Eternity Road (29 page)

“Every once in a while,” said Keel, “some damned fool wants to go out. Usually they’re looking for somebody to trade with. But there’s no one out there along the shores except damn Tuks. If people want to go to sea, they ought to build a strong enough boat. You say this was ten years ago. We’ve had several boats during that period put to sea on one damn fool job or another. They don’t always come back.”

“These people were looking for Haven,” Chaka said. “They were led by an older man whose name was Karik Endine. Gray hair. Medium size. Sort of ordinary-looking.”

“That should make it easy,” laughed Keel. “But as it happens,
yes
, I know about Endine. I suspect everybody around here knows the story.”

“What story?”

“Actually a lot of stories, most of them conflicting. Depends on who you get it from, I guess. They were treasure-hunting, as I understand it. Cut a deal with one of the captains. Man named Dolbur. He took them downriver and north up the coast. But they ran into something they weren’t expecting.”

“What?”

“
Something
. I don’t think anybody’s ever been sure what. Ghost. Water demon. Something. Again, it depends on who you talk to. They lost a lot of people. None of the ship’s crew. But everybody who was with Endine. There was only one of them came back.”

“That was Endine himself,” contributed one of the others.

Keel gazed a long time at Chaka.

“Where can I find Dolbur?”

Keel’s teeth showed through the beard. “Finding him’s easy enough, but talking to him would be tricky. He’s dead. I’m trying to think who else was on that boat.”

“Knobby,” said the woman.

Keel nodded. “Yeah. That’s right. Knobby was part of that crew.”

“Who’s Knobby?”

“First mate. You want to talk to him?”

“Yes.”

“Be here tomorrow.”

Knobby’s real name was Mandel Aikner. While Chaka
was too polite to ask the origin of the nickname, she didn’t need much imagination to guess that it derived from a bald skull that looked as if it had been rapped several times with a club. Knobby’s features were prominent: a large, bulbous nose pushed to one side in a long-ago fight; big ears; narrow, suspicious eyes; and a chin like the flat side of a shovel. A mat of wiry gray hair pushed out of the top of his drawstring shirt.

“I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t probably already know, Chaka,” he said, while they waited for their steaks. (Chaka was alone with him, on the theory that he would speak more freely to a woman.)

“Assume I don’t know much of anything, Knobby. Karik Endine and his people arrived in Brockett and wanted to charter a ship. Why don’t you take it from there?”

Knobby picked up the carafe, studied the dark wine, refilled his cup, and refilled hers. “Before we get into any of this,” he said, “I want you to understand, I won’t go back up there. Okay? I’ll tell you what I know, but that’s all.”

“Okay,” she said. She described her brother and asked whether Knobby had seen him.

“Yes,” he said. “I knew Arin.”

Her heart raced briefly.

“He was a good-looking boy. Didn’t talk much. I knew them all. Shay. Tori. Mira. Random. Axel. Even after all these years, I remember them. And Endine.” He drummed on the table with his fingertips. “It’s hard to forget.”

Chaka had met only Tori, who had been a friend of her brother’s. And Mira. Other than Karik, the others were just names.

“Endine’s the one who sticks in the mind,” said Knobby. “He was hostile.” She saw that he wondered whether he’d gone over a line. “He wasn’t your father or anything, was he?”

“No.” She smiled encouragingly. “I knew him, but not well.”
I’m beginning to think no one knew him well
.

“He didn’t seem to want to talk to anybody. On a boat the size of the
Mindar
, that isn’t easy.”

It was early. The entertainment wouldn’t start for an hour or so, and the dining room hadn’t begun to fill up. They were seated at a corner table. Knobby drank more of his wine, wiped his lips, and leaned forward confidentially, although there was no one close enough to overhear. His breath was strong, and he spoke with a wheeze.

“I was second officer on the
Mindar
at the time. We hauled mostly coal, iron, wheat, and liquor into Brockett, and manufactures out. And whatever else needed to be moved. We were commanded by Captain Dolbur. Dead now these three years.

“The first time I heard of Karik Endine was when the captain called me and Jed Raulin into his quarters. Jed was the first officer. We were dockside, between jobs, and the captain explained that there were some people in town, foreigners who wanted to lease the boat, wanted him to take it down the Hudson and out into the Atlantic.

“You’ve seen the boats around here. The
Mindar’s
downriver right now so I guess maybe you haven’t seen her. But she’s no bigger than any of the others, and none of these has any business going near the sea. But there was a lot of money in it, he said. And we’d stay within sight of land the whole way. Endine had shown him a pouch of gold coins. Anybody who went along would collect almost a year’s pay for a couple weeks’ work. If the captain said yes to Endine, would Jed and me go along?

“Jed had a family. He said he’d want to talk it over with his wife. In the end, she gave him a lot of trouble and he stayed out. So I got a promotion. Two of our crew also backed off.

“The visitors wanted to go north. Up the coast. There were seven of them, counting Endine. It would be a six-hundred-mile run from the mouth of the Hudson, give or take a couple hundred. These people didn’t seem quite sure where they were going. We were to help them look around, deliver them, and wait for three weeks to provide whatever support they needed. After that, we’d bring them back or, if they decided not to come, we’d be free to return.

“It was blistering hot while we got the boat ready. We leased a dinghy and installed a housing and a system of pulleys for it on the afterdeck. Nobody knew a damned thing about the kind of country we were headed into, so we loaded up with as much wood as we could. We also put on plenty of food and water. The captain went over every inch of the hull, replaced a couple of the spars, added some pitch. We got a new anchor, too.

“Altogether, the
Mindar
needed about three weeks’ work. Then Karik and his people came aboard, and we cleared Brockett on a humid July morning and headed downriver. Afterward, after all that happened, some of the boys said they’d felt premonitions about that voyage right from the start. But I can tell you true, there was nothing to it. We were feeling okay. We knew we were a good boat with a good crew, and we knew we could handle her in blue water. And we knew we were making more money than we ever had before. Or likely ever would again. So there was nobody on that boat thinking we should turn back.

“On the second day out, we passed Manhattan and turned north up the coast. There’s a long peninsula down there. We rounded it in good shape and stood out to sea. It was a gray, rainy day, and a lot of the stories that got started later about omens and such, they always mentioned how the weather looked when we started. But nobody thought anything about it at the time.

“The coastline going north is wild. Lot of rocks, shoals, riptides. We anchored every night at sunset, and you could look forever and not see a light anywhere.

“The boat was lower in the water than we’d have liked. That was because of all the wood and supplies on board. Everybody knew that if we ran into rough seas, especially outbound, we’d be in trouble.

“Like I said, Endine was unfriendly.” Knobby wrinkled his brow and let Chaka see his yellow teeth. “No, actually, it’s fairer to say he just kept to himself. He spent most of his time on deck, staring out to sea. He had cold, blue-gray eyes, and he just didn’t look like he gave a damn about anybody. His own people didn’t like him much.

“I got to know the others pretty well. Can’t help it when you’re all on a boat together for a week. They’d lost some people on the road. A couple got shot, a couple to fever.

“One of them, Tori, the youngest one, told me what they were after. I hoped the captain had been paid up front because I knew they weren’t going to find this la-la land they were looking for.

“The nights were cool, and the boat didn’t have much in the way of accommodations, so we used the dinghy to take the passengers and some of the crew ashore every evening. I remember somebody shot at us one night. Nobody got hit and we never found the son of a bitch and it’s lucky for him we didn’t. But that was the only incident.

“Early in our second week, land appeared on the east. We thought it was an island but I’m not so sure now. It might have been an arm of the continent, just sticking out a long way. I don’t know. It was mountainous and pretty far off, but Endine got excited and announced we were ‘in the bay.’ We saw a couple of whales at about the same time and everybody took that to be a good omen. I’d never seen a whale before. But we saw a few more before we got home.

“After a while the land on the east closed in and we saw that Endine was right and we
were
in a bay or channel. Whatever it was, it kept getting narrower. The first night, we made anchor near the eastern side and went ashore. We’d been setting watches since the shooting incident and I had the two-hour shift from midnight. Endine was awake the whole time, sitting on a rock down at the waterline. I asked him if he was okay, and he didn’t even hear me until I poked him.

“The sea’s loud up there. It’s a constant roar. In the morning we went down to the beach, and the
Mindar
, which had been anchored in twenty feet of water, was high and dry. The tide was out. Way out.

“Endine was furious. The captain had been on board, had seen it happening, and had tried to get clear but he wasn’t quick enough. Wouldn’t have mattered anyhow, because we were stranded on the beach. You understand, Chaka, we were just riverboat sailors. Nobody knew anything about those waters. The captain tried to explain, but Endine called him all kinds of an idiot, in front of everybody. I’ll never forget it. Later his people apologized. But Captain Dolbur had a long memory for things like that.

“When the tide turned, it came back pretty quick. I mean this wasn’t like any tide any of us had seen before. The channel just swelled up and roared in. We were afloat again by midmorning. There was some confusion in the currents, and we had trouble at first making way, but once we got back out into the channel we moved north like a son of a bitch. The farther we got, the narrower the channel got; and the narrower the channel got, the faster we went.

“That was rough country, wild, mountainous, not many signs there’d ever been towns. But we saw a few, ruins centered around harbors, and sometimes sitting up on rocky shelves or in prime locations along the coast. A couple of roads. Bridges crossing coastal rivers.

“Toward the end of that second day, the channel split in two. After some uncertainty, Endine directed us to starboard. Later that afternoon we sighted a cape sticking out from the eastern shore, and our passengers got excited.

“They had a map with them, and they consulted it and looked a long time at the cape as we rounded it. It was obvious they were hot on the trail now. The map was out every few minutes, and they were taking bearings on passing mountains and rivers and what-not.

“They found what they were looking for: The coast on both sides was lined with escarpments and bluffs. They zeroed in on one of the bluffs on the eastern shore. It was pretty ordinary-looking, a sheer wall rising about two hundred feet out of the water. We could see thick woods at the top.”

Chaka removed the sketch marked
Haven
from her vest. “Is this it?” she asked.

Knobby looked at it. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.

“There was a river on the north side of the bluff, and a pebbled beach. They looked at their map some more, took bearings on a turn in the channel and a saddle-shaped formation off to the west. That was it, they said. No question. And they cheered and clapped one another on the shoulder and broke out some liquor. Endine actually looked friendly. In fact, he shook hands with everyone in sight, including the crew. And everybody got handed a drink.

“We looked for a place to drop anchor. The water was low again, the tide running out, and we planned to be a little more cautious this time. Which meant that we would leave the boat in the middle of the channel and the crew would stay on board except for me. My job was to get Endine and his people to the beach, stay with them until the tide turned next morning, and then return to the
Mindar
, after which somebody else would go in and take my place.

“The sun had been down two hours by the time we arrived on shore. They jumped out as soon as we hit land and took off. They were like a pack of kids. I couldn’t believe it. Just ran off into the dark. Me, I stayed with the dinghy.

“They came back about midnight, unhappy, and I knew things hadn’t gone well.

“Tori explained they were looking for a catwalk or a cage on the face of the precipice. When I asked what would be the point of a catwalk up there, he just looked up at the cliff. ‘Train station,’ he said, and laughed.” Knobby’s eyes locked on Chaka. “You know what a train is, right?

“They used steam engines. Just like the
Mindar
. But I’m botched if I can figure out how one of them would run across the front of that precipice.

“They bunked down to wait for daylight. I don’t think any of them slept much. They were up again before dawn, stayed for breakfast only at Endine’s insistence, got their gear together, and walked down to the water’s edge, where they could get the best possible look at the cliff. They weren’t finding what they were looking for. Endine sputtered and stalked back and forth and finally threw up his hands and walked over to where I was standing. ‘The dinghy,’ he said.

“We’d beached it at high tide, and it was a long way from the water now. But we dragged it out through the mud and got it launched. The others jumped in. ‘Take us across the face of the wall,’ he directed. ‘About a quarter-mile out.’

“I don’t know if I mentioned this, but the dinghy didn’t have an engine. Right? It was sails and oars, which is okay when you’re moving around in a river. But not so good in those tides.

“I didn’t like it much but I took them. They were saying things like, ‘It’s got to be there,’ and, ‘Well, I damn sure don’t see it.’

“‘Your train station is missing?’ I asked Tori.

“He said it was.

“Now
I
laughed. ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.

“‘Well, Knobby,’ he said, ‘there might still be something there to indicate where there might have been a structure. Maybe even a pattern of shrubs.’ He said that if a platform or station had been mounted on the rock face, holes would have been drilled. If somebody drills holes, they eventually fill up with dirt. And the dirt sprouts shrubs. It sounded thin to me but I was damned if one of them didn’t think he saw it right away. And somebody else said how there was a piece of discolored rock.
That
I could make out, although it still didn’t seem like much.

“They were satisfied that was what they wanted, so I took them back in and they disappeared into the woods. They went around to the rear of the bluff, where the ascent was more or less gradual. I saw them again as they came out along the summit.

“They crossed to the edge of the precipice and threw a rope ladder over. Then somebody climbed down to the discolored stone. They were too far away for me to be sure who it was, but I had to admire them. I remember thinking how they’d never get me to hang out over that damned thing. Which shows you, you never know.

“The discolored stone was about fifty feet down. They needed a second climber, and the two of them worked on it for about an hour. Then a door opened up and I could see a passageway. The climbers went inside and the others started down the ladder.