A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (16 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
Captain Basseliniden looked them over and grew pale as he looked.
“What does this mean?” he asked, slowly.
“You know what this means, well enough!” answered the big, hook-nosed man, whom Rykkla recognized as Tuna Nose. “We didn’t sign onto this ship to take a pleasure-cruise for our health and beauty nor to play nursemaid to a bunch of females. If our present cap’n’s going to let every prize slip through his fingers, then we’ll get ourselves a cap’n who won’t!”
“Oh, you will, will you?” retorted Basseliniden.
“We will, indeed,” replied the spokesman. “And what about these wimmin here, eh? Ain’t we s’posed to share and share a-like in any booty? Ain’t them wimmin booty? They’s salvage, at least, I reckon. An’ salvage is share and share a-like, like it says in the Articles.”
“You’re not touching the women, not you nor any of you.”
“Well, ain’t many of us wants the big’un, it’s only fair enough to admit that, straight off. So’s if you wants her, that’s square by us.”
“It’s not a matter of who wants who. Either I’m captain here or I’m not . . . ”
A shout of “Then I guess you ain’t!” was followed by the report of a gun and Rykkla turned in time to see one of the bosuns stagger backward, both of his arms extended and his still-smoking shotgun slipping from his fingers, the second barrel detonating as it hit the deck, while the iron belaying pin which had impacted his forehead still whirled high in the air. A cry of pain rang out from the main rigging, angry and profane exclamations arose from the men on the main deck and the remaining officers on the poop sprang to the monkey-rail where Rykkla and the captain were threatening with their guns; the descending belaying pin struck Tuna Nose on his crown and he fell unconscious to the deck.
The man who had thrown the belaying pin secured a replacement from the pin-rail and resumed his position in the vanguard.
“They’ve shot Tuna Nose, too!” the sailor cried. “Let’s kill the murderin’ bastards and be done with it!”
“Back with you!” shouted the captain. “Down off my poop! If you come up here, I’ll shoot every last man of you. I am master here! Get down!”
Seeing the black muzzles of the shotguns staring steadily at them, the men slowly and sullenly backed down. When they had all returned to the deck, the new leader asked, his voice choking with rage, “Well, what are you goin’ to do now? Kill all of us?”
Rykkla leaned close to Basseliniden’s ear and said, “Captain, where is Gravelinghe?”
“What?” he replied, a little startled, then looked around the deck below. There was, indeed, no sign of the giantess. “You, men,” he shouted. “What have you done with the woman?”
He was answered by hoots and cat calls. “‘Bout time you noticed!” cried one of the sailors. “She’s all right, down below, and she’ll stay all right so long’s you do what we ask.”
Thursby wondered aloud, “How could they have taken her?”
One of the sailors, having heard this remark, replied, “She were asleep and we just beaned ‘er with a frying pan.”
“She’s trussed up like a roast,” said another, “and we’ll have no qualms about chuckin’ ‘er over the side, neither.”
It was now nearing twilight, and the wind, which had been increasing by huffs and puffs, was now blowing at gale force. The men on deck, whatever their personal wishes might have been, were forced to work against the storm. Drenched with flying spindrift and chilled with the typhoon’s cold, they labored by sense of sound and touch to save a ship they hated and a man against whom they had just mutinied, because they were sailors with a sailor’s peculiar code of ethics, which considers nothing else of importance during a time of stress. They hauled on hard, wet ropes against the counter-pull of the screaming wind, and with clew-lines and buntlines fast and reef-tackles chockablock, they scrambled aloft in inky darkness to fight out the battle on slanting foot-ropes, to clutch a handful of stiffened canvas only to have it torn away, to clutch again and again, gathering in the thrashing cloth inch by inch, and holding by knees and elbows until a gasket could be passed, shouting cries of encouragement to one another against a wind that drove the words back into their throats, and conquering at last by pure perseverance, brute strength and endurance. By midnight they had the ship, under the three lower topsails, foresail, spencer, reefed spanker and foretopmast staysail, hove to and taking the short, vicious seas easily but drifting northwest into the mouth of the bay, with its jagged barrier reefs a menace under the lee. By daylight sail had been further shortened by taking in the fore and mizzen topsails and reefing the foresail, but the threatening reefs, a blurry line of churning grey seen through the spindrift, was well on the lee quarter and away from their line of drift.
A squall, thick with rain and the spume from wind-truncated combers, was rushing down upon them, pressing the heaving turmoil of sea to a level, adding a louder note to the storm’s song. It struck the
Amber Princess
and under the impact she lay over until the lee rail was buried in the indigo water. Rykkla and Tholance gripped the quarter-rail and sheltered their faces from the stinging fusillade, while behind them Basseliniden, acting for the striking helmsman, scowling viciously, bore down with all the strength of his muscular body. “Take in the foresail!” he shouted against the howling wind. “Look out for yourselves on the fo’c’sle deck!”
The first violence of the squall had passed, and the seas were again lifting their heads. The men had manned the weather clew garnet and buntlines, and the taking in of that foresail in such a furious wind promised to be an interesting spectacle, worthy of attention, had it not been for the distraction of the sudden, shrill cry of “man overboard!”
As the ship reeled and shivered, shaking itself like a wet dog, a mighty sea boarded the weather bow, tearing Rykkla and Tholance from their places and rolling them to the lee rail, where the almost weightless Tholance would have been lost had not Rykkla gripped the tiny waist with one arm while hugging the railing with the other. Once she saw that the girl was secure, she picked herself up and descended to the flooded main deck, where she saw that the foresail was thrashing over its yard and was going to pieces. Half a dozen men were scrambling to their feet, where the water was waist-deep in the lee scuppers. Once again, someone cried out, “Man overboard!”
Less fortunate than Tholance, Tuna Nose had lost his footing and had been swept off the forecastle. With all the agility of an acrobat, naturally enough, Rykkla scrambled up the main rigging and scanned the waste of grey water to leeward. A yellow sou’wester showed for a moment a hundred feet away, puffed up with trapped air, bobbing like a bouy. “He’s a goner!” she heard one of the men say, by way of eulogy. Just at that same moment, a huge figure suddenly loomed alongside her; she glanced, startled, in time to see the towering nude prolongations of Gravelinghe as she paused for a brief second before diving into the leaden waves.
Another sea, the last of the usual three, and the mightiest, lifted above the
Amber Princess
and dropped aboard. It was a deluge; it crushed in the weather side of the forward house, but left it otherwise in place; it tore men from their grips on ropes and belaying-pins and washed them about helplessly; it surged against the lee bulwarks and rose, a moving mountain, high over Rykkla’s head. It wrenched her from the rigging and bore her away, struggling weakly in her tightly buttoned coat and long rubber boots.
Few saw her go, but one was ready for action. Basseliniden, in his shirtsleeves, rushed across the deck and caught her in a flying tackle just as she was about to be swept over the railing. “Gravelinghe!” choked Rykkla, spitting and retching. “She’s gone over!”
Without a word, the captain snatched at the end of the forebrace, which he tied in a long bowline over his shoulder, rose out of the surging water and climbed the rail. Crying out, “Stand by to haul in!” he sprang overboard, and those who climbed the rail, not the least of whom were Rykkla and Thursby, watched him swimming bravely towards what seemed at first to be nothing but a floating oil-skin coat and then was revealed to be the body of Tuna Nose kept afloat by the big woman, who was even then drawing closer to the ship, paddling as efficiently as a machine with one long, powerful arm. Basseliniden reached her just as the men on deck had cleared away the last tangled coil of the forebrace. Rykkla saw him slip the loop around the waist of the unconscious man and wave at her by way of signal. She called for the men to start hauling.
The fourth and following seas had not boarded the ship, and in the comparative tranquility the crew hauled first their companion, then the captain and Gravelinghe to the side, where the latter caught the main-chase and climbed aboard unaided. The sailor was lifted up, weak, full of water, but still living. He was assisted aft while the captain, disdainfully avoiding the hypocritically hearty words and claps on his back offered by the men, made his way back to the poop. Gravelinghe merely stood among the cheering sailors, as oblivious to their attentions as the ship’s carved figurehead.
“I’ve had it with this business,” Bassiliniden snarled to Rykkla, as he rejoined her. “This sort of thing isn’t worth it. Once upon a time, I could get a crew of dedicated Romantics who were damn good pirates and enjoyed every minute of it. But now . . . ”
“What are you going to do? You can’t let them take your ship.”
“Why not? All the fun of piracy is gone, anyway. For years I’ve wanted to get into something simpler and safer, import and export, perhaps, or law. I’ve always wanted to paint, too. Might as well do it right now as any other time. I’m not getting any younger”
“You mean to turn the ship over to the men
now
? Here?”
“Why not?”
And he meant what he said. The worst of the storm had passed and the ship was now climbing and descending long, low rollers like a stagecoach on an undulating road, a heavy, oily movement. The captain called those of the crew who were not needed at the moment to watch the ship, which was most of the men, and they gathered in front of the poop, wary and hostile.
“Men,” said Basseliniden, raising his hand to quiet the murmuring, “this will be simple: you want the ship; all right, it’s yours.”
There was a long silence, until the crew realized that nothing more was going to be said. There was a confused stirring, a considerable mumbling, before one of them was relunctantly elected to be spokesman. It was the fortunate and abashed Tuna Nose. He was pushed ahead of the gang, hanging his head, wringing his watchcap, shuffling his feet.
“Well, cap’n, that’s right gen’rous and I, we accept. Um, just zactly what did ye have in mind now? I mean, uh, what are ye goin’ to do?”
“Why, leave the ship, of course, not that I can see where my plans are any concern of yours,” the captain replied. “I don’t have any more interest in it. Choose a new captain among yourselves if you want, I don’t care. Give me one of the longboats, some provisions and a little water and you’ll not hear from me again.
“And have no fear,” he added, seeing the uneasy look on the mutineer’s faces, “of reprisals. I’ve no more love of the authorities than you. In fact, they’d be so glad to see me that I don’t think that they’d listen to anything I’d have to say about a bunch of pirates somewhere on the high seas. The first thing that I plan to do is change my name and head as far inland as I can get.”
“I want to stay,” said an oboe--like voice that cut through the miasma of uncertainty, distrust and hostility like a foghorn. Rykkla had not heard that voice, nor even such a voice, before and looked for its owner. Gravelinghe had both of her hands held clenched above her head, as though that might make her more conspicuous, an unnecessary gesture in Rykkla’s opinion, and repeated: “I want to stay.”
Thursby stepped to Rykkla’s side and said quietly, “I think that I do, too, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“But I planned to go with the captain!”
“I thought that you would. I’d still rather stay here with Gravelinghe and the men. It sounds like a lot of fun.”
Rykkla looked down at Tholance, who was shyly grinding her right toes into the deck. “I suppose that you’re turning pirate, too?”
“I guess so. I believe that it would please my father. I think that the experience would make a wonderful chapter in my memoirs.”
“Is it what you really want to do? You could start a new life in Tamlaght, if you wanted. I think that there may even be an estate waiting for you.”
“This
is
a new life. And if there is an estate that’s waited this long, it’ll keep a little longer.”
“If you’re certain . . . ”
“What’s certain? I just figure, what the hell?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MERMAIDS
Bronwyn awoke to an overpowering sensation of déjà vu. She opened her eyes but they seemed to be obscured by some sort of shimmering film that softened, tinted and distorted her vision, as though she were looking through a piece of fine, green, wrinkled silk. The minty emerald light pressed against her body evenly, everywhere, with a chilly firmness. There was a strange flow within her body when she attempted to breathe, she could only inhale and the oddly thick atmosphere seemed to pass directly through her head.
There was a face regarding her, beyond where her vision lost its sharpness, quivering as though it had just been released from a gelatin mold. It was a handsome face, she decided, even if it weren’t in focus: broad, set on a thick neck, with large, wide-spaced eyes, thin, almost lipless mouth with corners upturned in amusement, wide flat nose . . . but the head was completely bald. It looked like the face of a successful prizefighter, albeit a good-humored one who would never think of beating another human being to a pulp outside of the ring, the sort who wrote poetry or collected stamps on their days off. She was pleased being able to make such a detailed assessment so soon after her trauma, but some of this pleasure was a little spoiled when a brightly-colored fish drifted like a wayward butterfly between her face and that of the man.
Where am I?
she wondered in sudden panic. “Where am I?” she attempted to say aloud, but could only produce a gargling, strangled sound. The fish, alarmed by this, shot off like a startled hummingbird.
My stars! I’m under water!
and with this thought came sudden panic, since she knew that no one could remain under water for as long as she must have and still be alive. And with
that
thought she involuntarily gasped. Instead of a deep breath that might have calmed her nerves, her lungs would not expand; nothing seemed to happen from her throat down. Rather, a cool, dense substance flowed into her mouth and out of louvres that had inexplicably appeared on her neck. In lieu of feeling the pain she expected upon breathing water, she found herself involuntarily appreciating its smoothness; it was like a crystal liqueur.
The big man smiled; his teeth looked exactly like pearls.
“Welcome, Bronwyn,” he said. “You’re looking well.”
“I don’t feel at all well,” she bubbled.
“Come, come!” said the big man, in a jovial tone altogether too jolly to suit the princess’s mood. “You look absolutely splendid!”
“I doubt it,” Bronwyn answered, and began to examine her body, or, rather, what was left of it. She almost immediately discovered that something very peculiar had happened to it. She put her hands to her head. It was covered with a soft and leafy substance that only superficially resembled hair; thick, green strands instead of the expected coppery waves. Continuing down she discovered, below where her ears should have been, strange flaps of skin that were opening and shutting in rythm with the gulps she was taking of what was now passing for air. Her skin felt sleek and glossy and when she held her hands in front of her face, she saw that they now had pretty translucent webbing between the fingers. Relunctantly, she turned a fearful gaze toward her legs and feet, or where her legs and feet would have been if they had not been replaced by a thick, muscular, tapering green cone that finished off in a broad, spatulate pair of fins, their translucent tips wafting gently in the undulating current like the huge leaves of some tropical plant. There was a smooth transition between her original skin and the skin of her new caudal appendage, the change seemed complete around the level of her hips, whose iridescent scales sparkled in a fashion that under any other circumstance, or on anyone else, she would have thought very pretty.
She was still terribly confused and not a little frightened, but what amazed Bronwyn most was that she thought she looked splendid, she who seldom thought twice about the appearance of her body, both thoughts usually disparaging. Whatever was possessing her, she wondered, that she thought she looked better as a fish than as a human?
By his magic, this stranger had, for some yet unscrutable reason, done this thing to her.
“Why have you done this?” she gurgled.
“Why not?” replied the uncanny being, shrugging his massive shoulders. “It seemed the thing to do, I suppose. Actually, it wasn’t even my idea.”
“Well, then, who are you, anyway, who has the time to engage in such unique frivolities?”
“I? I am Sithcundman . . . merely an ordinary Triton . . . as you are, now, yourself.”
“
Triton?
Tritons are gods!”
“Well, minor gods, if you will. If we were mortal, we’d probably only be certified public accountants or dentists,” he replied, modestly.
A Triton?
thought Bronwyn.
And
I’m
a Triton? A god? Even if only a minor one? What does that make me, then? An honorary god? A godlet? A godling?
“Well,” said the Triton, who had been looking increasingly impatient since her awakening, “enjoy yourself!” and began to swim away with powerful, lazy strokes of his broad flukes.
“What a moment!” bubbled Bronwyn.
“What?” came the reply, relunctantly spoken over a broad retreating shoulder.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“You can do whatever you want. Look here,” he said, a little more patiently. “My associates decided to bestow a wonderful gift upon you; they must have had good reasons, but what those were I can only speculate; I’m only their instrument. After all, one of the prerogatives of godhood is arbitrariness.
“The waters of a hundred rivers are now pouring over you, washing away your mortality. What you do with this gift, as with all gifts of the gods, is up to you.”
Bronwyn was left alone, suspended like an orphan plankton, alone with her thoughts, which were poor enough company. Minutes or years may have passed, she had no way of telling. She was now an immortal living in a timeless environment where everything was equitable and changeless, with neither seasons, pulse nor pendulums. For a long time she dwelt in astonishment, mindless of purpose, moving with the great ebb and flow, pulled this way and that in the complex gavotte of the dancing moons, like an inexperienced square dancer passed from partner to partner. She was but one more anonymous corpuscle among the countless billions circulating in the sluggish, inexorable currents that formed the veins and arteries of a great, somnolent, infinitely powerful body, larger than all of the continents together and seething with life. like a newly-fledged bird testing its unfamiliar wings in the morning chill, an apt if inappropriate simile, she fearfuly and tentatively tried the pinions of her courage. She was a sea nymph among the periwinkle and intricate coral polyps, staghorn brittle as glass, the contemplative sponges; peaceful, pale anemones that bloom forever; a sweetly singing nymph that wove bright curtains of sunlight, winding like a thought in a philosopher’s passing fancy, flickering thoughts of phosphorescent beauty, among the crypts of everlasting change. Immediately, she discovered the freedom the gods had granted her. She set out to test the fathomless boundaries of her new abysses.
Bronwyn’s euphoria was a little spoiled by the realization that she did not know much about being a mermaid.
Perhaps, it may be because I had always assumed that fish were so dumb that it could be neither too demanding nor very entertaining to be one. After all, how much can a fish expect of life, other than to live a life devoid of hooks, nets and bigger fish?
Fortunately, she wasn’t as alone as she had originally thought. She did not again see the Triton who had introduced her to her newly aquatic life, but there were many others, she discovered, and, if they were not actually Tritons they were at least merpeople, which is all that she asked. She first met her fellow mermaids when she finally dared to push her head through the membrane that separated the ocean from the air above. At first she felt as though she had emerged into a vacuum, and gulped and gasped at the insubstantial gas like a hooked grouper.
This must be what it would have felt like had I given in to the urge to shed my spacesuit while on the moon.
Her unused lungs, however, eventually reinflated and she breathed with more ease, though not before spewing up gallons of seawater. A ringing in her ears that she had at first associated with her imminent suffocation continued and after a moment she realized that what she was hearing was
singing
: a kind of wordless, tuneless
a cappella
. She rotated and saw that there was a mossy pile of wave-rounded rocks a few dozen yards away. Sunning themselves, draped over the slimy surfaces like a half dozen indolent seals, were mermaids (or merwomen, for who could tell?). Their brilliant-hued bodies glimmered in the sunlight like sequined cocktail dresses as their cauda flicked absently at the flying fish that arced over the picturesque group like startled grasshoppers.
“Look! It’s
Bronwyn!
” cried one and the others, shading their eyes against the glare of the mirror--like sea, strained to see the newcomer. “Come on over!” they invited. “Where have you
been
all this time?”
She cruised over to the islet and, with considerable difficulty, hauled herself out of the water, feeling, with much justification, as silly and awkward as a seal. It was the first time that she missed having legs. She managed a half-sitting, half-reclining position, the dangling tips of her tail still in the water, that she hoped was at least picturesque. It was uncomfortable to lie directly on her back because she knew there were a pair of dorsal fins decorating her spine and where the crack of her buttocks would have been had she still possessed buttocks. She critically examined what she could see of herself as she lay stretched across the smooth, warm stone. The lower half of her torso, from approximately the line of her hips down, finished in a long, gracefully tapering cone that must have added two or three feet, at least, to her original not inconsiderable length. The blue-green scales of the cone merged almost imperceptibly with the rose quartz skin of her stomach. The sinuous curve of her tail as it draped over the boulders made her believe, rightly, that she had no joints (as a legged person in a mermaid costume would necessarily have, a fault that always spoiled the verisimilitude of such theatrical efforts), but rather that her spine continued on down to the very tip of the tail. She felt as though she still possessed her pelvis, however, and wondered briefly, if morbidly, what the mounted skeleton of a mermaid would look like. She noticed that she still possessed her navel, oddly enough, which winked back at her conspiratorially like the eye of a whale. From just below either hip fluttered pretty pelvic fins that she could open and close like translucent green paper fans. Doing this amused her for a minute or two. Her fingernails had a distinct aquamarine cast as so did her aureolæ and nipples, a color that, she thought, looked rather nice against the rosy cream of her skin. Her hair, so far as she could tell, was as lush as ever, but now possessed a lustrous berylline patina that shimmered as iridescently as a raven’s wing in the brilliant sunlight, like strands of green spun glass.
“Would you like a mirror?” asked one of the mermaids, after she and the others had allowed the newcomer her moment’s introspection.
“Thank you,” Bronwyn replied, taking the proffered glass from the mermaid’s slim-fingered hand. Bronwyn had noticed that she, herself, was considerably larger than the others, though it had not been obvious at all until their hands had approached. The mermaids were scarcely more, tail to crown, than five or six feet in length, dwarfed by the nearly ten feet or eleven commanded by the sea-Bronwyn. She felt like a whale among porpoises. They all looked very young, like attractive teenage human girls, though the princess knew that in fact they were immortal and were probably as old as the ocean itself. They also all looked very much alike; except for slight differences in coloring and size they could have been (and for all that Bronwyn knew, were) sextuplets. Bronwyn realized, with a blush that she hoped would go unnoticed, that she knew nothing of the sexual habits of merpeople; if they laid eggs in the hundreds, like frogs, it wouldn’t surprise her in the least. The mermaid’s faces were uniformly as fresh and round and vacuous as the glass globes that some fishermen use to bouy their nets.
Bronwyn gazed into the salt-tarnished looking glass and was both surprised and not entirely displeased by what she saw. Her face had suffered no major change, her eyes always had been green, other than the tint of her hair and the addition of the pulsating louvres on the sides of her neck, just below her ears, which latter had been reduced to mere token presences, like those of a seal’s. The gills were quiet now, she supposed because she was in the open air and breathing more or less normally, and were scarcely noticable slits. It was, all in all, the same peregrine face to which she had become both accustomed and resigned.
Had she ever had an experience with anyone that had
not
changed her in some way, though perhaps not so drastically as this last? It was a novel thought for the princess, she had for a very long time concerned herself, and had even, to her credit, worried, about the impact she had had on other people’s lives. Yet she had seldom considered how much she was herself an amalgam of experiences. Layer upon layer, like an onion or strudel: gypsies and fortune tellers; soldiers and cold-blooded hunters; madmen and madder princes; woodcutters and stonecutters; pirates and adventurers; villains and heroes; cowards and rapists; murderers and priests; faeries and changelings; gods and monsters and kings and scientists and monks and bears and children . . . Layer upon layer. like the iridescent chambers of the cowrie, nautilus or abalone, built up patiently layer by infinitesimal layer, -like the tissue-thin pages of a book, each one of which could be torn away until nothing was left but the empty boards. She looked down the glimmering length of her new body and thought of the cowrie’s shell: a beautiful compilation of pearl but entirely hollow inside.
“We thought you’d
never
show up,” said one of the mermaids. They were so indistinguishable that Bronwyn made no effort to single out who was talking at any particular time. She was unable to be certain whether one was doing all the talking, or whether, in rotation, they all took part in the conversation. It didn’t really seem to matter.
