The Vanishing Island (15 page)

“I
assume we're still in the Atlantic?” said the admiral.

“I couldn't tell you for sure,” said Mr. Tybert. “I've taken my measures two days running now, and all I know is that based on the ship's speed, we should be thirty-four degrees north, give or take—about two days south of Portugal. Instead we're approaching the Barbary Islands.”

“Which are where?” said the admiral.

“Seventeen degrees north,” said Mr. Tybert. “More than a thousand miles off.”

Bren was dying for the admiral to look at him, to see
if they were thinking the same thing, but the admiral kept his gaze fixed on the navigator.

“So if you've lost track, your dead reckoning is hopelessly off.”

“Aye, sir. I've no idea which direction we went to get this far south, nor how fast we went. It's like I fell asleep for two weeks. Except I didn't.”

The admiral thought about all he'd just heard, stroking his beard over and over. He stood up and called the navigator over to his charting map. “We did sail through a storm north of Iberia,” he said, pointing to the map. “And you know as well as I do how easy it is to lose track of things in the middle of a battle.”

Mr. Tybert said nothing. He just leaned on the map table with both hands, as if waiting for a better explanation to reveal itself.

“Look at it this way,” said Admiral Bowman. “If we traveled due south of where we engaged the Iberians, we would have hit the coast of North Africa, correct?”

“Aye, sir.”

“So let's assume we were on our planned southwesterly course, and go from there.”

“And hope we don't run head-on into a bump of land we didn't see coming,” said Mr. Tybert.

“I shall pray on it hourly,” said the admiral.

As the navigator turned to go, the admiral added, “And
Mr. Tybert, not a word to the crew about our being . . . temporarily dislocated.” Mr. Tybert nodded, passing Mouse as he left, who was bringing tea into the cabin.

“I guess we have our answer,” said the admiral, looking squarely at Bren. “About which one of us up and vanished. Any theories as to what happened?”

Bren's face grew hot, and he reached up to touch the paiza. Just a day ago he had felt like a hero, and now he wondered if he had somehow put them in even more danger.

“No, sir.”

The admiral turned to Mouse. “It would appear someone's thrown a wooden shoe into our loom,” he said. “We may be off course. I was wondering if you could divine which way the birds are flying?”

“I'll try,” said Mouse, and when he had left, the admiral noticed the puzzled expression on Bren's face. “It's one of the very wonderful things about our ship's boy,” he explained. “Mouse can talk to animals.”

“Really?” said Bren, who remembered the way the men had made fun of Mouse for talking to him. For having “neither fur nor feathers.” That also explained the cage of birds on the poop deck, he assumed.

“Of course, having a gift is one thing,” said the admiral, who came nearly nose-to-nose with Bren. He gently lifted the lanyard off Bren's chest with his open hand, and then squeezed his fist, causing the leather strap to tighten
around Bren's neck. “Knowing what to do with it is something else entirely.”

Mr. Tybert cast a chip log into the water—a weighted piece of wood attached to a line that had knots spaced evenly along its length. He then counted out the number of knots on the log line that spooled out over a half-minute period. He did this three times, to be as accurate as possible. This was how he calculated the ship's speed.

“Four and a half knots,” he said, and then, after studying his compass, “South-southwest, forty-three degrees.”

Bren went to the traverse board. The top part was a circle, painted with the compass rose, the face of which was covered with holes drilled at each point in the compass. The bottom part was a rectangle with another row of holes. Bren placed one peg in the top part, to record their direction, and a second peg in the bottom to record their speed.

“We do this every hour for four hours, until the board is full,” said the navigator. “Then we can dead reckon how far east or west we've sailed from the previous measurement.”

“That seems simple enough,” said Bren, at which point the navigator cuffed him on the ear.

“Ow!”

“Simple,
jongen
? Simple to figure the wind and the waves, that can throw you off by hundreds of miles over a
voyage this long? And that's
if
you haven't already lost track of a thousand miles!”

“Sorry,” said Bren, his ear full of bees.

Mr. Tybert slammed his fist down on the locker, causing Bren and the birds to jump. “All that poppycock about the storm and the battle, like I'm some silly little brugpieper. A navigator worth his salt never makes assumptions, jongen. But I reckon we don't have much choice.”

Bren decided not to talk for a while, to let Mr. Tybert calm down. The navigator would figure it out . . . he
had
to. This was the Dutch Bicycle & Tulip Company. Their ships didn't just get lost. Not when the treasure of Marco Polo was waiting to be found. This horrible thought of missing out on the greatest treasure hoard of all time immediately made Bren forget his vow of silence.

“Mr. Tybert, the admiral asked Mouse to ask the birds where we are. Do you believe he can talk to animals?”

The navigator gave Bren a look that told him he should guard his other ear. But instead of raising his hand, he said, “I believe a sailor will believe anything if he thinks it'll get him home safe. I've known a captain to carry a wounded dog aboard his ship, leaving a man back home with the dog's bloody bandages to dip in sympathy powder every day at noon. That way when the dog yelps on the ship they know it's noon back home, and they can calculate longitude that way.”

“Did it work?” said Bren.

“If he ever gets back, we'll ask him,” said Mr. Tybert. “That was fourteen years ago and no one's seen him since.”

Bren looked at the map again. He noticed the navigator had circled several locations in the Indian Ocean. “What are these?”

“Possible locations for your so-called vanishing island,” he said. “Guesswork, mostly. The admiral has been studying the history of the East for many years, picking up clues to routes the old-timers may have sailed, combined with what history has told us about favorable trade winds and the like.”

So-called vanishing island?
“Mr. Tybert, are you not a believer? In the lost treasure story, I mean.”

The navigator sized him up, as if he were trying to decide whether Bren was a mole for the admiral.

“I believe in treasure, all right,
jongen.
I've been a navigator for the company now a dozen years, and every trip we come back with a cargo hold of treasure. Every island in the Far East is a treasure island, far as I can tell. Makes me wonder why we'd go lookin' for one that might not even exist.”

“But now we have a map,” said Bren.

“A coded map,” Mr. Tybert reminded him. “But that's just between us and the birds, remember.”

Bren thought about it. “So we'll just stay at Cape
Colony until we've figured it out, if we haven't by then.”

Mr. Tybert scowled at him. “There you go making assumptions,” he said. “What did I tell you about that? We're God-knows-where in the Atlantic, and you've already got us in Cape Colony, sippin' tea with the Dutch governor.”

Bren blushed.

“Aside from that, the winds are rarely friendly near the equator. It ain't writ on maps, but we call this whole region the Sluggish Sea,” said Mr. Tybert, pointing out a large swath in the middle of the Atlantic. “Can grind a ship to a halt like quicksand.”

Bren didn't want to argue, but he had seen “The Sluggish Sea” written on many old maps at Rand McNally's. Early sailors always came up with better names for places: the Sea of Atlas (the north Atlantic), the Sea of Gems (the Indian Ocean), Ocean's End (the Arctic Circle). He was just now beginning to realize how long he would go without setting foot on land, confined to quarters the size of a coffin, with the same terrible men and the same terrible food and the same terrible duties every day. And that was assuming they weren't
really
lost. How his father and Mr. Black would love to know that Bren's only discovery to date was that ship's life wasn't as thrilling as he'd imagined, even in its most thrilling moments.

Part of him wished he could admit it to them, face-to-face.

That night Bren went to his old hammock before remembering he was now sleeping in the caboose.

“Master Owen is first class,” chided one crewman. “I hear they give you silk robes and slippers back there.”

“And cocoa and sweets,” mocked another.

“I'm just sharing a cabin with Mouse,” Bren protested, but it didn't stop the men from sending him off with two earfuls of insults.

He soon discovered that calling his cabin a cabin was a stretch. It was more like a mop closet, with the two cots set at right angles to each other, and one tiny desk with a small lantern. But Bren wouldn't take all that in until later. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was Mouse, who apparently was changing for bed. And the first thing he noticed was that the ship's boy wasn't really a boy.

“I wasn't . . . I didn't mean to . . . ,” Bren started to say, but words utterly failed him. He snuffed the lantern, as if that would make everything go back to the way it was.

Mouse relit the lantern. She had a nightshirt on now.

“Does anyone . . . are you . . .” Bren still couldn't put a single thought together.

“The admiral knows,” said Mouse. “He said it's best to keep it a secret, on a ship like this.”

Mouse got in bed, and Bren began to undress to do the same. He paused halfway, snuffed their lantern, and then finished.

“Don't worry,” said Mouse. “I won't look.”

“The admiral must've known I'd find out, bunking with you,” said Bren.

“I think he trusts you,” said Mouse. “I do, too. You saved me from those boys in Map.”

Bren said nothing. He didn't want to explain that he had been more interested in hurting Duke than saving some orphan.

“So, how did a . . . girl . . . end up on the
Albatross
? A girl from
China
?”

Mouse didn't reply at first, and in the silence Bren realized just how complete the darkness was below the decks of a ship.

“I don't remember much about China,” Mouse began. “I was an orphan, in a very poor village. The things people like you read about, and dream about . . . it was nothing like that. Always hungry. Always dirty. Not just me, everyone. I kept getting sent away.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Where the admiral found me was a fishing village at the mouth of the Pearl River, on one of the many islands south of China. There was an old woman
there known to take in unwanted children, and I showed up at her door one day.

“The admiral says he rescued me because he could tell I was special. That was why others kept sending me away—they were fearful. He says I came from China, yes, but from a lake high in the mountains. One day a flock of cranes landed on the shores of the lake, and when they touched the earth they transformed into beautiful girls. They undressed and hung their robes on a willow tree by the shore, and then went to bathe in the lake. What they didn't know was that in that very willow tree was a hunter, who had come to the lake to hunt geese, and hidden himself when the cranes landed.

“The girls finished bathing, and one by one they dressed and flew away. But the last girl couldn't find her robe—the hunter had stolen it. He jumped down from the tree, and forced her to come with him, lest she freeze to death by the lake. She agreed, and the hunter took her home, and tried to get her to marry him. She refused, and he refused to return her robe, and this went on for days and weeks and months until she finally gave in. But she vowed never to name their children, so that they could never grow up.”

“What happened?” said Bren.

“They had eleven children together,” said Mouse. “Years later, the hunter's wife finally tricked him into returning
her robe, so that she could fly away and rejoin her sisters. As she flew higher and higher away from their home, the hunter begged her to at least name their sons, so they could grow up to be leaders of their tribe. And so the crane wife agreed, calling out the sons' names as she departed, but the daughters were left nameless, and cast away by the hunter.

“The admiral says that's why I can talk to animals,” said Mouse. “Because my mother was a crane.”

Bren swallowed hard; he didn't know how to respond. “Why does he call you Mouse?”

“That's what the old woman called me. She says I wouldn't talk to any of the other orphans, just a small mouse I had made a pet of.”

“It sort of fits you,” said Bren. “I just mean because you're quiet, and sort of curious.”

“What about you?” said Mouse. “How did you get here?”

“A much more ordinary story, I'm afraid,” said Bren. “I was born in Map. My father is a mapmaker for Rand McNally, and my mother died two years ago of plague. I was named for St. Brendan, which my friend Mr. Black says means I am cursed with a wandering spirit.”

They lay in silence for several minutes before Bren said, “You never knew your mother, and I watched mine die.” He grasped the black stone necklace as he said this. He had never said it out loud before, but it was true. He had
been at his mother's bedside when she died. There was no wishing it otherwise. But that didn't mean Fortune couldn't be real, did it? The admiral believed in it, or a place very much like it.