Bright and Distant Shores (37 page)

Word of Tikalia's plenty traveled back to Poumeta and, after a hundred years, it was decided that some of the warriors and fishermen should see the island for themselves. A voyage was
mounted and it lasted a season. When the party finally returned they carried hundreds of ornate armlets and necklaces, pearl-shell bracelets and amulets. They told stories of sheer white cliffs that dropped into a lake a thousand feet deep, of open fields of breadfruit and canarium almond forests, of clans living in cave houses with floors of tawny hibiscus. The island was very beautiful but for six moons of the year it was ravaged by terrible hurricanes. The Tikalia, who now spoke their own language and barely understood Poumetan, took shelter in their caves and didn't seem to mind the storms a bit. There were no yam gardens to rebuild and they sat by their hearth fires, making handicrafts and telling stories, while outside the world broke apart. Only twenty of the thirty Poumetans returned from Tikalia and the villagers didn't know whether the missing warriors were dead or now dwelling in caves with their distant cousins. The mystery remained but every two years a voyage to Tikalia was made anew. The Poumetans loaded their canoes with items of trade up from the other islands and set out. The circumcised boys went along with their fathers, and each time some of them did not return and were never spoken of again. In this way there was always an excess of Poumetan brides, enough to trade with the tree-dwelling Kuk.
This is how it came to be
.

Argus mulled over these myths in his mind from behind the bulkhead, the
Cullion
plowing through the brilliant field of waves. Tikalia specked the horizon between swells, a chalky ridge blinking through the morning haze of salt. There were the legends of the past, spread like vellum pages of scripture, and then there was the living dream of the past, the moments he carried, as real as the silver napkin ring in his portmanteau—the smell of his father searing white wood for a canoe, or the taste of guava and wild meat during a feast. He had failed his father long before being invited to make the voyage to Tikalia and it felt strange now to be approaching the island in a pair of trousers and leather boots. He wondered if he might encounter all the boys who did not return from the
voyages of his youth. Far from being dead, they might greet him on the beachhead with music and garlands of mimosa and he could teach them, as a sideline to trade, the catechisms of truth and veneration. Like the earliest missionaries in medieval Scotland, St. Ninian or St. Columba, or the New World brethren with Mohawk Bibles wrapped in their saddlebags, cantering across the ungodly American plains, he might be the first to bring them the good news of the Son and the Ghost. From the prow he also thought of David Copperfield going to London and wondered what they would find in Chicago. Instead of ending up in a blacking factory like David, he might work in a bishopric with a rose garden and his sister might nanny in a mansion of singing children. The future
was
different from the past. The reverend had written that it was all the same to the islanders, that clansmen swam in a broth of eternal present, but Argus knew the future by the way it made him feel. The past was sealed in envelopes, pockets, memories. It had been picked over, the Almighty's plan already revealed and known. The future, though, was still being made and furrowed into the minds of heathens and catechists alike, and Argus could sometimes feel the plowshare as God pulled him along, the revelation of who he might become. A different life was being sown for him.

He wasn't sure his sister saw it this way or that she understood the point of the moving pictures in the messroom. They had been invited to America, to the city of Chicago, which was a thousand miles from the sea. He sounded these words in his mind. They had the same revelatory bent as
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show
. If the white men in Chicago couldn't pronounce his surname of Niu then he might call himself Argus Copperfield. Or maybe Argus Blunderstone or Argus Trotwood, names that carried within their open, flowing sounds some hint of rookeries and hamlets and forests of English camphorwood. They had been invited to America and before they could answer formally the storm had driven them east. Argus had
seen Owen tracing their course on a map in his cabin. They were now closer to Fiji than they were to New Guinea. It was written into the charts—the answer was
yes
.

He turned from the approaching island and went to find his sister. As usual, she was tending the menagerie of stowaway animals on the quarterdeck—feeding a handful of oats to the wallaby, dried apples to the tortoise, a paste of dried fish to the Siamese cat. The mongoose had taken to climbing the rigging with the men, catching dragonflies and moths in its snapping jaws, but was also taken by the sailmaker into the belly of the ship to catch mice and rats. As a consequence, the mongoose, now named India, was never hungry and skulked a wide circle around the other feeding animals. Terrapin and Nipper watched the feeding from the elevated poop, the dog's bark growing perfunctory.

“We are almost there,” said Argus. “Our father made the voyage here many times in his life. Now we can see where he went and what he saw.”

“It is taboo for Poumetan women to set foot on that island. I am not leaving the ship,” she said. She let the wallaby nuzzle into her skirts.

“Do you know where we are going next?”

She straightened and beckoned to the cat. “And I will not live inside a museum with dead men's skulls and poisoned arrows. I want a house to work in if we go anywhere.”

Argus watched the Siamese purr around her bare feet. It was even more occult looking than most cats—eyes that suggested supernatural malice as well as cool indifference. “Who told you we would be living inside a museum?”

She glanced up at the poop deck, where the captain squinted, slack-mouthed, into the bright morning. There was no word for
captain
in Poumetan except
headman
or
chief,
so she called him
chief of the big canoe
. “He says that they will keep us behind glass windows so that clayskins can put us in their books. He says that he can get me a cooking job on another island.”

“He wants to keep you, Sister, behind his own window. He has halfblood children all over the ocean. Owen Graves told me this. Their days of birth are written on his arms.”

“You don't know him. You are not allowed in his cabin without an invitation. He has never touched me.”

Argus closed his legs so that the cat couldn't circle through them. He said, “Did you see where they want to take us in the pictures?”

“I saw too many lights and fat women with ostrich feathers on their heads. I am not for that place. You can go because you are already half made of clay and Bible song. You want to be in their books.”

“Only for a short time and then they will bring us back. You will work in a mansion, which is a house of many rooms.”

She said nothing further but they watched the mongoose emerge from a shadowy nook with a mouse in its teeth. It was apparently too full to eat; it left the tiny corpse for the cat to investigate. The cat did little but paw at it and, after a few minutes, Malini threw the dead mouse over the railing and into the ship's wake. For the second time since the sea burial she thought of Dickey Fentress in his body sack, twirling and spinning his way to the bottom of the ocean, where he would rot or be eaten by whatever dwelt there. What a grotesque ritual, she thought. He wasn't even important enough to burn, not even a finger bone was nailed to the ship's tall trees up among the fluttering canvas. He had been forgotten altogether. The sea was deep and filled with bags of sailors' bones and there were sharks and whales with strands of human hair coiled inside their stomachs. This was something she would never understand.

The
Cullion
skirted the island, looking for anchorage. Terrapin leaned at the helm with Owen at his side. There was a wide fringing reef, a series of brown coral ramparts that extended for a quarter-mile. On the leeward side, the sheer cliffs plunged into a
volcanic bowl, the lake suspended cuplike over the white beach. Above the massif a rim of stunted trees bent seaward before the slopes gave way to jungle rioting—stands of Tahitian chestnut, tree ferns, casuarinas, coral trees kindled with scarlet flowers.

“Not more than fifteen square miles is my guess but she's a fuckin fortress,” said Terrapin. “Skirt of gnarling coral and not a channel or place to find bottom.” They held a starboard tack, rounding the northern tip. Without the caldera's wind shadow the bark sallied into a gust and was pushed leeward, closer to the fissured heads of coral. Then, beyond the point, they saw a boneyard of shipwrecks hulked on the windward reef—a nautical museum of broken brigs, sloops, and barks. “Come about!” he yelled to the first mate and within seconds the
Cullion
tacked through the eye of the nor'easter and away from the wreckage. When they had passed about eight boat lengths toward the open sea, Terrapin drew breath. “The charts are wrong, Mr. Graves. There is no island at this latitude. Just a graveyard for scuttled ships. The
Lady Cullion
will not anchor here.”

Owen regarded the angled masts of the wrecks, weathered and pale as driftwood, the spars and sails long gone. He looked amidships, where Argus had prepared their trading cargo for loading. Owen said to Terrapin, “Can you get us near the edge of the reef and we'll row from there?”

“Because you intend to join the shipwrecked and the drowned, Mr. Graves? What's my payment if I come back without a trader? A kick in my corpulent arse?”

Owen looked off into the blue-white distance. He found himself on the verge of confiding in Terrapin and then he was saying: “I don't know when I will be able to come to sea again. My livelihood depends on whatever I can get off this island.” It sounded true enough, though there was the small omission of a looming inheritance. That would never seem like
his,
though.

Terrapin handed the wheel to the helmsman and took a step toward the cataclysm of yawed hulls. “Nine,” he said. “I count
nine ladies hogged up.” He stood with his hands clasped over his ponderous belly, a bootlace untied, a fazzolet knotted around his ruddy neck as if for dinner. His breath was redolent of aged cheese. “You must really want a bamboo harp, Mr. Graves, because this is lunacy of the empirical order.”

“Come back for us in three days, at noon. We'll take our chances.”

“And where am I supposed to take the ship for three days?”

“Half a day north there's another island. The men can rest before the trick home.”

“Yes, and that island was probably shot out of the same cannonical mud-dick as this one. Understand that an island without anchorage is no use to me. A ship likes to sleep in bays, sandy bottoms, channels, that drift of thing.”

“We can row from here,” Owen said in a tone of appeasement. “It's just Argus and me, and the rowboat can be lowered quickly.” Since waking that morning he had been aware that Jethro would be jettisoned from the trip to Tikalia. His unpredictable behavior would hamper their odds of success. No, if he was going to attempt a final boon, he was going to do it in a precise and ordered fashion. Everything needed to be under his control.

Terrapin nodded, letting the trader's scheme settle over him. “I imagined that the carpenter and the dead-bird collector were going along on this jaunt. That's the precedent that's been struck. 'Course, with the apprentice dead I wasn't going to give you another seaman. Does the wraith know he's not going along? Seems he might be a little miffed . . .” A smile played on his lips.

“I can't risk it after the run-in on the last island. It's just me and the boy. No one to slow us down. I would have liked to take a whaleboat because I can fit in more trading supplies. Any chance of that?”

Terrapin puckered and leaned forward against an invisible weight. “Like you, Mr. Graves, I'm hedging my bets. And after the weather I've seen pissfiring out of this particular sky, I can't
risk being caught short on lifeboats. You and the kanaka lad can have the dinghy and that's all. But if you want extra stowage, I recommend hauling something in the rear. The carpenter might have some old planksheer or something you can float behind to carry more loot.” He stepped back to the helm. “Mr. Pym, bring us on a skirting line, six boat lengths from the edge of the reef so the trader and his boy can row ashore. Noon three days hence, then.”

Owen nodded, retrieved his duffel bag, and descended to the quarterdeck to help Argus load.

In the fug below, Jethro was preparing his field kit, waiting for the definitive jangle of the anchor chain against the cathead before going above. The trip was winding down and at this final island he would go after something unusual, a gun-gem of the tropics. He was coming to think that Nature, in all her thrashing abundance and delicate recoil, was governed by a secret language. A cryptology that murmured just below human perception. His finger throbbed in the lamplight; was it trying to send him a message with its metronomic insistence? The body pulsed with electricity and it seemed his moods, even his thoughts, emanated from that poisoned blue tip. If it thrummed angrily, he was surly. If it fell into spasm, he was erratic. In the middle of a meditation on, say, avian flight or the armature of a wing, the finger would cut him off like an impetuous guest—
I am here, I am here
. And like some muzzled dog, more and more the finger objected to being imprisoned inside the glove. It wanted air, attention. He covered it with a piece of cloth and tried to run free with his thoughts. Consider the silkworm, he said to himself, aloud, surprised by his own voice. There was a half-written poem on the workbench that described a white mulberry with its thousand silking tenants. He took up the poem and found a pencil. He had been trying to finish it for days but it evaded him just before the last stanza, at the point where he compared the tree to an ancient citadel. What about the Chinese Tree of Heaven? Could that be in the next line, and then the stanza could continue: