The Vanishing Island (22 page)

Bren's first instinct was to run. But where? Captain Kroeger was dead, and for all he knew the colony was in the throes of a full-scale rebellion. And then he saw a man grab Mouse by the arm as he raised a curved blade above his head to strike. Bren ran to her, reaching into his boot and drawing forth the balisong just as he arrived, thrusting it at the attacker.

He had forgotten to flip open the knife. As the man's blade came down, Mouse squirmed away and the blade struck the table, wedging into the mahogany wood. He struggled to remove it, giving Bren precious seconds to regain his senses and unlatch the knife. With all his might he drove the short blade into the man's side. The man cried out, and then someone grabbed Bren from behind.

It was the admiral, who dragged them both from the dining hall, through the hallway, and into the long foyer that led to the front door, the bloodcurdling sounds of the insurrection echoing through the corridors.

“Go, go!” said the admiral, who was running behind them now, holding his bloody hidden sword, while a wounded Mr. Richter ran off-kilter behind him. The admiral and Mr. van Decken held back to try to fend off any pursuers.

Bren and Mouse burst through the front door and ran across the moonlit lawn, through the town, until they
reached the harbor and found a rowboat. Bren could see the blood staining Mr. Richter's waistcoat as he straggled up behind them.

“Get in,” said Bren to the company man. “Mouse and I will help push off. If you're able, be ready to man an oar when the admiral and Mr. van Decken get here.”

The company man clearly wanted to scold Bren for ordering him around, but he said nothing and got in the boat. In a matter of minutes, the admiral and the first mate appeared at the far end of the road, running full speed.

They all made it into the craft, finally, and then Bren rowed as if his life depended on it, trying not to notice the throng of men with weapons rushing toward the harbor.

A
groggy Sean helped the night watch pull the admiral, Mr. Richter, Mr. van Decken, Bren, and Mouse onto the ship. The next hour was a blizzard of confusion as the admiral ordered all hands on deck so the ship could weigh anchor and set off as soon as possible.

Once they were under sail, Bren and Mouse went to their cabin, where they could hear the admiral and Mr. Richter arguing in the chart room above.

“What in the world happened?” said Bren.

“I don't think Mr. Richter was expecting to leave so soon,” said Mouse.

“Was Admiral Bowman?”

Mouse shrugged.

Bren could still see the hideous head of the boar, face-to-face with the severed head of Governor van Loon, and hear the screams of the guests. He wondered if anyone had survived but them.

“Mouse, do you think I killed that man?”

Mouse looked at Bren with her fathomless black eyes. “You helped me.”

Bren couldn't decide which had felt worse—sinking the blade into a man's flesh, or being too scared to remember to open the knife when the man first threatened Mouse.

The argument above them raged on, and soon Bren heard Mr. van Decken's voice, too, but he couldn't make out what they were saying. He looked at Mouse, and she could tell what he was thinking.

“I don't think we should,” she said. “It sounds bad.”

Bren knew she was right; now was not the time to spy. Instead he took out his journal and tried to write about what had happened at the banquet, but when he got to the part where he stabbed the man, he had to stop. He didn't want to write it down. He didn't want to remember it later, though he knew he would, whether he wanted to or not.

In the days that followed, the arguments stopped but the tension remained high. Mr. Richter kept to his cabin, and Mr. van Decken, it seemed, worked every watch.

Cape Colony was on the western side of South Africa's tip, and when they rounded the continent's true southernmost point, the Cape of Needles, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans met, Bren saw firsthand one of those phenomena of the ocean no sailor could explain. Instead of one ocean blending seamlessly into the other, like two bowls of water, there were bands of color that naturally divided the two: the Atlantic, a mottled tortoise green; the Indian, an ever-deepening blue.

The admiral called all hands on deck to address the concerns he had heard about their ultimate destination. No, they were not returning to Amsterdam, but if the men insisted on sailing for the Dragon Islands, he would hear them out.

“But I want to encourage you to reconsider,” he said. “Yes, there's more than I've told you about the supposed resting place of Marco Polo's treasure. It's a place once known to the ancient Chinese but erased from maps as a matter of secrecy. A place that could harbor fantastic new resources for our kingdom.”

Bren noted the words the admiral carefully chose to deliver his lie. He prided himself on being true to his word,
and Bren couldn't find fault there. Except that being true to your word and being truthful weren't always the same thing.

“And you've heard what happened back at Cape Colony,” the admiral continued. “That valuable possession may be lost to us forever. More than ever we need to find new safe harbors. I propose that we sail to Madagascar and regroup, and then chart our new course.”

The one thing he left out, though, was that Bren's code-breaking was hardly foolproof. They had worked through the algebra of it all—the normal times it took to travel overland from Xanadu to the City of Lions, which was the place now called Singapore. Polo had written nothing that would indicate it was anything other than a routine journey, but still, they had to make certain assumptions.

“A navigator worth his salt doesn't make assumptions!” Mr. Tybert had bellowed. But Bren had decided that wasn't true. A navigator assumed the sun rose in the east and set in the west. He assumed the wind and he assumed the tides, and he assumed that the pattern of the heavens remains unchanging, always, circling the same picture back into view every so many years as if the planets and stars were affixed to the gears of a clock.

“All of us who use maps put ourselves at the mercy of the maker,” Rand McNally had once said.

That's where they were now. Half at the mercy of
Marco Polo, and half at the mercy of an admiral obsessed with an ancient power that may or may not have been real. Sailing not so much toward a place as a theoretical spot on a map.

But his argument had been persuasive. Or perhaps it was just that the men felt they had no other choice.

As the weeks passed, Mr. Richter remained in his cabin, unseen, and Bren began to wonder if he was under house arrest. One morning when Mouse was needed elsewhere, Bren drew the short straw and had to take the company man breakfast. When he walked into Richter's cabin, he couldn't believe what he saw—a room twice as big as any other on the ship, with not one but two sofas, reading chairs, a large bed, a desk, a full liquor cabinet, and a harp.

“Set it there,” said Mr. Richter, waving his hand nowhere in particular. He was sitting up in bed, wearing a dressing gown that was obviously of the finest quality but which struck Bren as somewhat feminine.

“Do you play the harp?”

“No.”

Bren lingered, hoping that his recent isolation might make Mr. Richter chatty, and that he might spill the beans about his argument with the admiral. But when the company man noticed Bren was still there, he threw up his hand and said, “Begone, pest!”

“Did you know Mr. Richter lives like a king?” Bren
said to Mouse the next time he saw her.

She just shrugged. “Or maybe he thinks he's one of the Five Emperors from the admiral's story.”

Bren laughed at this, but then something began nudging at his brain. The Five Emperors—why five? He felt like that number had come up in a significant way before. But where?

And then he remembered. Mr. Black, going on and on about some new book he was reading about China, remarking on the odd fact that the Chinese recorded five cardinal directions instead of four: north, south, east, west—and Earth.

Marco Polo would have known this. What if the paiza wasn't just a hidden map, but a hidden compass, too? If the center was Earth, Polo may have been recording the fact that he was seeing the plowman and the cloud maiden (the Lyre and Cygnus) along the horizon. If so, they could narrow down the island's possible locations considerably.

Bren started to run for the admiral, but then he stopped himself. He had made the admiral promise him his freedom in exchange for this information. That hardly seemed possible now. Should he strike a new bargain? For what? It seemed cowardly to go back to the admiral begging for fortune or the power he had tempted Bren with.

No, all he wanted now was to survive . . . and to make sure Mouse survived, even though he couldn't have honestly
said he knew what she really wanted. Was she with the admiral out of loyalty? The admiral had raised the specter of slavery. Could Mouse be his . . . no, he couldn't think of her like that. Regardless, their only chance of survival was to get where the admiral was determined to go, lest he sail them around the Indian Ocean until they all died.

He had to help him finish the map.

“So what's the rest of the story?”

The admiral looked at Bren. He was at the quarterdeck rail, and Bren had just come down from the poop deck. They had dropped anchor off the east coast of Madagascar, along the Tropic of Capricorn, to put the finishing touches on their map before proceeding.

“The rest of what story?”

“After Marco Polo deserted the girl on the island,” said Bren.

“Ah, that story,” said the admiral, staring off into the distance. “Well of course, Marco Polo was never able to return to her. He was imprisoned during the civil war between Venice and Genoa, and by the time he was released, the family fortune was gone. On his deathbed, he freed his Tatar slave, who repaid the kindness by going through his things and stealing what little money Polo had left, along with the paiza, though he didn't know it was really a treasure map. The slave ended up killed in the
Russian Wars, and the coin began its strange journey, until it ended up with Jacob Beenders, the man you found in the vomitorium.”

“How did Jacob Beenders end up with it?” said Bren. “And what happened to him, exactly?”

“Jacob Beenders stole it from me, indirectly,” said the admiral. “He was a member of the Order of the Black Tulip, remember, and, once upon a time, as much a believer in the ancient powers as I. But the fool was orange through and through, and wanted to place all this power in the king's hands. Well, I guess you know my feelings by now about putting myself at risk only for the power and glory of others.”

“So you murdered him?”

“I believe the legal charge would have been
attempted
murder,” said the admiral. “Although I can assure you, there would have been no evidence of my involvement. I had tracked the paiza down, but Beenders got to my scout first. He offered it to King Maximilian, who it turns out was not a believer. He laughed at Jacob, and rewarded him by sending him on a suicide mission—finding a northeast passage through the Arctic to our Far Eastern colonies. Already half a dozen good ships had been lost on that folly. But Beenders is—was—a tough bird. He survived that, and my attempt on his life. For a while, anyway.”

“Why did he come to Map?” said Bren.

“I can only assume he intended to try to sell the map to Rand McNally,” said the admiral. “Rejected by his own king, he hoped perhaps to at least capitalize on the map's value as a collector's item. Or maybe he wanted to pay me back.

“Don't give me that look, Bren. This is
my
destiny. The one I have made for myself. Aren't you trying to do the very same thing?”

Bren thought of the slashed neck of Jacob Beenders, and his gutted corpse in the doctor's office. And poor Dr. Hendrick with a knife in his heart. The murder scene with a floor covered in blood but no bloody footprints. And then Otto. Had the signs been there all along, and Bren had just ignored them? Because he was determined to board the
Albatross
, and because he had idolized this man who had risen from commoner to admiral? Who had made something of himself, the way Bren wanted to? Changing your fate in life wasn't something to be undertaken lightly. Weak men need not apply. You had to be willing to do anything, Bren imagined, to accomplish such a thing. Like put yourself in league with the Devil.

“Mouse, keep your eyes open—and your ears!” the admiral called to her. She was in the crow's nest, on the lookout for land or signs that land was near. If Bren was correct, the island was located at nearly thirty-eight degrees south and
seventy-seven degrees east, approximately nineteen hundred nautical miles from where they had dropped anchor off Madagascar. Which meant they should spot land any day now.

The nearness to their destination had created a thrum of excitement on board that was audible—men humming and whistling tunes, loud banter and joking, all the things men do, consciously or unconsciously, when their spirits are lifted. But Bren also sensed that some of this excitement came from anxiety, the fact that their destination was both unexpected and completely unknown, and because there was a growing distrust of the admiral's motivations among the crew.

Still, Bren overheard those speculating about the “fantastic new resources” the admiral had promised, and he noted that being a grown man, a grizzled mariner even, didn't stop men from harboring wild desires for fame, fortune, and power.

“You can stop wondering how the
lost treasure of Marco Polo
will benefit you,” came a slurred voice from above. It was Mr. Richter, finally emerged from his cabin. And he was drunk. He could barely support himself using the quarterdeck rail.

The men on deck looked at one another, wondering what he was talking about.

“I think you should go back to your cabin,” said Mr. van Decken, coming over to Mr. Richter, but the company
man stood his ground, barely, gently swaying with the boat.

“The fall of Cape Colony is just the beginning!” shouted Mr. Richter. “He wants to bring down the empire!”

More confusion spread among the ranks. Who was he talking about?

“You should have listened to your co-conspirator, and stayed in your cabin.”

Everyone froze. It was Admiral Bowman, coming from the back of the deck and up behind Mr. Richter. “You're the reason for the mess at the Cape. And you,” he said, turning to Mr. van Decken.

Bren looked up at the crow's nest, to see if Mouse was hearing this. Did she know what was going on? He looked for Sean, too, and found him standing on the forecastle, frozen in place like the others.

“You're mistaken, Admiral,” said Mr. van Decken, but the admiral was looking now at Mr. Richter, who had turned to face him, leaning against the rail for support.

“You didn't have grand plans to make yourself governor of Cape Colony, and turn my ship over to my first mate?” said the admiral. “While having me arrested?”

He pulled a folded mass of papers from his pocket and handed them to Bren, as if this public trial required at least one witness for the prosecution. “Letters from the Orange King himself and the president of the company, along with
documents of transference, replacing the unsuspecting Governor van Loon and installing Governor Richter. Those trunks we hauled ashore, one was your entire wardrobe and the other was full of gold. Your personal stash, I assume. Thank you for that, by the way. It was gratifying to bribe the Khoikhoi with your own money.”

The admiral turned to Mr. van Decken. “Sorry about that, Willem. And about that scar on your arm. You weren't worthy of being captain of this ship, and you certainly weren't worthy of the Order.”