Jamrach's Menagerie (25 page)

Tim laughed. ‘I don’t care about the money.’ He resumed his sweeping. ‘I was sure I was going to die. I thought, Blow this, if I ever get off this damn island and get home, I’l never ask for anything more – Jesus Christ, this stinks! – and I wouldn’t. I’l not be going to sea again, Jaf, but
you
wil , I’m sure. It’s not for me. I’m the man of the family now. I’l go home and work for Jamrach and keep my dear old ma happy.’

‘Stil ,’ I said, ‘you’l have some great stories.’

He snorted. ‘And no one wil believe—’

‘That we saw dragons feeding on one of their own on an island,’ I said.

‘You got a way with words, Jaf.’

‘How far could it swim?’ I wondered.

‘Pretty far maybe,’ Tim replied. ‘Not that I know,’ and then he sighed. ‘Poor old Skip. Stuck down there. He can’t help being mad.’

I thought of the dragon in the sea, swimming valiantly back west towards its home. I saw its tough bowed legs walking in the water. How far? Hundreds of miles. It was probably dead by now. Al that ancient wildness and power gone. It was just a thing that can die. I saw things die at Jamrach’s. It’s always the same: a light dimming, going out. The only human I knew who’d died was Tim’s dad, and that was just as if an old chair that had stood in the same place for years had suddenly been thrown out.

‘Think it’s dead?’ I said.

‘Maybe.’ He drove dirty water out onto the deck. ‘I have no idea.’

I liked to think of it swimming on for days and days, ever westward, landing on a scrap of land here and there and taking nourishment, eating fish, swimming on and on and on, til it final y hauled itself up onto the shore of its own island.

Home.

‘We shal never see a whale again,’ Dag Aarnasson said.

Nine bel s, the air stil and hot. The ocean had a troubled look.

‘Why do you say so, Dag?’

He grinned. ‘Curse of the dragon. So they say.’

‘I could believe anything out here,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s gone now.’

‘True enough.’ John Copper, soaked in sweat. ‘So, what say we never mention the damn thing again?’

Bil y, aloft, cal ed out. The captain shouted: ‘Al hands ahoy!’ I heard the sound of running feet.

Tim, staring past my shoulder, suddenly had a look of wonder on his face. ‘Oh God, what now?’ he said softly.

I turned.

In the west the dark cloud ceiling had a bloated, boiling look, but was luridly bright in one place. From here, a long, white serpent, swaying graceful y, reached down to the surface of the ocean.

‘What is it?’

‘Waterspout,’ said Dag.

‘Tumble aft!’ Rainey yel ed. ‘Every one of you! Gabriel to helm.’

A forked gash of lightning flickered deep inside the cloud.

‘Jump to, jump to.’ Rainey swept us aft. ‘Bil y, get down!’

It was coming nearer, a lovely whirling dreamy thing dancing across the water with furious speed.

‘Clew him up, clew him up!’ the captain cried.

Strange to have to jump and haul when al you wanted to do was be silent and watch. I’d seen many a wonder since I left home but nothing to match this. It seemed as if it ran at us but stopped a mile or so away to observe. It looked as if the cloud was sucking up the sea through a spinning column of luminous mist.

‘Main tack and-sheet let go!’ shouted Captain Proctor.

A huge brightness was like fire in the sky behind it.

‘Don’t stand gaping, Mr Linver, jump to!’

We got her round. It was on our lee. I had a moment to look: there was a massive commotion at the foot of the spout, a brightening, as if a spectral ship sailed there. Then again, the whole thing was like a silver column resting on a silver plinth. It climbed and climbed through the sky like the beanstalk in the old story, like the world tree joining earth to heaven. How big was it? I don’t know. Monstrous. Everything here was monstrous.

‘Topsail halyards let go!’

Then another came, also from the west, a beautiful oyster-pearl column with what seemed like a pale cloud rising within, and then a third, wider at the top like the funnel of a trumpet and tapering down to a place on the water with the appearance of grey fire. These two joined the first. The three stood swaying, sinuous, spinning gloriously on our lee. So beautiful. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life. I could almost say it was worth it al to see a sight like that. First they danced a stately court dance, three wil owy girls weaving in and out of one another, advancing, retreating, bowing and bending, coming together to part and circle, deft and elegant in every move as nymphs and fairies but stronger than Hercules. And al the while we ran about settling down the topgal ants and tops while the mains snapped and cracked in the growing gale.

‘It’s revenge,’ said Bil y, ‘that’s what it is.’

‘Right enough,’ agreed Felix sagely.

‘Don’t talk shite,’ Tim said. ‘It’s weather.’

We tacked round cautiously. The western sky was bunched and black, ful of inner movement. A distant sound of shril singing came from afar. Captain Proctor’s face was worried, and that worried me. Lightning shuddered in the clouds. Mr Rainey strode about shouting orders, and we nipped about like wraiths, the sky flashing silently every few seconds and lighting our faces, al of us a-shake and agog in the eerie light.

We were making good progress away when the dance played itself out. The three columns stood for a moment, vibrating finely as if col ecting themselves, then, one after the other in perfect harmony, traversed a smooth wide arc and regrouped once more on our leeward side, where with no more ado the youngest – and as it were, the most slenderly girlish – peeled away and ran at us. She came with the roaring of the deluge and unimaginable speed, passing no more than a hundred feet before our stern and raising a wave that rocked us violently and soaked our decks. The wind yanked us round. The sails thundered. A great jag of lightning pierced the west. We struggled with the ship, and as we struggled the second one came, passing after her sister and spinning us round in circles. The decks tilted. The sound of a mountain fal ing was the second spout, and the sound of sea chests and boxes hurtling around below, the crashing of crocks and pots in the cookhouse, the howling in the rigging. And a great fal ing about among us lads.

But it was the third that did for us. While we’d held our own against those two outriders, she’d been gathering, drawing the angry sky into a thick funnel like a gigantic bruised lily flower. The first two ran far away, taking the gale with them.

They left us suddenly stil , breathless and dumb. Then the sky flashed and she was there, with a density to her, an awesome gravity that stopped the blood.

The top was like a trumpet or a chanterel e, a horn of plenty from which the massed clouds of the canopy had burst forth like foam. The stem was a mighty trunk, grey, shot through with quivers of lightning, and she stood upon a shimmering darkness on the sea.

‘Let go al halyards,’ came the cry, but there was no time.

She charged. The wind came before, screaming. We should have got away. We changed course, tacked about like a flying bat, but she mimicked us, played Simon Says, turning as we turned, changing as we changed. You’d have sworn there was a brain in that thing. But they do that. I know it now. I’ve spoken with many a sailor’s seen the same or near enough. They chase, don’t ask me how, but they do. I didn’t know that then though, and its dogged stalking pursuit horrified me in more than a merely physical way. I was fil ed with supernatural dread, as if what came truly was a living monster.

As of course she was.

She chased us no more than a mile ful -out flying before we were hopelessly outrun and she hit. I flew out of myself.

Al was unaccountably silent for a second. I was a thoughtless fear unbodied and unbrained, a fleck of foam on my sleeve, a plummeting spar, a fiery salamander tipping a wave of the sea. I was al these things, but I was not me. Me was gone out somewhere, dreaming it al and watching afar.

Yet I felt it al – the shock of cold wet air knifing down my throat and singeing my lungs, the sharp throb of a panicked heart in my chest, the warm sea a huge shining coil, dragon green, a tongue licking over the rail. Sound crashed in with the sea. A horrible cry of pain, outraged and childish.

Whose? A fiendish roaring, shouting, things fal ing spear-like around me on the deck.

The world rol ed round and I rol ed with it, banged and winded and beaten by the timbers of the deck and the hard outcrop of the tryworks that cracked my knee and sent a fire screaming up into my chest. I fel from there as the world swung al around my head, lurched again, grabbed and hung onto the weather rail.

We were on our beam ends, right over on our side with the waist of the ship awash. I saw Gabriel fly over the helm, and Mr Rainey running backwards on his heels with his arms whirling. His face was stiff, features set in rock, though pure horror stared out of his eyes. I saw Wilson Pride swim out of the cookhouse door, and a tide of rats washed past me on a shivering black stream. Stil screaming, whoever it was, a shocking scream, a stabbing scream, a bad-hurt scream.

Who? I took a mouthful of sea, it went up my nose and burned me. Abel came sliding along the upper deck, shouting: ‘The boats! The boats!’ and I heard the captain’s voice come deep and loud as a foghorn through a mist of spray. A hand grabbed my col ar and hauled me away.

‘Jump to, Jaf!’ Dan said brightly. ‘There’s work to be done,’ and he shoved me along before him. I saw one of our whaleboats carried away and another stove in, smashed to match wood against the gunwale. We lurched along the side of the cookhouse. A great commotion was taking place beneath our feet.

The mainmast broke with a great crack, toppling like a tree, lifted and blown away like a twig by the wind. Up on the listing quarterdeck they were hanging onto the last two whaleboats. That’s not enough, I thought. Dag was there with Tim, grappling with rope, Rainey with blood running down his head, the captain with his face sagging and his eyes bleak, shouting: ‘Aft! Aft!’ into the wind. Simon was cutting the lashing off the other boat. There was a water cask and a musket and a quadrant in theirs, a bundle of hardtack and a tub of boat nails in ours. Henry Cash in soaking shirt and breeches emerged from the aft companionway, as if from a flooded underground cave, pushing Joe Harper’s toolbox up in front of him, shaking water from his eyes. Gabriel jumped down from the rail and grabbed his arms to haul him out, but Henry was for going back down. You could see him drawing in the air to last another minute or so, pushing back the flat dark hair from his forehead and blinking hard. He looked very young suddenly.

Someone stil screamed. Who?

‘Mr Cash!’ Rainey bel owed through the din. ‘Come aft now, that’s enough!’ and the Captain stil cal ing:

‘Aft! Al hands aft!’

‘Where’s Sam?’ Rainey jumped down into the water. ‘Is Skipton up?’

‘Aye, sir,’ said Gabriel.

‘Sam!’ yel ed Rainey. ‘Sam Proffit!’

Yan, wild-eyed, came running with the compasses from the binnacle and flung them in our boat.

‘Cash!’ roared the mate and captain together.

I saw the boys fal ing and stumbling aft along the tilted line of the larboard deck: Skip, freed from the irons, thank God, to take his chances with the rest of us; Abel Roper and Martin Hannah; Felix and Bil y; Joe Harper stil with Simon’s fiddle in his hand. John Copper waded in the flotsam of cookhouse debris and dead rats that nudged the quarterdeck like a school of curious fish. Who was it, screaming stil ? Who was it? The cookhouse wal burst.

Barrels rol ed out on the surge and went floating joyful y away to freedom or bowling down the deck to send everyone a-scatter and knock Joe’s legs from under him, so that the poor fiddle went flying once more and Joe turned a watery somersault over the barrel and landed crash on his face on top of the water. Henry said something to Gabriel and went under once more.

‘Cash!’ Mr Rainey bawled into the wildness. A mad, staring, bloodied man.

‘Keep by the boat, boys,’ Dan told us.

With a crack like nothing more than a broken stick, the mizzenmast snapped near the bottom and fel across the drowned hatch. Gabriel, barefoot, fel upon the mast and began hauling and straining at it. First he tried to lift it, then he tried to rol it, but it wouldn’t budge. Big Martin Hannah, vaguely smiling stil , threw in al his weight, and Skip jumped in to help him, but nothing was moving that mast and Henry was never coming up again. The sea lapped over the transom, poured up the deck and swirled about the submerged companionways, and a col ossal shift took place in the heart of the ship as three or four hundred barrels of oil moved as one with a sound like the end of al days. Sound: the sea, the wild wind, the voices of our crew as the brittle wooden speck we lived on rol ed over like the slippery pole at the fair, and the sky flew up as the swingboat soared.

But it never came down again.

The spars cut water. The boats bounded eagerly. ‘We’re going down!’ John Copper screamed from below, kicking out, swimming. Tim grabbed me, his arms round my shoulders. Wilson Pride fished an axe from the floating soup and hacked at spars, expressionless. Gabriel waded for the fiddle. Dan pushed us about. The whole world broke open.

Parts of the ship went dancing away. Henry Cash was under the water. Henry Cash was dead. Gabriel crying, wading for Simon’s fiddle.