We are all worn out.
We have met, for minutes at a time, attempting to remember how to tie a knot, drowsiness eating our thoughts.
The limit has been reached. I hardly know how to set a watch, since no one is fit to go on.
It is time to secure everything, to lower the sails, to tie down our cargo, and go to sleep without knowing whether we shall wake up at the bottom of the ocean or not.
It is time to surrender to the mercy of something that, we know well, has never had mercy.
Muresh has volunteered to steer and watch.
Watch what?
The dark waves, the wild wind, the clouds falling in sheets upon us, the incessant fog.
Still, I understand: A sailor at the helm means we have not given up completely. A hope, if a man alone in the midst of the sea can rightly be considered hope.
I could have kissed him, but—desire also requires energy.
The rest of us shall sleep for four hours.
We risk life for it, but what more can be done?
I write this down in haste and tell myself (lying is at times necessary) that the wind is abating.
The seas still surge terrifically, but I feel them less.
The ship is steadier.
The silence awakened me.
The storm has vanished, leaving a still sea below and an icy sun above.
The men work to repair everything broken, to bail the water, to patch the sails.
They will sleep a long and dreamless sleep tonight.
Muresh and Abranoff will take over at dark. Too exhausted to rejoice, we simply await the coming of evening.
We rest, let our minds wander without any fixed course.
We tell ourselves, with the satisfied tiredness of one who has barely escaped his grasp, that Death merely brushed us with a bony hand before he left.
But it is not true. He has not left.
Another tragedy.
Joachim’s shout at an indeterminate hour of darkness.
Single watch tonight, as crew too tired to double. When he came on deck to keep the morning watch, Joachim found only Abranoff at the helm. Muresh, who shared the watch, was missing. He had gone to investigate something at the other end of the ship,
steps
but had never returned.
Raised outcry and all came on deck. We conducted a thorough search, but no one was found. We are now without a Second Mate and crew in a panic.
There is no stranger on board or storm to blame for the disappearance.
There is only the certainty that Muresh was alone when it happened, whatever it was.
No longer an accident: a purpose.
Vlahutza and I have loaded the guns, slipped blades into our belts. We shall go armed henceforth and wait for any sign of cause.
The last night. Rejoiced we are nearing England. Weather fine, all sails set. I retired, worn out. Slept soundly. Vlahutza has awakened me, saying that Acketz and Joachim are missing. Helm was free for many hours, in the dark, and we are now off course.
Now, only Olgaren, Abranoff, Vlahutza, and I remain to work the ship.
Two days of continuous fog, a nothing that devours the sea, the stars, the coasts that might tell us where we are.
I look at the navigation charts, dead paper with vague figures.
The fog surrounds the ship like a shroud, reminding us that we are expelled from the outside world.
Not a sail sighted. No way of knowing whether we have entered the English Channel or have passed it by, heading toward a destination we will never reach. No one to whom we might send a desperate signal.
Not having power to work sails, we watch the canvas swell with air and humidity above us. We have given the helm of the Demeter to the wind and the sea, which—needless to say—seem to be against us.
I dare not lower the sails, as we could not raise them again.
We seem to be drifting to some terrible doom.
Vlahutza is more demoralized than all of us.
He cannot impose his rank on the missing.
He regards the ropes with indifference, no longer searches the fog for a hole to use the sextant.
He does not care. Not about the fate of wood.
He has not set his weapons aside even once, but the fog cannot be sliced with a blade and drift is impossible to shoot.
But something living ….
What, in all this misty waste?
His stronger nature seems to have worked inwardly against himself. The men are beyond fear, working stolidly and patiently, with minds made up to the worst. They are Russian, he Romanian.
Midnight
A cry.
Not part of the dream, seemingly outside my port. A cry of pain.
Nothing could be seen, with the fog.
I have rushed on deck, not knowing where to run. Vlahutza shouted at me from an alcove lit by lamps, Olgaren’s shelter against the night.
There was naught left but a cigar, still smoking, a void whose silence screams.
We watched the ember until it went out.
Abranoff looked down at his own cigar and then hurried to throw it overboard, as if it were an incandescent eye that suddenly winked at him.
One more gone. Lord help us!
Vlahutza says we must be past the Straits of Dover, as in a moment of fog lifting, he saw North Foreland, just as he heard Olgaren cry out.
If so, we are still en route, though now sailing aimlessly through the North Sea. Only God can guide us in the fog, which seems to move with us, and God , it seems, has deserted us.
At midnight, I went to relieve Abranoff at the wheel. When I got to it, I found no one there.
The wind was steady and, as we ran before it, there was no yawing. Any attempt to change course might rip the rigging free, make us list in the water.
I dared not leave the helm, so I shouted for Vlahutza. After a few seconds, he rushed up on deck in his flannels, indifferent to the fierce, icy drizzle that whipped us.
He looked wild-eyed and haggard. He glanced down at the deck and then at me, and I realized he saw shadows that I could not.
Though he saw me struggle with the helm, he did not rush to my aid, but climbed slowly, carefully up the rungs to where I stood, pulling a huge knife out from his flannels.
He slid up behind me.
I couldn’t see him. All I could do was wait for ...
the blade ….
And I felt his breath for a second sliding down my neck, reaching my ear.
I clearly felt his deep breathing, the warmth of his mouth, brushing my flesh.
He whispered hoarsely, with his mouth to my ear:
“It is here.”
Not a gesture of love, but of terror. He feared the very air might hear.
“I know it, now. On the watch last night, I saw It, like a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale, lit by the sickly glow of mushrooms. It was in the bows, looking out. It made a gesture and the fog dissolved at Its command. I could see the stars above us. I saw It move Its lips (swollen, red), which twisted as It muttered some obscure spell. I crept behind It, as I have behind thee, and gave It my knife.”
His voice vibrated, falling and rising in tone, from a hoarse whisper to nigh-on a girlish scream: His reason had given way.
“Dost thou see this blade? Dost thou? Should I bury it in thine eye … dost think thou couldst feel how cold it is in the midst of thy living blood? I always believed it so. I believed in the voice of steel ... yet it failed me. I do not know how. I gave It my steel, I tell thee, but the knife went through It, empty as the air.”
And as he spoke, he took his knife and drove it savagely into space. I felt a sudden burn and blood slid down my cheek. He had just cut me without knowing.
And, with a warning look and his finger on his lip, he wen
t below.
“I know where It hides.”
He started laughing.
“What is not normal aboard this ship?” he asked.
you
“The cargo, the damned boxes of earth in the hold, savvy? It must hide in one of them. One of the covers must be false. I’ll unscrew them one by one and see. Work thou the helm.”
He peeked over my shoulder, then touched my lips with his feverish fingers, giving me a warning look.
“Shhh.”
He went below. I saw him come out on deck again with a tool chest and a lantern, and go down the forward hatchway.
He is mad; stark, raving mad, and there is no use in my trying to stop him.
What damage can he do to the cargo? Nothing could matter less than the clay we transport.
I can only trust in God and wait till the fog clears. Then, if I can’t steer to any harbor with the wind that is, I shall cut down sails and lie by, and signal for help ....
Thus was I thinking when Vlahutza screamed.
Lord, may I never hear another man scream again!
Not like Vlahutza, not like Mikhail.
My blood froze and I was about to go to his aid.
But the hatchway burst open and up on the deck he came as if shot from a gun—a raging madman, with his eyes rolling and his face convulsed with fear. I could see he had pissed himself.
“Save me!” he cried. “Save me!”
He looked round on the blanket of fog. His horror turned to despair. And all of a sudden, he was once more simply Vlahutza. He saw me standing there, alone and terrified, pathetically clutching the wheel.
Whom could I have saved?
“Come with me,” he said in a steady voice, a sane man for the last time. “You had better come, too, Captain, before it is too late. He is there. I know the secret now. The sea will save me from Him, and it is all that is left!”
Before I could say a word, or move forward to seize him, he sprang onto the bulwark and deliberately threw himself into the sea, shouting as he condemned himself to exploding lungs and endless suffocation.
Without hesitation, he chose the black face of the drowned, a mouth unhinged by despair, hands that tear bloody grooves in a throat closed forever by the sea.
He jumped toward that end, eagerly.
I suppose I know the secret, now, too.
It was this madman who had got rid of the men one by one, and now he has followed them himself. God help me!
How am I to account for all these horrors when I get to port?
When I get to port!
Will that ever be?
Voices like dust, covering everything, hiding the immutability of the world.
I am at the helm of a dead ship.
What does it matter?
The voices are alive, surrounding me as my men once did. Voices that belong to me, that I shall not write down in the log of the Demeter that, now inside the bottle, has ceased to belong to me.
How might it be useful to whoever separates salt from those pages that I speak of Olgaren closing the door behind him, approaching to tell me, regardless of the impossibility of his words, that a wolf prowls the deck, the warm fur of a murderer exploring that narrow space with wild steps and the insane heat of his hunger, stalking?
The Demeter a bare forest, which I have inherited upon their death.
Acketz and Joachim shouting, filling me with the formless horror of not knowing what could transform a pair of strong men into broken voices.
“The canvas is alive,” they say.
“The fog cleared, Captain, and we could see ... see ….”
“The sails changed color.”
“They were black, Captain, torn upon the masts, fluttering in the wind ….”
“Wind that didn’t exist ….”
“We knew not how or why they had all been ripped, shredded, yet every piece still hovering together ...”
“... when we touched them, they screamed, all of them.”
“And the dark cloth stirred itself, moved of its own accord, throbbing obscenely.”
“Then it flew away.”
A million bats covering the intact sails, a million membranous wings fluttering in the air, spiraling above us, fading into the storm clouds that—in turn—shouted rain and wind.
The days become confused, days blended with other days by fear, insane goings-on, the silence that slowly covers us without our knowing how.
Did we keep our sanity within that silence, or did we fear we might tear the fragile membrane of normalcy with our voices?
When someone spoke, it was possible to hear his hopeless loneliness, echoing in the immense cavern of the world; so weak, so insignificant that we feared being reduced to that relative whisper.
However, silence also weighs heavy and sometimes, we would risk breaking it in order to breathe.
Vlahutza at the helm started talking to the route, to the wood, to me, about his short stay in Paris.
“I met Martin Dummolard,” he said, as if proud of the fact. “I stayed at Justine Lafayette’s boardinghouse in Lyon. She was still but a child, then. Fresh meat, as they say, Captain. I slept, unaware there was a pair of murderers in the house. I closed my eyes, never imagining that they both ate human flesh. My father and I left, after paying some coins, ignoring the fate that saved us at that moment. Dummolard was the murderer, cracking skulls to give them to his lover, who sipped their blood as if it were a crime to let it spill, drawing a curved knife to cut away the fleshy parts of the body: the thighs, the arms, occasional breasts that she would eat in her scented room—among the lace and ornaments that have made Paris famous—monstrously swollen, white, like maggots that arise from the flesh. Those who went to arrest her refused to put a hand on her, because touching her might stain one with ignoble liquids. Somehow, the fact that she had been eating only dead bodies for years had turned her into something else. She moved as if her immense flesh were an object that could propel itself as though multitudinous, with the perfect synchrony of insects. There was a trial and evidence and, although it is true that it was more a lynching than a legal execution, it is also true that she shouted until the end of the torment, ‘They are meat, meat, meat!’ and bit the executioners to taste human blood one last time before burning.”
Vlahutza took an old rosary out of his clothes, a coruscating old silver crucifix, which he turned between his fingers, as if it could save him from dreams.
My God, he might have prayed, deliver me from the memory of my days, from the images you offered to my eyes, from the meaning-laden whispering of Silence round about me. Heavenly Father, offer me the Peace of Ignorance so that the blade that seeks my flesh and blood weighs less before it slays me ….
He was not unaware that the thin and nervous Dummolard—and his gigantic Justine—wanted him.
They wanted his flesh in the dark, the blood hidden in his veins, the secret liquids of his body.
He wondered what Hunger would come for him in the dark.
“Dost thou desire me, Captain?” he asked in the dark of an endless night.
“Yes,” I admitted, as all had already collapsed, and he feared the other crew members, convinced in his heart that someone was preparing cutlery and spices.
He looked at me in such a way that I regretted having confessed it. The world a crack and I an edge that tore at his mind.
“If thou comest for me, I shall kill thee,” he said, spitting out the words as if his contempt could cleanse him of my presence.
At that moment, I became Martin to him. My desire is a white and swollen Justine Lafayette between my thighs.
A monster at the heart of the obscene night.
As Mikhail had been a monster, brought down by one of the mob’s thousand arms. A shot, a stone, a million shouts surrounding him.
“He kil
led the boy!” they lied. “He killed the boy!”
Yet, I know, and they as well, that the “boy” was nothing more than a cover for their persecution, a mask affixed to a young man, justifying a rage that needed no more reason than their unbridled fury. Intoxicated by the power of being a mob, by how unbeatable they were before the threat of a single man.
The “boy” had accepted Mikhail’s caresses and his mujik father preferred to kill his son rather than to accept that his nakedness was not a sin, that caresses offered in the dark, in the glow of the senses, did not indelibly stain him.
I might have screamed, might have offered myself, as well, as a sacrifice. But I simply skirted the shores of that surging sea that heaved with the impulse of its communal rage.
Mikhail sank into those human waters and when he fell, he screamed.
Just once.
Vlahutza’s scream.
The hoes were raised above his skin, the flesh opening as they fell. Waves: sharp edges rising. Foam: blood spattering the faces, baptizing the crowd with the ignoble ichor of murder.
A baptism that the mob imbibed, satisfied.
He was buried at a crossroads, so that his spirit could not find its way back to the village.
They sank rose thorns in his eyes, condemning him to darkness, even in death.
They filled his mouth with garlic, thinking that—thereby—he could not contaminate anyone with his breath; and what can be kissed while worms gnaw, tireless?
A priest gave the orders; he brandished the long blade that separated head from mutilated body.
He turned it face down; spat a curse into that gaping neck.
Then they nailed the body to the ground with a wooden stake.
The body was a beast for them, the flesh a monster that yielded to an incomprehensible instinct.
What did they really imagine they had stopped with all those rites?
Unimagined pleasure become a whispering silhouette that sought them out, pressing against their windows, touching instincts that had lain dormant for years, convincing their flesh to yield to ... what?
They did not wish to know. They planted heather over his grave, condemning Mikhail to rot in its dreadful roots.
The Route of Ice and Salt Page 8
