Zia (5 page)

"I will use my knife tonight while they sleep."

"You will do nothing with your knife nor with your tongue."

"I will speak to Mukat," Mando said.

"Speak to Mukat all you wish. But to the white men say nothing."

We rounded the headland and set off in the direction of the whaling ship. It was still billowing smoke. Through the smoke I could see fires burning and men moving about on the deck and on the carcasses of the two dead whales. It looked like the scene Father Vicente described to us sometimes—like the smoke and fires of Hell.

When we reached the ship the blue-eyed man told us to climb a rope ladder that was dangling over the ship. "Step lively," he said, which we did, though the ladder swayed and the ship rolled. He came up after us and took me to a place in the bow where food was cooking on a brick stove. I was not there a second before the cook thrust a knife into my hand and pointed out a basket of potatoes. He said nothing but made motions, which meant that I was to peel them.

I did not know what happened to Mando until noon when the men came in to eat. He was as oily and black as the rest and when he spoke his teeth glistened white against his skin.

"What do you do?" I whispered to him.

"I toss hunks of blubber into the pots," he whispered back. "The heat and the smoke are bad. And the smell, it does something to the stomach. Tomorrow I will go crazy and jump overboard. Maybe I will go crazy before tomorrow."

Chapter 8

T
HE COOK
was fat and enjoyed eating. He enjoyed chewing tobacco, too, which he carried in a leather pouch. He enjoyed both so much that he chewed and ate at the same time, holding the tobacco under his lower lip while he munched away. He spat a lot, sometimes in the fire. But the next morning when I helped him slice up the beef the mate had bought on shore he told me to take my time and not get in a hurry.

"This is no boarding house where they have to eat on the stroke of the hour," he said. "Here we serve mess when it's ready. Not a minute before."

In the afternoon he gave me some time and urged me to look around the ship.

"The
Boston Boy
is not a very pretty sight right now," he said. "But you can hold your nose and look where you want. If the men give you any lip, give it back to them. But mostly they're gentlemen—the rough sort, mind you. Besides, they've got no time for chatter."

He walked to the door of the galley, which ran from one side of the ship to the other, spat to windward, and came back.

"We ran into some sperm whales," he said. "What they're doing around here—usually it's the grays—nobody knows. But we caught us two and since we're on shares everybody is killing himself to fill every barrel on shipboard."

I was not interested in watching the men slice off the blubber in great long strips with their sharp flensing knives and haul the whales aboard with big hooks and fling them into the trying pots. I wanted to talk to my brother Mando and see if together we could think of some way to get away from the ship.

Most of the ship—all of the middle part—was given up to boiling the blubber. In front of one of the brick furnaces I found Mando. He was stripped to the waist and was feeding the fire under the pots. He had a pair of tongs and would reach in the pot and pull out pieces that no longer had oil in them and then fling them into the fire, where they blazed up and added mightily to the heat.

He glanced at me but there was no chance to talk. I tried to meet him that night after supper but I could not find him. It was not until the third day, in the afternoon, that an accident happened to the mate, the young man with the wrinkles and the gold earring, that gave us a chance to talk.

The mate had talked a lot at noon when he was eating, bragging about how rich everyone was going to be, now that a girl was aboard.

"Nothing but luck," he had said, "from now until the time we sight Boston port. Fair seas at the Cape, following winds, good weather."

He was talking to all the sailors who thought that it was bad luck to have a woman on the ship. There were many of them and I hoped they would cause a mutiny and put me ashore, but the very next day, the ship killed four more sperm whales, who the young mate said were a thousand miles from their usual haunts.

"Proves I was right," he bragged, and furthermore we'll take an Indian to Boston and show the citizens of that proper town what real Indians look like. No feathered savages, these ones."

He gave me an admiring smile. The smile and what he had said about taking us away and showing us off to strange people made me more determined than I ever was to flee from the ship.

He drank down the last of a flagon of wine he had bought nearby at Mission Ventura and went reeling on deck. I had cleaned up the table and was getting ready to wash the dishes with the help of a dwarf South Sea Islander they had picked up somewhere—and were also going to take to Boston—when I heard a scream, then the running of feet and the shouts of many men.

The commotion was caused by a strange accident that had befallen the earringed mate, whether from the wine he had drunk at the noon meal or from an odd misfortune, I do not know.

I had never seen a sperm whale before. The whales that live on our coast are different. They have a more fishlike look about them for one thing. But the sperm whale has a prow for a nose, like a great rock that rises straight from the sea. It forms a fourth part of the animal. The cook had told me this the first day when he had set me to peeling the basket of potatoes.

When Mando and I had first set foot on the ship, I had noticed an enormous head hanging at the bulwarks, held there by iron hooks fastened to ropes strung from above.

While I was peeling the basket of potatoes the cook had set before me, I asked him about this enormous head, which had loomed beside me when I had climbed on deck. I remembered the fright I had felt at this great dangling maw with its ivory teeth that looked as long as my arm. Beyond it hung still another of these giant heads, its mouth gaping open.

"Pure ivory," said the cook. "Valuable, but it's the head that's the treasure. Full of spermaceti, it is. Enough to fill five casks. It makes the finest perfume, young lady, this sweet-smelling whale oil."

"I have none," I said.

"If you did, here's where it would come from."

I ran out of the galley at the sound of screams and running feet. The cook followed me. Men were clustered around one of these hanging whale heads, some with knives, others with spades. They were all talking at once.

Mando grabbed my arm. "It's the mate. The one with the gold earring," he said. "He has fallen and will drown."

The mate, it seemed, had insisted upon cutting into the heads. This was his task, one that no one else could do so well. Not only to cut into the animal at the proper place but to manage the bailing out of the precious liquid it held in its enormous head.

After the iron bucket had gone down more than a dozen times, like a bucket into a well, and come back filled, the mate somehow had slipped and fallen deep down into the whale's skull, which was like a deep cavern.

His screams came up from the cavern, growing louder and louder while the men stood by, planning how best to reach him. First the iron bucket was taken from the pole and the pole lowered into the well. But, for some reason, the mate did not grasp it.

His screams grew fainter. Then someone with a flensing knife hacked at the underside of the whale's skull. The precious liquid poured out and with it the mate. He fell into the sea, drifted face downward, and before anyone could reach him sank from view. A few oily bubbles marked the place where he had gone down. Then the hat he had worn bobbed up and the sea was quiet.

All the ship's longboats, including ours, were manned. They went around in circles over the place where the mate had disappeared, but all they found was the hat he had worn, glistening with the precious oil that covered the sea.

Chapter 9

I
T WAS
the drowning of the mate that gave us a chance to escape from the
Boston Boy.

The crew spent the rest of the afternoon searching for his body. They rowed in ever widening circles around the ship, using all of the longboats, of which they had five, including ours.

They searched until dusk when hunger drove them back to the ship. I was in the galley with the cook, the only sailor aboard who did not man an oar, except my brother and the captain, who kept mostly to his cabin, which was astern of us. From time to time during the afternoon he would appear on deck, hoist a spyglass to his eye, search the movement of each boat and then disappear.

Between peeling potatoes and cutting up strips of salt pork I had an opportunity to speak to Mando. After the third day the captain had decided to make him a cabin boy. I guess he had seen him tending fire under the trying pots and was taken by the way he did his work.

In any event the captain had him dressed up in a white sweater and white pants—the only pants that Mando had ever owned—and kept him busy running errands. One of the errands that afternoon brought Mando to the galley for a cup and a crock of tea.

After the cook had made the tea and given it to my brother I followed him to the deck. He hurried along, me at his side, but we had a brief chance to speak.

"I heard the captain talking," said Mando. "He was talking to the second mate who is the first mate now. He said that the casks were full of oil and that they would sail for home tomorrow and for him to get everything ready."

"Then this is the last night we will have a chance to flee," I said.

"The captain also told the new mate that he was taking us with him to Boston. Wherever that is."

"I think it is far away," I said. "But wherever it is I am not going. I will jump overboard first and swim to the island."

"It is a long swim," Mando said. "And what would we do on the island?"

"We could find enough food to eat. We would wait until someone at the Mission found us. We could make fires and signal them," I said.

"There are many sharks out there, Zia. They were gnawing hunks out of dead whales all day. One of the men shot three, but more, many more, came back to eat."

There was a look in his eye and a tone to his words that surprised me and suddenly made me suspicious. "You are not thinking of going with the ship?"

"I have thought of it," Mando said.

"But you are not going?"

"I have no choice in these matters. Nor do you. We are the captives of the white men."

The idea of being a captive was something new for him. He seemed to like it.

"No," I said, "I am not a captive. Nor are you."

He began to move away. "I have to take the tea to the captain," he said.

"The captain can wait for his tea. Do you think we can find our boat in the dark?"

Mando stopped. "We can find it, but it will have no oars. They take all the oars on the ship at night."

"Because there are others who would like to escape also," I said. "That is why they hide the oars?"

Mando shrugged and started on his way. I followed him along the deck, within a few feet of the captain's door.

"Where do you sleep at night?" I said.

"In a locker over there." He pointed to a shelter nearby, without a door.

"Do you hear the ship's bell when it strikes?" I said.

"Sometimes I hear it. Sometimes not when I am sleeping."

"Tonight stay awake and hear it," I said, "when it strikes six times." I held my hands out and counted six on my fingers. "Six times means it is eleven o'clock."

"At the Mission six bells means six o'clock," said Mando. "Time to go and eat."

"Here they mean eleven o'clock. By then everyone will be asleep, except the man who watches the deck. Meet me here at the rail when you hear the six bells. And bring your knife."

"What if I do not choose to hear the bells," Mando said.

"You are eleven years old but you have not reached manhood," I said.

"I will be twelve in a moon or so," Mando said defiantly. "So I am twelve."

He lingered. "How can we run the boat without oars?" he asked. "We have no sail, either. How do we move?"

"We both can hold on to the rudder and kick our legs, as if we were swimming."

"What of the sharks?"

"There are more of them here on the ship than in the sea," I said. "Many more. And the captain is one of them."

"In the morning the captain will find that we are gone," Mando said. "He will send the boats out to search for us."

"We will be near Mission Ventura by morning. The current runs strong here in the channel and it runs toward the shore."

"I do not like what you say," Mando replied. "I do not like being without oars or a sail. What if the men who watch through the night see us? What of the sharks? What if the men search for us in the morning? What if they find us and put us in chains? There are two in chains now. They live in a dark hole down where the oil is stored." Mando walked toward the captain's door. "I do not like it," he said.

"We will find a way to reach Karana and bring her home to the Mission," I said. "She belongs to our tribe. She belongs to us especially. I left my home to find her."

Night was falling. The boats were coming back from their search. The men were tying them up and climbing the rope ladder.

"Do not forget," I said. "We are slaves to no one. Nor are we something for people to stare at. Remain awake. Listen for the six bells. And come promptly with your knife."

I went back to the galley, to the storeroom where I slept. I put some of the beef left from supper in a bag with a handful of big round crackers, hard as stones. From the rack beside the stove I took the sharpest knife the cook owned and put it into the bag. Then I sat down to wait for the six bells to strike.

Whether Mando would defy me and decide to remain with the ship and the white men, I did not know. But I knew that somehow I would find my way to shore.

Chapter 10

A
T THE
sixth stroke of the ship's bell I took my bag, which held food, a knife, and a flask of water, and went to the galley door.