Son of Fortune (2 page)

he sky was beginning to lighten behind him as Aiden stood on the last hill overlooking the Seattle harbor. It would still be a while before the sun actually rose above the trees, but he could see the flat, square shapes of the city streets and the shimmering water of Puget Sound just beyond. He saw fourteen ships anchored. Nine were lumber ships, in various stages of loading. The rest he didn't know. Aiden had never seen the open ocean and knew little about ships, but he did know the ones in Seattle always needed men. There was a gold rush in British Columbia, and it was common for whole crews to desert in Seattle to chase their fortunes. He also knew he had to be careful. Seattle and Portland had long been notorious for shanghaiing—men were fed knockout potions in saloons and dropped through trapdoors only to wake with throbbing heads, far out to sea with the roll of the ocean beneath them, forced into service as deckhands on their way to China. Aiden was determined not to fall prey to anyone. If he did decide on the sea, it would be on his own terms, and those terms, he knew, would be best made in San Francisco. He found his way down to the harbor as the sun rose behind him.

“You have never been to sea.” The captain squinted at him suspiciously and twitched like a fly had landed on his ear. “And so I should hire you as sailor for why?”

“I'm not asking for pay,” Aiden replied. “Just to work my passage.”

“The fare to San Francisco is ten dollars. The pay to a sailor is two dollars a day. It is four, maybe five days to San Francisco. Can you think the numbers?” The captain tapped one finger on the side of his head. He had a thick Swedish accent, so the question sounded almost like a child's rhyme.
Caan
you
tink
da
nuumbers?
So many of these lumber boats that ran along the coast were run by Scandinavians that they were sometimes called the Swedish Navy.

“I can sleep on deck.”

“Go away,” the man said. “You are no use to me.”

“I've worked lumber,” Aiden said.

The captain shrugged. “The lumber is already loaded.”

“I just meant I know hard work,” Aiden pressed.

“I have no hard work. I have a steam engine. I have a winch. I have a crew. We do not sail to China.”

Aiden knew this boat was the only one ready to leave that day. Besides, even to his inexperienced eyes, it looked like a good ship. The decks were clean, the sails were neatly reefed, the wooden railings were recently varnished and the lumber was well stacked and secured. He had some money, almost two hundred dollars. It was a modest fortune but hard won, and he didn't want to spend it unless he had to. Fortune, for most of his life, had been a box of pennies on the shelf above the stove, saved against hard times and emptied far too often. He knew San Francisco was expensive, and he had no idea what sort of work he could find there. He had no formal education and little experience. He could plow a field, skin a wolf, cut down trees and fight. He had read most of Shakespeare, all of Dickens and the
Atlas
of
the
World,
but he knew that didn't count for much.

“I'll give you five dollars' fare for passage, and sleep on the deck,” Aiden offered.

“Your face was in a fight,” the captain said, flicking a disapproving hand at Aiden's bruises. “It looks like trouble.”

“Well, it never looked all that good to start with.”

The captain twitched in what might have been a laugh. “Did you win?”

“I'm here, aren't I?”

“What is this?” He tipped his prickly chin at the bundle that Aiden carried. “A gun?”

The bundle was long and narrow, wrapped in oiled cloth and tied securely with rough twine.

“Bow and arrows,” Aiden answered.

“You are not the Indian.”

“No,” Aiden said simply. He wasn't sure what he looked like these days, but he was pretty sure he didn't look Indian.

“Where do you come from?”

“Logging camp up north.”

“Before that?” the captain pressed suspiciously.

“Kansas mostly, then west. I came out with a wagon train.” The facts were true, though they left out a lot. His parents had been godforsaken bog Irish who had escaped famine in the old country as indentured servants, their passage to Virginia paid for with nine years of work: the regular seven, plus two for the children they brought along—his two older brothers. After the indenture was completed, the family had worked in coal mines and rock quarries, saved every penny and bought land of their own. But that land turned out to be a barren plot of desperate Kansas, where drought and blizzard and fire made the plagues of Egypt seem like sniffles and hangnails. That land had ultimately killed most of them. A pile of woeful history, he thought, that mattered to no one.

“What is your name?”

“Aiden…Madison, sir,” he said, thinking only now that he ought not use his real name. He did not imagine himself a very grand outlaw and doubted a manhunt in Seattle would chase him very far, but his real name—Aiden Lynch—might be tainted for a while in local parts, and a lumber ship on regular runs might hear it. His sister's name had been Maddy, so Madison would be easy to remember.

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” Aiden lied, adding on three years. He was tall and still lanky, but months of plentiful food and hard work in the logging camp had given him some muscle. His face, angular and roughened by a life outdoors, had never really looked boyish, but a close inspection would betray little need yet for shaving.

The captain frowned but didn't challenge him.

“Are you a good shot with this bow and arrow?”

“Yes,” Aiden said evenly.

“What do you know about polar bears?” the captain asked abruptly.

“Um…they live in the Arctic,” Aiden replied, quickly trying to switch his brain around. “They can weigh six hundred pounds and are solitary animals. They eat seals, which they hunt from ice floes—”

“Are you being smart?” the captain snapped.

“No, sir.” Aiden flushed with confusion. Hadn't the man just asked him? Wasn't he just answering? “I had a book,” he explained. “It told about all the regions of the world and their native peoples and animals and so on.” The
Atlas
of
the
World
had been nightly reading for most of his life, and the only thing that had kept him and his little sister, Maddy, going through the desperate last winter. He could call up most pages entirely by memory.

“So I could ask what do you know about headhunters or yaks and you would tell me that too?”

“Not yaks, sir,” Aiden said. He suspected the man was now teasing him but decided to play it back straight. “They were mentioned only briefly, as Mongolia is still a largely unknown region,” he added. “Though I could probably build a yurt if I had to.”

“Ha!” The captain jerked his head back once, overly quick like an amateur sword swallower. He seemed too young to be captain of a ship, Aiden thought. No more than thirty, though he did have a beleaguered air of experience about him. He was shorter than Aiden, and stockier. He looked like he might once have been athletic, but now had the slight softness that came from spending long periods of time on a small ship with a steam engine, a winch and a crew.

“Ha! All right, then, Mr. Atlas of the World. So you know all about polar bears! Are you afraid of polar bears?”

“I've never seen one, sir.”

“Well, think! Think!” It came out
Tink! Tink!
and Aiden, his nerves already on edge, had to work hard not to laugh. “Use your imagine! It's a bear!” He lunged at Aiden in bear pose, with curled finger-claws and a toothy snarl. Two of the other sailors working on deck briefly looked up but didn't seem to think their captain's behavior all that peculiar. Aiden took some hint from that. Crazy people were in charge of lots of things in the world, he had learned, so you just had to go along with them.

“Well, if I saw one in the wild, I suppose there wouldn't be much I could do,” he said. “I suppose it would kill me regardless, if it wanted to, so being afraid wouldn't matter much either way.” He gave a quick glance around the deck, suddenly wary that there might actually be polar bears on the loose. “But if I saw one anywhere else, it would probably be in a cage.” He shrugged. “So I'd be all right.”

“Yes!” The captain jerked his head again in his odd way of maybe laughing. He actually had a kind face, Aiden noticed, once you got used to the twitches.

“These are in the cage.” He grew still and looked at Aiden with a sudden piercing concentration. “See. Here. I have bears. For a rich man's zoo in San Francisco. Special order from Alaska. We go all the way for the special trip. It is the long trip and now mother bear is sick. We give the fish but she will not eat. My men try to kill the seals but they are not hunters. One time when they do shoot the seal, God knows by what luck, it swims away before we catch it. So here you come now with the Indian bow.” He gave one tiny twitch, then went on. “This morning when we leave the harbor, we will pass by a little island full of seals. So you will put string on your arrow like the harpoon, yes? And so you can shoot the seal and pull it in.” He mimed this vigorously, tugging an invisible rope hand over hand. “And then you feed the bears.”

“Uh, sure,” Aiden said. He doubted the string-and-arrow plan would work, but he certainly wasn't going to talk himself out of an opportunity.

“Keep the bears alive and you have free passage. Ten dollars you pay if they die. Yes?”

“Five dollars if they die,” Aiden countered. “Though I promise I will devote myself.”

The captain shrugged. “
Ja,
all right. But no coffee! Only food, and you eat last.”

“Fine,” Aiden agreed. He liked coffee, but he could go without. He held out his hand, but the captain just turned away and shouted to the deckhands in Swedish. Three of them began hauling in lines and preparing to cast off. The fourth, a small, bowlegged man, muttered something that sounded, even in the unknown language, to be more grumbling than a ship captain usually heard. But the captain didn't react. The bowlegged man was at least fifty and could have been much older—his weathered skin and rough gray beard made it hard to tell. His watery eyes were the palest blue Aiden had ever seen.