The Isle of Blood (44 page)

Situated near the boiler room, the crew’s quarters was small, noisy, constantly hot, and therefore nearly always deserted in the summer months, when those not on the night watch slept on deck in a row of hammocks suspended midship. I did not get much sleep our first two nights at sea. I could not relax with the incessant sway and counter-sway of the hammock beneath me and the naked night sky refusing to stay still above me. Closing my eyes only made it worse. But by the third night I actually started to find it pleasant, swinging back and forth while the warm salty air caressed my cheeks and the dancing stars sang down from the inky firmament. I listened to Awaale beside me, weaving tall tales as intricate as a
nidus ex magnificum
.

On the third night he said to me, “Do you know why Captain Julius hired me to be his mate? Because I used to be a pirate and I knew their ways. It is true,
walaalo
. For six years I was a pirate, sailing up and down the coast. From the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar, I was the scourge of the seven seas! Diamonds, gold, silks, mail packets, sometimes people… Yes, I even trucked in people. After my parents died, I signed on to a pirate ship, and when I had learned all I could from the captain of that ship, I snuck into his cabin one night and slit his throat. I killed him, and then I gathered the crew together and said, ‘The captain is dead; all hail the new captain!’ And the first thing I did as captain? Put a heavy lock upon the cabin door!” He chuckled. “I was all of seventeen. And in two years I was the most feared pirate on the Indian Ocean; Awaale the Terrible, they called me. Awaale the Devil.

“And I
was
a devil. The only ones who feared me more than my victims were my crew. I would shoot a man for hiccupping in my direction. I had everything,
walaalo
. Money, power, respect. Now all that is gone.”

“What happened?” I asked.

He sighed, his spirit troubled by the memory. “My first mate brought a boy to me—a boy he vouched for, who wanted a berth—and like a fool I agreed. He was about the age I was when I began, also an orphan like me, and I took pity on him. He was very bright and very strong and very fearless— mate brouanother boy who decided he wanted to be a pirate. We became quite close. He was devoted to me, and I to him. I even started to think, if I ever became tired of it, I would quit the pirate’s life and give the ship to him as my heir.”

Then one day a member of the crew brought to Awaale troubling news. He had overheard the boy and the first mate, the man who had vouched for him, whispering one night about their captain’s tyrannical rule and, most damning of all, his refusal to share fairly the ill-gotten spoils of their labors.

“He trusts you,” the first mate told the boy. “He will not suspect the knife until the knife strikes home!”

Awaale did not hesitate. He seized the alleged conspirators immediately and confronted them. Both denied the plot and accused their accuser of scheming against them in order to curry favor and increase his share of the booty. Awaale’s judgment was swift and ruthless: He killed all three of them, accuser and accused, including the boy he loved, though he admitted that had been hard—very hard. Then he decapitated them with his own hand, and hung their heads from the mizzenmast as a reminder to his crew that he was their lord and master.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If the first man was telling the truth, why did you kill him? He warned you about the mutiny.”

“I did not know if he was telling the truth,
walaalo
. I did not know who to believe.”

“Then, you killed at least one innocent man.”

“I had no choice,” he cried in a voice broken with despair. “If I let the wrong one live, then I would die! Spill the blood of the innocent or have the guilty spill my own! You do not know,
walaalo
. You are a boy. You’ve never faced the faceless one.”

“The faceless one?”

“That is my name for it. I wept when I plunged the dagger into his heart; I cried bitter tears for the boy whom I loved, while his blood, scalding hot, poured through my fingers. And crying, I laughed with a fierce, unconquerable joy! I laughed because I was free of something; I cried because I was bound to something. I was saved; I was damned. Bless you,
walaalo
, you have never had to face the faceless one; you do not know.”

Freed and enslaved, Awaale did not remain a pirate long after his impossible choice. He abandoned his ship at Dar es Salaam, whose name is a mangling of the Arabic
andar as-salām
, the “harbor of peace.” Penniless and friendless in a foreign land, he wandered deep into the African interior until he reached Buganda, where he was taken in by a group of Anglican missionaries who taught him how to read and write English and prayed daily for his immortal soul. He prayed with them, for it seemed to him he shared a special kinship with their God.

“The spilling of innocent blood is nothing new to him—no, not to him!” said Awaale. “His own son he suffered to die a bloody death that I might live to worship him. This God I think understands the space between ‘may’ and ‘must’; he’s seen the face of the faceless one!”

I did not speak for some time. I watthe stars swing back and forth, left and right and back again; I listened to the slap of the sea against the clipper’s bow; I felt the beat of my heart.

“I saw it too,” I said finally. “I know that space.” It existed between Warthrop and Kendall in the bedroom at Harrington Lane, between Torrance and Arkwright in the Monstrumarium, between Rurick and me in the place of silence at the center of the world.

“Where,
walaalo
?” He sounded incredulous. “Where did you see it?”

“It’s here,” I said, and pressed my hand to my chest.

On the fourth day the horizon before us turned black and the seas rose, driven by a stiff wind that pushed against the
Dagmar
like a giant hand pressing upon her chest. Captain Russell turned the ship southward to skirt the worst of the storm, a decision that did not sit well with the monstrumolo-gist, who ground his teeth and tugged on his bottom lip and paced the foredeck while the gale bent him nearly double and whipped his hair into a cyclonic confusion. I braved the elements to urge him inside, convinced he would be swept overboard at any moment by the tempestuous waves crashing furiously across the bow.

“You know what von Helrung would say!” he shouted above the whipping wind and pounding sea. “The fury of a merciful God! Well,
I
say let him loose his signs and wonders! Array the powers of heaven against me, and I will contend against them with every fiber of my being!”

The deck shuddered violently and then bounced upward, throwing me off my feet. The monstrumologist’s hand shot out and grabbed my arm, yanking me back from the edge.

“You shouldn’t be out here!” he screamed.

“Neither should you!” I hollered back.

“I will never sound the retreat! Never!”

He shoved me toward the stern and turned his back upon me, planting his legs wide for balance and spreading his arms as if inviting the fullness of God’s wrath upon his head. A burst of lightning flashed, thunder shook the planks, and Warthrop laughed. The monstrumologist laughed, and his laughter overtook the wind and the lashing rain and the thunder itself, trampling the maelstrom under its unconquerable heels. Is it any wonder the power this man held over me—this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and, without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into that purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

You may call him mad. You may judge him vain and selfish and arrogant and bereft of all normal human sentiment. You may dismiss him entirely as a fool blinded by his own ambition and pride. But you cannot say Pellinore Warthrop was not finally, fully, furiously
alive
.

height="1em" width="0em">I retreated to the safety of the bridge, where I could at least keep an eye on him, though the water splattering and streaming down the glass obscured my view, turning him into a maddened, wraithlike shadow against the lighter gray of the white-capped sea. As it happened, Awaale had taken the helm. His massive arms flexed and stiffened as he fought the wheel.

“What is he doing?” he wondered. “Does he wish to be blown out to sea?”

“He is anxious,” I answered.

“Anxious for what?”

I said nothing.
To face the Faceless One
, I might have answered, but said naught.

The storm chased us well past nightfall, forcing the
Dagmar
miles off course, far south of the island, and putting her directly in the path of the monsoon winds driving down from the north. When the weather cleared, Russell planned a heading to bring us back to the west of Socotra; it was, he told the doctor, the only prudent course.

“We can’t approach from the south, not with winds like these,” he said.

“That would cost us at least a day,” the monstrumologist pointed out, his jaw tightening with barely suppressed ire.

“More than that,” answered Russell grimly.

“How much more?”

“Two days, two and a half.”

Warthrop slammed his hand down hard on the table. “Unacceptable!”

“No, Dr. Warthrop,
unavoidable
. I tried to tell you back in Aden. No one goes to Socotra this time of—”

“Then, why in God’s name did you agree to it?” the doctor snarled.

Russell called upon all his English fortitude and said, in the calmest manner he could muster, “Coming from the west is our only hope of getting you close enough for a landing. Forcing our way north against this wind could take just as long and entail twice the risk.”

Warthrop drew a deep breath to collect himself. “Of course I will defer to your judgment, Captain. But I hope you can understand the urgency of my mission.”

“Well, I do not understand it. You’ve been marvelously obtuse about your purpose, Dr. Warthrop. Perhaps you could realize your hope by telling me what the bloody hell is so important on that desolate rock that you’re willing to risk life and limb—
my
life and limb—for it.”

The doctor said nothing for a moment. He stared at the floor, weighing something in his mind. Then he looked up and said, “I am not a botanist.”

“I have seen some strange things in this dark part of the world,” the captain confided at the conclusion of the doctor’s confession. “But none as strange as those you describe, Warthrop. I’d heard of—what did you call it?—that foul jelly tht brings madness and death, but never thought it to be real. I’ve also heard men speak of the so-called red rain, blood pouring from the sky like some biblical scourge, but I never put much stock in sailors’ tales. You could very well be mad, which is of no concern to me, except when that madness threatens my ship and the safety of my crew.”

“I assure you, Captain Russell, I am neither mad nor naïve. The stories are true, and I intend to show you the proof when you return for us. If, that is, we ever manage to get there!”

“I will get you there, Warthrop, but I must ask how you plan to prevail over a squadron of Russians
and
capture this monster of yours, both intent on killing you, with nothing more than this boy by your side and a revolver in your pocket.”

Both Russell and I waited for his answer. I did not think he’d give the one he gave to me in Aden—
this is what will save us—
and he didn’t.

“I will leave all things nautical to you, Captain Russell,” he said. “If you will leave all things monstrumological to me.”

“Did you hear,
walaalo
?” Awaale asked me later that night as we lay in our hammocks belowdecks. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the thrumming of the engines. “I am going with you.”

I was stunned. “What do you mean?”