Nation (25 page)

“Why would they not listen?”

“Because…” She hesitated, but there was no way of avoiding it. “I’d better tell you everything,” she said. “I
want
to tell you everything. You should know what happened on the
Sweet Judy
. You should know about the dolphins and the butterfly and the man in the canoe!”

And while the circle listened with open mouths, she told them what she had seen, what Cookie had told her, and what poor Captain Roberts had written in the ship’s log. She told them about First Mate Cox, and the mutiny and the man in the canoe…

…who had been brown and, like Mrs. Gurgle, looked as if he’d been made out of old leather. The
Sweet Judy
had caught up with him out among the islands, where he had been paddling a small canoe very industriously toward the horizon.

According to First Mate Cox, the man made a rude gesture. Foxlip and Polegrave backed him up on that, but in his log the captain, who had spoken to them all separately, made a point of noting that they weren’t clear about what the gesture was.

Cox had shot at the man, and had hit him. Foxlip fired too. Daphne remembered him laughing. Polegrave was the last to fire, and that was just like him. He was the kind of weasel who would kick a corpse, because it was unlikely to fight back. Polegrave giggled all the time and never took his eyes off Daphne when she was on deck. But he was probably smarter than Foxlip, although once you got past the swaggering and the bullying, there were probably lobsters who were smarter than Foxlip.

The two of them tended to hang around with Cox in a way that was hard to understand until you found out that there are fish that swim alongside a shark, or even in its mouth, where they are safe from other fish and never get eaten. Nobody knows what’s in it for the shark; maybe it doesn’t notice, or is saving them up for a secret midnight snack.

Of course, Cox was not like a shark. He was worse. Sharks are just eating machines. They don’t have a choice. First Mate Cox had a choice, every day, and had chosen to be First Mate Cox. And that was a strange choice, because if evil was a disease, then First Mate Cox would have been in an isolation ward on a bleak island somewhere. And even then, bunnies nibbling at the seaweed would start to fight one another. Cox was, in fact, contagious. Where his shadow fell, old friendships snapped and little wars broke out, milk soured, weevils fled from every stale ship’s biscuit and rats queued up to jump into the sea. At least, that was how Cookie had put it, although he was given to mild exaggeration.

And Cox grinned. It wasn’t the nasty, itchy little grin of Polegrave, which made you want to wash your hands after seeing it. It was the grin of a man who is happy in his work.

He’d come on board at Port Advent, after five of the crew didn’t come back from shore leave. That often happened, the cook told Daphne. A captain who strictly forbade card games, whistling, alcohol, and swearing found crew hard to keep at any price. It was a terrible thing, said Cookie, to see religion get such a hold on a decent soul. But
because
Roberts was a decent soul, and a good captain, a lot of the crew stayed with him voyage after voyage, even though stopping sailors from swearing was a terrible thing to do (they got around it by sticking an old barrel of water right down in the scuppers and swearing into it when it all got too much; try as she might, Daphne couldn’t make out all the words, but at the end of a difficult day the water in the barrel was hot enough to wash with).

Everyone knew about Cox. You didn’t hire First Mate Cox. He turned up. If you didn’t need a first mate because you already had one, then the one you had was suddenly very keen indeed on being a second mate once again, yes indeed, much obliged.

And if you were an innocent man, you accepted all the glowing references of the other captains without wondering why they would be so happy to see Cox on someone else’s ship. But Cookie said that in his opinion Roberts knew all about Cox and had been filled with missionary zeal at the chance to save such a big ripe sinner from the Pit of Damnation.

And maybe Cox, when he found himself working for a captain who held compulsory prayer meetings three times a day, was filled with a different kind of zeal, which would have been black with flames around the edges. Evil likes company, Cookie said.

Amazingly, Cox went to the services willingly and joined in
and paid attention
. Those who knew about him walked carefully. Cox ate and drank mischief, and if you couldn’t work out what he was up to, then it was the really dark stuff.

When he had nothing else to do, Cox shot at things. Birds, flying fish, monkeys, anything. One day a large blue butterfly, blown from one of the islands, landed on the deck. Cox shot it so neatly that there were just two wings left, and then he gave Daphne a wink, as if he’d done something clever. She’d had a cousin like that—Botney was his name—who never left a frog unsquashed, a kitten unkicked, or a spider unflattened. In the end, she’d accidentally broken two of his fingers under the nursery rocking horse, told him she’d put wasps down his trousers next time if he didn’t mend his ways, and then burst into tears when people came running. You didn’t come from a family of ancient fighters like hers without at least a pinch of ruthlessness.

Sadly, there had been no one there to set Cox’s feet on the right path and his fingers in plaster. But, some of the crew whispered, it seemed that he’d changed. He still shot at things, but he was always in the front row for the services, watching old Roberts like a botanist watching a rare beetle. It was as if Cox was
fascinated
by the captain.

As for Captain Roberts—he might have wanted to save Cox’s soul from the Fires of Perdition, but he hated the man himself and didn’t mind showing it. This did not sit well with Cox, but shooting captains always caused a bit too much of a stir, so, Cookie said, he must have decided to beat the captain on the man’s own ground, or water, destroying him from the inside.

Cox shot things because they were alive, but to him that was just killing time. He had greater ambitions for the captain. He wanted to shoot him in the faith.

It began with Cox sitting up straight during the prayer meetings and shouting “Halleluja” or “Amen” every time the captain finished a sentence, and clapping loudly. Or he’d ask puzzled questions like “What did they feed the lions and tigers with in the Ark, sir?” and “Where did all the water go?” Then there was the day when he asked Cookie to try to make a meal for the whole crew out of five loaves and two fishes. Then when the captain said the story was not meant to be taken literally, Cox gave him a smart salute and said: “Then what is, Cap’n?”

It started to get bad. The captain got humpty. Crew who’d served with him for a long time said he was a decent man and a good captain, and they’d never seen him get humpty before. Everyone suffered under a humpty captain, who’d find fault with everything and turn every day into a chore. Daphne spent a lot of time in her cabin.

And then there was the parrot. No one was ever sure who taught the bird its first swear word, although the wobbling finger of suspicion pointed at Cox, but by then the whole crew was ill at ease. Cox had his supporters, and the captain had staunch allies of his own. Fights broke out, and things, small things, were getting stolen. That was terrible, according to Cookie; nothing broke up a crew like the thought that a man had to watch his possessions all the time. Dooms and reckonings would be upon them all, he forecasted. Probably more dooms than reckonings, he added.

And the next day Cox shot the old man in the canoe. Daphne would like to report that every sailor in the crew was angry because the old man had been shot, and in a way it was true, but many of the men were less concerned about the sanctity of souls than they were about the possibility that the old man had relatives nearby with fast canoes, sharp spears, and an unwillingness to listen to explanations. And there were even a few who held that one old man more or less didn’t matter, but Cox and his cronies had been shooting at dolphins, too, and that was cruel and unlucky.

In the end there was a war, and so much bad blood had been bubbling that there seemed to Daphne to be more than two sides. She sat it out in her cabin, seated on a small barrel of gunpowder with a loaded pistol in her hand. The captain had told her that if Cox’s men won, she should fire the pistol into the barrel “to save her honor,” though she was uncertain how much a saved honor would be worth when it was falling out of the sky in tiny pieces, along with the rest of the cabin. Fortunately she did not have to find out, because Captain Roberts ended the mutiny by detaching one of the
Sweet Judy
’s swivel guns and aiming it at the mutineers. The gun was intended for firing lots of small lead balls at any pirates who might try to board the ship. It was not intended to be a hand cannon, and if he had fired the thing, the recoil would probably have thrown him into the air, but everyone in front of it would have died of terminal perforations. There was a fury about him that even Cox took note of, Cookie had told her. The captain had the look in his eye of the Almighty confronting a particularly wicked city, and maybe Cox was just sane enough to recognize that here was someone who might be even madder than he was, at least for the time it took to turn Cox and those around him into much smaller lumps. Or, Cookie said, the captain may have been about to commit wild murder right up until he realized that this was what Cox wanted, and the devil of a man would drag the captain’s soul to hell along with his own.

But the captain didn’t fire the gun, said Cookie. He laid it on the deck. He straightened up with his arms folded and a grim little smile on his face, and Cox just stood there, looking puzzled, and then every single loyal crewman pointed a pistol at his head. The steam got knocked out of the mutiny. Cox and his chums were herded into the ship’s boat with food, water, and a compass. And then of course there was the matter of the guns. The mutineers still had friends among the crew, who said that leaving them in uncertain waters without weapons was a death sentence. In the end the guns were left for them on a little island a mile away, despite Captain Roberts declaring that in his opinion, any pirate or slaver who ran into Cox and his men would have a new captain in very short order indeed. He ordered the swivel guns primed and ready day and night, and said that the boat would be fired on instantly if it was ever seen again.

The boat was set adrift and sailed, her crew silent and worried except for Polegrave and Foxlip, who jeered and spat. That was because they were too dumb to realize, said Cookie, that they were heading off into bad waters with a murderous madman in command.

The
Judy
never really recovered, but she kept on course. People didn’t talk much, and kept to themselves when they were off watch. She wasn’t a happy ship at all. Five men had previously jumped ship at Port Henry and so, without the mutineers, there weren’t enough men to crew the ship properly when the wave came.

And that was the story Daphne told. She tried to be honest, and where she’d relied on Cookie’s rather excitable stories, she said so. She wished she had Pilu’s talent; he could make tripping over a stone sound like a desperate adventure.

There was silence when she finished. Most people turned to look at Pilu. She’d done her best in a foreign language, but she’d seen the puzzled looks.

What Pilu gave them was the story all over again, but with acting, too. She could make out the character of Captain Roberts, heavy and pompous, and surely the one who sidled around was Polegrave, and the one who stamped and roared was Cox. They shouted at one another all the time, while Pilu’s fingers popped like pistols and somehow, in the middle of the air, the story unfolded.

A certain extra touch of slightly mad realism was added by the parrot, who danced madly in the top of a coconut palm and shouted things like, “What about Darwin, then? Waark!”

Pilu’s translation lagged behind Daphne’s account, but when he was about to deal with the old man’s shooting, he stopped for guidance.

“He killed a man in a canoe because he was not a trouserman?”

She was ready for this. “No. The man I kill—the dead man would have done that, but I think Cox just killed the old man because he couldn’t see anything else to shoot at.”

“Er…my English is no so good—” Pilu began.

“I am sorry to say you heard me correctly.”

“He kills for Locaha and adds glory, like the Raiders?”

“No. Just because he wants to.”

Pilu looked at her as if this was going to be a hard one to get across. It was. From the sound of it, no one thought he was making sense.

He went on doggedly for a few more sentences and turned to Daphne. “Not dolphins,” he said. “No sailor would kill a dolphin. You must be wrong.”

“No. He really did.”

“But that is killing a soul,” said Pilu. “When we die, we become dolphins until it is time to be born again. Who would kill a dolphin?” Tears of puzzlement and anger raced down his face.

“I’m sorry. Cox would. And Foxlip shot at it, too.”

“Why?”

“To be like Cox, I think. To seem like a big man.”

“Big man?”

“Like the remora fish. Er, you call them suckfish. They swim with the sharks. Perhaps they like to think they
are
sharks.”

“Not even the Raiders would do this, and they worship Locaha! It is beyond belief!”

“I saw them. And poor Captain Roberts wrote it down in the ship’s log. I can show you.” Too late, she remembered that Pilu didn’t so much read as recognize writing when it was pointed out to him. His look now was a plea for help, so she stood close to him and found the right place:
“Once again Cox and his cronies have been discharging their pistols at the dolphins, against all decency and the common laws of the sea. May God forgive him, because no righteous sailor will. Indeed, I suspect that in this case even the Almighty will find his mercy overly strained!!!”