The Moon and the Sun (58 page)

“Where is this treasure you promised me?” he said.

She fancied that the King felt sick because of the ship’s slow erratic dance, and she felt glad of it.

“Your Majesty, Sherzad can’t see the ocean from the deck. Please free her. If she can hear the ocean properly, she’ll lead me to the right cove.”

“I will see,” His Majesty said.

Sometimes he meant it, but all too often he meant to refuse but did not care to say it.

It was pointless to try to change his mind. Marie-Josèphe curtsied again. The King turned away, dismissing her.

“Your Majesty,” she said, pausing in the hatchway. “M. de Chrétien’s of no use to you here. Put him ashore, send him back to Versailles —”

“Where he has too many friends!” His Majesty exclaimed. “He’ll stay here, in my sight, until you find the treasure.”

Marie-Josèphe fled. She understood: His Majesty held Lucien hostage to illness on the flagship, he held Yves hostage under guard at the chateau, until Marie-Josèphe succeeded and the King returned safe to his court.

On deck, she bathed Lucien’s face with a wet cloth.

“I don’t like you to see me this way,” he said.

“You saw me after the surgeon bled me,” Marie-Josèphe said. “If I only stand with you during good times, what kind of a friend would I be?”

He managed to smile. “You’re a friend without boundaries.”

“And without limits,” she said. She took his hand. As yet, they had done no more than touch each other’s hands. She wondered what would happen when they could do more.

My heart can hardly beat faster, she thought.

“Are you otherwise recovered?” she asked. “From your extraordinary situation?”

“There’s something to be said for sea-sickness.”

“What’s that?”

“It takes one’s mind off one’s other misfortunes.”

His Majesty’s guards approached Sherzad’s basin. One carried a musket, another a club. Sailors followed with a net and a coil of rope.

Marie-Josèphe leaped up. “What are you doing? She enjoys His Majesty’s protection!”

“It’s His Majesty gave the orders, mamselle,” the lieutenant said. “Stay back, now.”

“Are you freeing her?” Marie-Josèphe cried, amazed, overwhelmed. “You needn’t threaten her.” She sang to Sherzad, joyously, a simple child’s song. “Lie quiet, Sherzad, as you did when they freed you into the Grand Canal. The King is keeping his word!”

Sherzad obeyed restlessly. The sailors loosened the net and used it as a sling.

Sherzad’s hair was dull and tangled, her eyes sunken, the swellings on her face deflated and venous. Pallor greyed her mahogany skin; her wounds were red and swollen.

Marie-Josèphe followed Sherzad. The sailors carried her to the bow. Sherzad growled and hummed and trembled.

“Farewell.” Farewell, she sang, her voice breaking.

Instead of opening the net, the sailors tightened it, holding Sherzad fast, pinioning her arms, restraining her clawed feet. Sherzad screamed. Marie-Josèphe cried out in protest and seized the net. The mesh ripped her skin.

A musketeer grabbed her and pulled her away, indifferent to her struggles. Dazed with illness and lack of sustenance, Lucien staggered to his feet and drew his sword. He tripped one of the guards with his cane and stumbled toward Marie-Josèphe.

The lieutenant aimed his pistol at Marie-Josèphe’s head.

“Surrender,” he said to Lucien.

Lucien stopped. He put down his useless sword and raised his hands. A sailor shoved him to the deck. Incredulous, Lucien tried to rise. A cutlass grazed his throat.

Marie-Josèphe kicked the lieutenant’s knee. He cursed and flung her down. She crawled toward Sherzad, dizzy from the fall.

Lucien’s sword-cane rolled across the deck and bumped against Marie-Josèphe’s hand. She snatched it up and scrabbled to her feet, flailing around her with the sword.

The musketeers backed away, laughing. She barely noticed the pistol aimed at her.

“Stop or he dies!” the lieutenant shouted.

A drop of blood flowed down Lucien’s neck, staining his white shirt.

Marie-Josèphe and Lucien were overpowered, outnumbered, each held hostage for the other’s safety.

Marie-Josèphe lowered the sword, defeated and betrayed. In a fury she jerked away when the musketeer took her arm. She could only watch as the sailors slung Sherzad between the arms of the golden figurehead and left her hanging beneath the bowsprit.

The guards lowered musket and saber, and allowed Lucien to rise.

“Now she can see and hear the ocean.” His Majesty took Lucien’s sword from Marie-Josèphe’s hand. “You gave me your parole, M. de Chrétien.” The King grounded the sword’s tip and stamped his boot on the Damascan steel. The sword rebounded. The edge gouged the deck. The King stamped again. His expression grim, he attacked a third time. The steel snapped. Lucien never flinched and never looked away.

His Majesty flung the handle to the deck, and kicked the broken blade over the side.

oOo

Sherzad hung suspended in the net. The ropes cut cruelly into her breasts and hips; the figurehead’s absurd bosom pressed painfully against her back. The salt spray cleansed and revived her. She opened her mouth to take it onto her tongue, the taste and smell of her home.

She was dying. She did not want to die.

She kept her silence all afternoon, refusing to reply to Marie-Josèphe, refusing to direct the ship. As night approached, she sang. Her voice was hoarse and ugly.

“She agrees! She’ll take us to the cove!” Marie-Josèphe, foolish trusting Marie-Josèphe, interpreted.

The sun touched the horizon. Sherzad sang, listening to the shape of the sea-bottom as best she could. The wind hesitated, in the moment of calm between day and night, and shifted as dark fell. The ship’s captain argued against sailing blind so close to shore.

The toothless shark, the King, commanded him to obey.

The ship plunged through the water. Sherzad trilled with excitement and fear.

A jagged stone reached from the sea bottom and seized the ship, grinding along its keel. Timbers crashed and splintered. Sherzad lurched against the net. The rough cables cut her skin.

But they did not break, they did not free her. The ship hung stranded, the captain shouted in fury, Marie-Josèphe cried out in shock. Sherzad laughed, wild and terrible, ready to die, for her plot had failed.

They left her hanging before the figurehead as the waning moon followed the sun into the sea.

29

Marie-Josèphe huddled miserably on deck, a blanket around her shoulders. She had tried to persuade Louis that Sherzad had not deliberately run the ship aground. She did not believe it herself, so her protestations only convinced the King she knew what Sherzad had planned.

What does he expect, she wondered, but betrayal for betrayal?

One good thing had come of the stranding. As the tide went out and the flagship settled, the groan of insulted timber replaced the erratic pitching. Lucien slept for the first time since the voyage began. His white-gold hair gleamed in the starlight. To Marie-Josèphe’s great relief, the sword cut on his throat was neither deep nor long.

Nothing had changed. The ship was not badly damaged. The captain said it would float free at high tide.

And then what? Marie-Josèphe wondered. They’ll never trust Sherzad to guide them, they’ll never trust me. Will they torture her, or kill her, or return her to Versailles and give her to Pope Innocent?

A quiet song floated through the night. Sherzad sang a lullaby that the sea people sing to their babies.

Marie-Josèphe matched her voice to Sherzad’s. Dew collected in droplets on the blanket and on her hair and on the ship’s gleaming paint and gilt.

Nearly asleep, Marie-Josèphe caught herself. She raised her head, fully awake, singing softly.

The guard near the bow nodded, caught himself, checked his pistol, nodded again.

He had orders to shoot Sherzad if she tried to escape. He nodded a third time. He snored.

Marie-Josèphe slipped from beneath the blanket. She stealthily picked up Lucien’s sword-cane and twisted its handle. The sound of its release was as loud as the crash of the ship against the rock. Yet no one responded.

She drew the broken blade. A handsbreadth of steel remained, its edge transparently sharp. In her stocking feet, singing the soothing lullaby, Marie-Josèphe crept across the deck. She passed the guard and climbed onto the bowsprit. She crept along it, afraid the rustling of her petticoat, or her awkwardness in her long skirts, would awaken the guard. Sherzad’s song charmed him into sleep. The sea woman’s song enfolded her.

Sherzad’s eyes gleamed red.

“Carry my life in your heart,” Marie-Josèphe whispered.

She slipped the broken blade beneath a cord of the net. The cord parted at the touch of the steel. She cut another cable, and a third. The sword was never meant to slice through cable. The harsh mesh dulled it quickly. She sawed harder. Sherzad grew excited, agitated, writhing, pushing her foot through the hole in the net, tearing at the mesh with her claws. Sherzad’s song faltered and dissolved into a moan. Behind them, the musketeer snorted and woke.

“No!” he cried.

Sherzad shrieked in triumph. She burst through the net and tumbled into the sea. A pistol ball screamed past Marie-Josèphe’s ear and sizzled into the water. Marie-Josèphe caught her breath and clutched the broken sword in one hand, the bowsprit in another.

She gazed into the darkness, terrified that Sherzad had been hit.

A splash sprayed Marie-Josèphe’s face with cool salty droplets. Sherzad laughed, cried a challenge, and vanished.

The ship creaked and shifted. Marie-Josèphe clung to the bowsprit, shaken, intoxicated.

“Come onto the deck, Mlle de la Croix.”

She obeyed the King, crawling backwards, embarrassed that His Majesty and his men could see her legs all the way to her knees. When she reached the deck and turned around, two musketeers held their pistols on her; three sailors stood ready with pikes.

“Give His Majesty my sword, if you please.” Lucien was bareheaded, unperturbed, wide awake. “Pass it hilt first.”

Her life, perhaps Lucien’s, depended on capitulation without threat, even with a broken sword. She did as Lucien said. Louis accepted her surrender.

The sailors led Marie-Josèphe away.

Shut up in the locker with the slimy seaweed-covered anchor chain, Marie-Josèphe lost track of time. She thought it must be day again, then night; but when the ship shifted and moaned beneath her, she knew it was only dawn.

Have they left the ship to break up on the rocks? she wondered. She hoped they had taken Lucien away with them. Anyone who disliked the sea so intensely should not have to drown.

The pumps groaned and rushed. The ship floated free. As the ship settled into the water, Sherzad’s voice travelled through the sea and touched the planks, resounding like a drum. Astonished, overjoyed, Marie-Josèphe replied. Sherzad spoke again, begging her to answer. Hurry, hurry, she cried, I cannot bear to wait for you much longer.

Desperate, Marie-Josèphe pounded on the bulkhead until her scratched hands bruised.

The hatch opened. Light poured in, dazzling her.

“Stop that noise.” The King stood before her. “You’ve exhausted my patience three times over.”

“Can’t you hear her? I freed her — she’ll keep her promise, she’ll lead me to your treasure.”

“I hear nothing. She has disappeared.”

“Shh. Listen.”

The King listened in skeptical silence. The ship rocked and complained around them; the pumps rumbled. Beneath the noise, Sherzad sang in a delicate low register.

“She promises. She says, The sand is covered with gold and jewels. She gives them to you, for my sake, despite your betrayals and your broken promises. Afterwards... she declares war on the men of land.”

“I wonder,” Louis said, “if she’s declared war on you.”

The King would never forgive her, treasure or not. Nor could Lucien hope to return to his proper place in the King’s esteem. Marie-Josèphe wondered if Lucien would ever forgive her.

On deck, Lucien peered into the dawn brilliance of the sea, searching for Sherzad.

He had locked his dulled and broken sword in its sheath. He leaned on it and grasped the rail as well, preparing for seasickness.

Marie-Josèphe joined him.

Lucien glanced up. “You are perfectly magnificent.”

She sank down beside him and took his hand.

The captain bowed to His Majesty. “The ship may return to Le Havre, Your Majesty,” he said, “but I can’t answer for any hard sailing.”

Marie-Josèphe searched the horizon and the silver sparks of sunlight. She called Sherzad, but heard no answer. She’s out there, Marie-Josèphe thought. It’s so hard to find anything on the whole wide sea —

“Very well,” His Majesty said. “Return to Le Havre.”

A distant splash marred the perfect pattern of the surface of the sea.

“There!” Marie-Josèphe cried. “She’s there.”

“It’s only a fish,” the captain muttered. If the lure of treasure could not overcome his fears, the will of the King did. The captain sailed his ship in pursuit of Sherzad, though he set a sailor on the bow with a sounding-line. When Sherzad led them to a cove, he refused to take the ship inside.

“It’s treacherous, Your Majesty,” he said. “Look at the chart, the wind. We’d go in.

We’d never come out.”

Marie-Josèphe fidgeted unhappily while the sailors lowered the skiff. They objected to her presence, even to Lucien’s, but the King climbed into the skiff and commanded Marie-Josèphe to accompany him, and he said nothing when Lucien climbed down the ladder too.

He believes my friend will be even more miserable in a smaller boat, Marie-Josèphe thought uncharitably. To her relief, Lucien’s discomfort eased.

The sailors rowed nervously after Sherzad. They whispered to each other, when they thought their passengers could not hear. They were afraid of Sherzad, afraid of more duplicity, afraid of ambush. Marie-Josèphe could not blame them. What’s more, she would not have blamed Sherzad if the sea woman fulfilled the sailor’s fears.

She caught only an occasional glimpse of the sea woman. Sherzad was frightened, too, of nets and guns, of explosive charges to stun her back into captivity. She hovered by the mouth of the cove, ready to flee at any threat.