Challenger Deep (7 page)

“I’m fine in the outer circle,” I tell him.

“You misunderstand,” the captain says sternly. “This isn’t a choice.”

Then, gauging my continued reluctance, he snarls, “You’ve been to the crow’s nest, haven’t you? You’ve been partaking of its odious libations. I can see it in your eyes!”

I glance to the parrot on his shoulder, and the parrot shakes his head, making it clear I should keep my mouth shut.

“Don’t lie to me, boy!”

And so I don’t. Instead I say, “If you want this done right, sir, I’ll need more polish and a bigger rag.”

He glares at me a moment more, then bursts out laughing, and orders another crewman to provide me with better supplies.

Luckily it’s a calm day at sea. The bow rises and falls just slightly
as it rides the waves. I’m given no rope, no way to secure myself. I am to shimmy out to the very tip of the pole with no protection but my balance to keep me from plunging into the sea, where I would be taken down beneath the ship, and shredded by its barnacle-encrusted hull.

Rag in one hand, polish in the other, I straddle the pole, pressing my thighs together to keep myself from falling into the bottomless blue. The only way to do this is to start at the far end and shimmy my way back—because once the wood is polished I know it will be too slick to cling to, so I carefully make my way to the front and begin, doing my best to forget about the waters passing beneath me. My arms ache from the work, my legs ache from holding on. It feels like it takes forever, but finally I am back where I started at the bow.

I carefully turn myself around so I’m facing the ship, and the captain grins broadly. “Competently done!” he says. “Now come off there before the sea or something in it devours your semi-worthless hide.” Then he leaves, satisfied that I’ve been sufficiently tormented.

Perhaps it’s that I get a little cocky at my success, or perhaps the sea is spiteful that it hasn’t claimed me—but as I climb back to the bow, the ship lurches on a sudden swell. I slip and I slide off the pole.

It should be the end of my miserable life, but someone catches me, holding me as I dangle by a single arm above doom.

I look up to see who has saved my life. The hand that grips me is brown, but not brown like flesh. It’s ashen, and the fingers rough and hard. My gaze tracks up the arm until I see that I am being held
by the ship’s figurehead—a wooden maiden carved into the bow, beneath the bowsprit pole. I don’t know whether to be more thankful or terrified—but terror dissolves as I realize how beautiful she is. The wooden waves of her hair dissolve into the timbers of the ship. Her perfect torso tapers into the bow, as if the rest of the ship is just a part of her body. And her face—it’s not so much familiar as it is reminiscent of girls I’ve seen in secret fantasies. Girls who make me blush when I think about them.

She studies me as I dangle, her eyes as dark as mahogany.

“I should drop you,” she says, “for looking at me like an object.”

“But you
are
an object,” I point out, and realize it’s the wrong thing to say, unless I want to die.

“Perhaps so,” she says, “but I don’t appreciate being treated like one.”

“Will you save me? Please?” I ask, ashamed to be begging, but feeling I have no other choice.

“I’m considering it,” she says.

Her grip is firm and strong, and I know that as long as she’s still considering, she won’t let me fall.

“There are things going on behind my back, aren’t there?” she asks—and since she’s the figurehead of the ship, the answer is, of course, “Yes.”

“Do they speak ill of me? The captain and his pet? The crewmen and their demons that hide in crevices.”

“They don’t speak of you at all,” I tell her. “At least not since I arrived.”

That doesn’t please her. “Out of sight must truly be out of mind,”
she says with the sticky bitterness of oak sap. Then she studies me a few moments more. “I will save you,” she says, “if you promise to tell me all the things that go on behind my back.”

“Agreed.”

“Very well.” She squeezes my hand tighter, and I know it will be badly bruised, but I don’t care. “Visit me, then, to vary my days.” And then she smirks. “And maybe one of these days, I’ll allow you to polish
me
, instead of just that pole.”

Then she swings me side to side, building momentum, and finally heaves me back onto the bow, where I land hard on the deck.

I look around. No one is nearby. Everyone on deck is occupied in their own particular obsession. I resolve to keep this encounter a secret. Perhaps the wooden maiden will be an ally when I need one.

35. The Unusual Suspects

The mission team has been chosen. The captain gathers a half dozen of us in the map room—a sort of library beside his ready room, filled with scrolls of maps, some of which already show signs that the navigator has had his way with them. There are six seats, three on either side of a pockmarked table. On my side is the navigator, and the scream-faced girl with the pearl choker. Across from us is another girl with hair as blue as a Tahitian bay, an older kid with a hard-luck face God forgot to give cheekbones, and the obligatory fat kid.

At the head of the table stands the captain. There’s no seat for him. That’s intentional. He towers over us. The light from a flickering lamp behind the captain casts his shadow across the table—a shifting blob, that almost, but not quite, mimics his actions. The parrot sits perched on some scrolls, his talons digging into the parchment.

Carlyle, the swabby, is also there. He sits on a chair in the corner, whittling on his mop handle, like he’s turning it into a very thin totem pole. He observes but says nothing at first.

“We bob above many things unseen,” the captain begins. “Mountains of mystery lie low in the lightless, bone-crushing depths. . . . But as you all know, it be not the mountains that obsess us, but the valleys.”

Then his single seeing eye looks to me. I know he’s making eye contact with all of us as he speaks but I can’t help but feel that he’s
singling me out as he waxes pirate poetic.

“Aye, the valleys and trenches. And one in particular. The Marianas Trench . . . and that place in its icy depths called Challenger Deep.”

The parrot flaps to his shoulder. “Been watching you, we have,” the parrot says. Today he sounds like Yoda.

“Indeed we have been scrutinizing your ways,” adds the captain, “and fiercely reckon that you be the ones to play a crucial part in this mission.”

I roll my eyes at his strained pirate-ese. I wouldn’t doubt he spells everything with triple
rrr
’s.

All is silent for a moment, and from the corner, Carlyle, without looking up from his whittling, says, “Of course, I’m just a fly on the wall, but this would all go much more smoothly if the six of you shared your opinions.”

“Speak,” orders the parrot. “All must speak of what you know of the place we seek.”

The captain says nothing. He seems a bit irritated that his authority has been undermined by the parrot and the swabby. He crosses his arms in a display of power, and waits for one of us to say something.

“Well, I’ll go first,” says the girl with the pearl choker. “It’s a deep, dark, terrible place, and there are monsters that I really don’t want to talk about . . .” and then she proceeds to tell us about monsters none of us cares to hear about—until she’s interrupted by the obligatory fat kid.

“No,” he says. “The worst monsters aren’t
in
the trench, they
guard it. The monsters come before you get there.”

Choker-girl, who insisted she didn’t want to talk about them, obviously wanted to, because she’s miffed that she’s been cut off. Now everyone’s attention turns to the fat kid.

“Go on,” says the captain. “Everyone’s here to listen.”

“Well . . . the monsters keep people away by killing anyone who gets close. And if one doesn’t get you, another one will.”

“Very good,” says the captain. “Well-spoken! You know your lore.”

“Lore-master,” says the parrot. “Make him Lore-master.”

“A clear choice,” the captain agrees. “You shall be our designated expert on lore.”

The fat kid panics. “But I don’t know stuff—I only heard you talking once.”

“Then learn.” The captain reaches to a shelf I didn’t know was there a moment ago, grabs a volume the size of an unabridged dictionary, and slams it down on the table in front of the poor kid.

“Thanks for sharing,” says Carlyle from the corner, flicking a bit of wood from his knife to the ground.

The captain turns his gaze to the girl with blue hair, waiting for her contribution. She looks off to the side as she speaks, as if her lack of eye contact is the ultimate rebellion against authority. “There must be sunken treasure or, like, whatever,” she says. “Otherwise, why would you want to go there?”

“Aye,” says the captain. “All treasures lost at sea seek the world’s lowest point. Gold and diamonds and emeralds and rubies taken by the jealous sea are dragged by its watery tentacles along
the seafloor and dropped into the unknowable depths of Challenger Deep. A king’s ransom without the nuisance of a kidnapped king.”

“Kidnap, sand trap, sandstorm, life-form,” says the navigator. “Life-forms never seen by the human eye lie in wait for a challenger.”

“So who is the challenger?” asks the kid with a dearth of cheekbones.

The captain turns his gaze to him. “Since you asked the question, you will prophesize answers.” Then he turns to the parrot. “Bring him the bones.”

The parrot flies across the room and returns with a small leather sack in his beak.

“We shall call you the prophet and you shall interpret the bones for us,” the captain says.

“These,” says the parrot, “are the bones of my father.”

“Whom we devoured one fine Christmas,” the captain adds, “when no one would be the turkey.”

I swallow and think of the White Plastic Kitchen. Then the captain looks at me and I realize that everyone’s spoken but me. I consider what everyone else has said and I can feel my anger building. The captain with his single bloodshot eye; the parrot, his head bobbing in anticipation of whatever nonsense I would add to this foolishness.

“The Marianas Trench,” I say. “Nearly seven miles deep—the deepest place on earth—and southwest of the island of Guam, which isn’t even on your globe.”

The captain’s eye opens wider so it appears to have no lids. “Go on.”

“It was first explored by Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh in 1960 in a submersible called the
Trieste
. They didn’t find any monsters or treasures. And if there are treasures, you’ll never get to them. Not without a heavy-duty diving bell—a bathyscaphe made of steel that’s at least six inches thick. But as this is a preindustrial ship, I don’t think that’s going to happen, because you don’t have that kind of technology, do you? So this is a waste of everyone’s time.”

The captain folds his arms. “How very anachronistic of you,” he says. “And you believe this because . . . ?”

“Because I did a report on it,” I tell him. “In fact, I got an A.”

“I think not.” Then he calls to Carlyle. “Swabby,” he says. “This crewman has just earned an F. I order that it be branded on his forehead.”

The prophet snickers, the lore-master groans, and everyone else waits to see whether or not it’s an idle threat.

“You are all dismissed,” the captain says. “All except for our insolent F.”

The others shuffle out, the navigator giving me a sympathetic gaze. Carlyle hurries out and returns in seconds with a branding iron, red-hot and smoking, as if it had been waiting just outside. Two of the nameless ship’s officers hold me against the bulkhead, and although I fight, I can’t get free.

“Sorry about this,” says Carlyle, holding the red-hot brand, the heat of which I can feel two feet away.

The parrot flies off, not wanting to watch, and the captain, before he gives the order to do the deed, leans close to me. I can smell his breath. It reeks of bits of old meat pickled in rum. “This not be the world you think it to be,” he says.

“Then what world is it?” I ask, refusing to give in to my fear.

“Don’t you know? ’Tis a world of laughter, a world of tears.” Then he lifts up his eye patch, revealing a nasty hole that has been plugged with a peach pit. “But mostly, it’s a world of tears.”

And he signals for Carlyle to give me an F on my report.

36. Without Her We’re Lost

In the aftermath of my branding, the captain becomes gentle. Apologetic even, although he never actually apologizes. He sits by my bedside dabbing water on the wound. Carlyle and the parrot stop in once in a while, but only for a moment. Once they see the captain there, they retreat.

“This is all the parrot’s fault,” the captain tells me. “And Carlyle’s. The two of them put ideas in your head, and get you all riled up when I’m not around.”

“You’re always around,” I remind him. He ignores me, and dabs my forehead again.

“Those damn trips to the crow’s nest aren’t helping you either. Away with the spirits—to the devil with your potion. Mark my
words, those unholy concoctions will rot you from the inside out.”