they were gone, Richard stepped out of the shadows with the towel Robin wasn’t going to need after all. Knowing the instant they crossed the line, he had come down to see fair play. He climbed up onto the scaffold and looked down. Ben Strong had taken off the Neptune headdress and was standing, calculating what his shaken dignity and total nudity would allow him to do.

  “Warned you, Number One,” said Richard.

  Ben looked up and grinned ruefully. “She fooled me all along the line,” he admitted. “She’s quite a girl. An officer but no gentleman!”

  Richard gave a bark of laughter and threw him down the towel.

  General Purpose Seaman Hajji Hassan laughed quietly to himself, uncertain whether he was more pleased with the humiliation of his friend Kerem Khalil, with the attempted humiliation of the unbeliever woman, or with her unexpected revenge upon the unbeliever mate whom he did not like. What ever. It had been a memorable evening. One worthy of a little celebration.

  Hajji was the last to have any hashish hidden aboard. The austere Salah Malik disapproved, and, while his attitude was not shared by all the seamen, his word was law. With all but Hajji. He would allow himself one swift indulgence, then he would retire happily to the uncomfortable berth with the others.

  He had decided to hide his tiny cache in the Pump Room while helping the chief remove the corpses of the last lot of officers. None of the others was likely to come here unaccompanied after such an occurrence. Even Hajji, who was not in the slightest superstitious, found the atmosphere of the place oppressive. Especially this evening, for some reason. He hurried in, crossed to the Fire Control Room, and brought out the little silver packet from behind the sinister black canisters as fast as possible. The air around him seemed peopled with unnatural shadows. It seemed full of scarcely heard whisperings. Every now and then his heart would flutter as though something were just behind him, trying to steal his breath.<
br />
  None of this was quite as imaginary as it appeared. In spite of the checks after the accident, in spite of daily maintenance, several of the cylinders had slow leaks. The air up to Hajji’s knees was heavy with carbon dioxide. When he left the door open, as now, it cascaded into the corridor and wound along the floor, sinking into guttering and runnels, seeping down and collecting in pockets where the air-conditioning could not reach, just as both Levkas and Martyr had feared it would; silent, invisible, odorless, deadly.

  Still laughing quietly to himself, Hajji closed the Pump Room door and began to creep down the corridor. He had gone less than ten feet when Malik called his name.

  Salah Malik stood, watching the man with distaste. At first he had seemed an excellent seaman, worthy of the pilgrim’s title his parents had given him as a name: Hajji—one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; but it had soon become clear that this was an illusion created by the fact that he always worked in a team with Kerem Khalil, who was seaman enough for both of them. “Go to the Engine Room, Hajji,” he ordered now. “You are late for your watch.”