Deluded Your Sailors (18 page)

As he gave life to the word ‘devil,' I smelt something like burnt blood or salt water set afire. Gust-borne, it passed right quick, but it sickened me.

Captain Walters smoothed my hair and tightened the bit of rope Atthey had used to tie my plait. ‘Tis like walking on wool, Kit,' he said. ‘I am lost without you. Count paces to my cabin.'

Maybe an hour later, Coltman lowered his spyglass and sniffed. I caught the odour, too, that burning stench again. Fog quick as a dream took us then. Fog at sundown, great long fingers and cliffs of it, hiding us from one another and playing merry hell with our voices.

The men cursed. ‘Young eyes,' said Coltman, his voice coming from starboard when last I'd seen him larboard midship. ‘Kit, take this.' He pressed his spyglass into my hands and spoke to me as he spoke to the other men, all of a cause he needed my small size for a task more important than his shaking jollies. ‘Climb aloft and tell me what you see.'

I slowly climbed the ratlines. I could only see my own hands and feet and the lines I grasped.

Coltman's voice came at me in pieces. ‘Speak, for the love of God.'

‘I see naught but the fog,' I called down.

Calm water slopped the hull. I wanted Atthey.

Coltman ordered me down out of it and then grabbed me by the ears. He twisted them before I could reach for my knife. Then he bade me listen if I wished to survive the night. ‘Get below,' he said, ‘and get Rattlebags. Now.'

Childish loyalties and standing orders compelled me to wake the captain instead. He'd been deep asleep, but he climbed the companionway and charged through the charthouse like a whipped horse. ‘Morris, the rung! Where be Kit? Ah, Coltman, more foolishness. What mischief drives you to ruin me sleep? What do you see?'

‘I see naught, sir,' said Coltman, glaring the promise of a hard smack at me. ‘Be what I smell that bothers me.'

Captain Walters snorted hard enough to snot up his chin. ‘A clot of squirmin weevils. From what biscuit now did God tap ye lot? Rattlebags suffers visions of skewed charts, and Coltman smells the stink off his own clothes and calls it hazard. What next in this Bedlam pageant, Christ Himself stretched on a spar? Be my kitten the only one of ye with any sense? God damn the lot of us if Kit be the only one who can see.'

The men laughed a bit, nervy. They playacted relief and settled back to work, and they may have convinced themselves all was well, for they did be long practised at such spliced thinking. Walters walked fore, and he disappeared so fast I expected a splash, but he spoke. The fog split and dragged his words down starboard, down larboard until his voice surrounded us. ‘As for the smell,' he said, ‘tis just trickery of fog. God alone knows what the fog carries in itself. Ghosts and spies and the stink of far-off lands.'

Coltman dug his fingers into my hair. ‘Rattlebags,' he ordered me. ‘
Now
.'

I found him on his knees, sighing, hammock out of reach. I helped him stand, helped him walk, and his lips cracked and bled when he asked me the course. I told him I knew naught of the course at that moment, only that the men on deck worried about a smell.

Rattlebags stopped walking and held my shoulder hard. Then he asked ‘Burnt seaweed?'

‘Burnt something,” I said, tired now, and damp from the fog.

‘Sweet Christ Jesus,' said Rattlebags, ‘what be the course?'

We sneaked on deck. The fog parted a moment and revealed the boatswain at the helm, sweating freely. Walters stood behind him, quite content, and called the bearing. Rattlebags listened, then tugged me gently so I might help him back to the charthouse. There he retrieved and unrolled a different chart, spreading it over the table and tacking the corners with rocks. ‘Latitude,' he muttered, ‘latitude, take your departure and sail straight on, never a glance spared for the sky. You proud and poxed-up stunned bastard, you can't see. Christ, for a backstaff and a clear sky. Burning seaweed, God, my God, storms we cannot avoid, but this… fogbound in the Isles of Scilly. Damn you, Walters.'

Captain Walters had entered the charthouse. ‘None will damn me, only God. I passed no word for you, Mr Rattlebags.'

Rattlebags stared at the man who could not see him. ‘Please, sir, can you not smell the burning kelp? It be a warning, sir. I be afraid –'

Walters mocked him. ‘You be afraid?'

‘Aye, sir, for I've got the sense to be! God's not deafened you, so listen. Our course hauls us too close to St Mary's and Peter's Rue. The water here hides rocks of the devil's own design. You know this, sir. We must change course. I can plot it, and you can call it, but we must change course.'

Captain Walters spoke about cargo due in Harbour Grace and cargo waiting. Then he reminded Rattlebags how he'd restrained himself but could do it no more. ‘You be troublesome, but you be no Atthey. I will beat you down with one blow.'

‘Sir,' Rattlebags pleaded, ‘alter course!'

Captain Walters had already turned his back, and now he looked over his shoulder, stretching out the word almost past meaning. ‘No.'

Bon Wally
rocked harder as the winds picked up. On deck, Walters got jovial and told a story about calenture, a fever that struck in great heat. He giggled. ‘And the poor man,' he said, ‘gazed out on the grey sea, grey as dug-up gravecloth, and he described it all as the most vivid blue. Called it one of the blues God must see when he decides how to paint the sky. He went on about greens, next, green like grass in the brightest sun. Then he got stuck, trying to tell us about a little dimpled sun he'd once held on the palm of his hand. He meant an orange. We dragged him below, tied him to his hammock and spoke gentle words, but he only babbled about colours.'

Rain spattered, and Walters finished his story. ‘He strangled himself in his own hammock.'

The captain ordered me below to fetch his greatcoat. I passed Rattlebags, half-asleep on the charthouse floor. I wanted to ask the captain permission to get Rattlebags a drink, but Walters called me to count paces. My eyes, tired and strained, kept seeing little flames on shores not there. A common enough fault of sight on a night-watch, except those flames looked different. I told the captain, and he ordered Coltman to check through his spyglass. Two points off the starboard bow: flames as real as ourselves, and I asked about the burning kelp. Walters and Coltman promised me I'd seen no such thing. I forced myself to believe them, they being more experienced. I swayed a bit on my feet after that, and Captain Walters ordered me below to hop in my crib and sleep. And I slept.

I remember little of the rest. The water roared, or perhaps the nennorluk did. Whatever roared, we just got in the way. I jumped out of my crib into water up to my waist, and rising. I got numb and drifted, trying to swim to the companionway. Somewhere I lost all bearing and spun underwater. I hung off a rock for a while. I remembered Coltman's certainties and made a deal with God.

13) PETER'S RUE
S
UMMER
1720, I
SLES OF
S
CILLY
,
AS TOLD
J
UNE
1734
TO
L
IEUTENANT
J
OHN
K
ELLY
, RN,
BY
C
APTAIN
C
HRISTOPHER
M
ATTHEW
F
INN
.

Gulls woke me. Crying like that. I felt some heavy weight on top of me and rough sand working into my hair. Sand already up my nose, which burned and burned. Jammed down like a chart, I was, pinned. Waves broke. Hardly afraid. Long past that. Every bit of me hurt, and the more I awoke, the more it hurt. Even just to breathe.

Wrecks no novelty in these waters, those living on Peter's Rue made quick work of the salvage. A gull waddled over the weight on top of me and peered at my face. Not brazen enough to pick and eat, not yet. I took a breath, and the pain of it made me scream. A very salt and dry scream: no one heard it. I rolled my head. The seagull landed on the beach, next to my head. Fish and rot wafted off it. I tried to blow the gull away, but it hopped closer and darted its beak close to my eyes. Feet shuffled on the sand, and a man reached down to shift what pinned me down. The gull flew just beyond reach, patient. Finding me with a moving chest, the man called out ‘Live one,' picked me up and hoisted me over his broad shoulder. I spewed and spewed down his back as he slowly climbed, and I took a departure, just like I'd been learnt. Lines and sail all tangled in themselves. Rocks and seabottom and this jagged shore. The charts amply warned us, but we'd made right for it. Women laid out corpses gone graceless and stiff and shooed gulls. I recognized some clothes but no faces, marks of the soul being scoured away by one night.

The man bearing me up the small hill said ‘Like as not the one washed over you trapped the warmth what kept you alive.'

God rest Ki Rattlebags.

Gigs skimmed out and around the wreck, and I took my final look at
Bonaventure Walters.
Larboard sundered, starboard cocked, rigging heaped and mast defeated. Beautiful once but violated now, and deserving of it.

I took a fine catarrh in my chest and head out of it, slept, fainted sitting up. A constant fire burnt high, low, and a man muttered complaints about the use of fuel. A woman pressed me back and tucked blankets tight round me, over and over. Broth, gruel, then goat's milk. For days I lay there, scoured and dried out but too numb and too weak to stand. Bored. The woman fed me off a spoon and told me how pleased she was that her dead boy's clothes fit me. I ate, dozed, and tried to speak, to explain, but the salt water had damaged my voice. You can still hear how it's right hoarse. The first time I stayed awake, she studied me, patient but vigilant, too. We met eyes, and I wanted to ask her questions and thank her for the food and clothes and say I was sorry for her dead boy. I think she understood, all of a cause she just patted my knee and said ‘Only I tended and saw you.' Then she showed me the little pile of clothes I'd been wearing, complete with the canvas jacket and lanyard and knife. Most pleased to see that knife, and I held out my hands for it, but she passed me the jacket instead. ‘Stranger things than you have washed ashore,' she said. ‘The others expect you be a boy, and I've not righted them. We see what we expect and want in this world. Otherwise tis all too frightening.'

Christina Foote, her name, an ancient twenty-six. A grand little conspiracy we had going, like a hidden fire. She'd tell her husband, Jem, how I did be weeks away from enough strength to help him with the fishing, why, I'd nearly drowned and had the man no sense? Other women came visiting, and they all cooed and fussed over me, one even reaching out to finger my hair, saying it rolled in a lovely curl and didn't I look just like a girl? I took a coughing fit at that, and Christina chased them all out. Jem, for his part, eyed me like some weird living flotsam and often asked when I might work my keep.

Christina and Jem both stood about middling height. They kissed a fair bit, though Jem sought something from Christina she could not give over. Jem fished, like most of the other men. The islanders collected seaweed, dried it out, then burned it in pits. A man called Hicks owned a ketch, and he would take the ashes to St Mary's and sometimes the mainland. He'd ferried back the only other survivor of the
Bon Wally
wreck. I've heard people curse the Scilly Islanders for ruiners and thieves, but those curses deceive. Aye, they salvaged wreckage. What else can you do when a ship runs aground, especially when no one survives? Those shores chewed wood and bone with equal ease.

Jem Foote wore an odd plait. Christina had woven a black ribbon through his hair. ‘Mourning,' he told me, catching me stare at him. ‘Seems we're always burying some mother's son. Your lot we buried nice and proper in the high ground, all in together, that great bloated man with the horrible face on top. With the rings on his fingers, we figured he be commander.'

Still I did not speak. Jem harassed Christina about it, and she answered him hard. ‘The boy just lost all he knew. I should like to hear you telling poems after so much death.'

Jem made a harsh sound and demanded to know why their boy and the other youngsters on Peter's Rue died after the Bad Salvage, while I survived a wreck that killed all the grown men?

Christina had no answer for that.

As I got better, I took to mending clothes, and then nets. Hoping, at least, that Atthey's distant ghost might be pleased. All my sharp teeth – ahhh, still got most of them, though Martin Sikes knocked loose a few that night in Salem – helped me cut thread and cloth. You need a good few teeth for mending nets and coats. I tried to mend a wig once. Stinking failure. That net I mended for Jem Foote: I made that better than it had ever been, except for in some dream of perfect nets. I sat outside on an upturned bucket, watching Jem and the others come ashore, windburnt and famished. Salt and fish-scales glittered all over them. Jem took the net from me, held it against the sun, called it serviceable. And so I finally earned some keep.