Son of Fortune (5 page)

The bears were sound asleep, snoring in oblivious bliss. The ship creaked gently. He could smell the rich aroma of frying potatoes and hear the easy cadence of Swedish conversation from the deck above. In the main salon, the men were just sitting down for a meal. They had left a place for him. Evening came early in January in this northern latitude, and though it was only about four-thirty, the sun was already low, slanting sharp gold beams through the small portholes. It was all so totally foreign, yet so easy and comfortable.

After supper, Captain Neils went to his tiny cabin to update the ship's log, while the other men, like all sailors eager to take advantage of sleep when it was possible, took to their bunks. As long as the weather stayed fair, they would keep only one man at the helm throughout the night, each taking a two-hour watch. Aiden went up on deck and sat on a pile of lumber, watching his first sunset at sea. The clouds slid through ripples of gold and crimson, with fringes of purple. A hundred shades of blue melted gradually down through the sky. The ocean was the color of black plums ripened to bursting.

He heard a noise and looked up to see Fish approaching. He carried a bottle and two glasses and sat down beside Aiden. He pulled the cork from the bottle and poured two small drinks. A dense aroma—spicy and slightly medicinal—floated up. The liquor was smooth and scouring at the same time and tasted very foreign. Aiden gasped and managed not to choke. He leaned back on the pile of wood. The fresh smell of lumber made him feel strangely sad. That part of his life was over now. It was a rough, harsh life, but there was a lot of good about it too. Logging was challenging and dangerous, but at the end of every day he always felt satisfied. And there were few decisions to make, nothing to wonder about. Eat this, sleep here, chop down this tree.

“Here—a present for you.” Fish pressed something smooth and sharp into Aiden's hand. It was a glossy white triangle, nothing like a stone, though closest to a stone, the size of a playing card, smooth on one edge, jagged on the other two.

“Shark tooth. It was stuck in the sole of your boot.”

The tooth was surprisingly heavy and had an odd prehistoric elegance. Aiden found a bit of leather boot sole caught between two of the tiny saw points. He pried it free and rolled it between his fingers. It was like mitten fuzz, only rubbery and dense. His hands began to tremble. Fish said nothing but poured them both another drink. The clear, pungent liquor was thicker than water but less so than blood. Still, there was the harsh iron smell to it that reminded him of blood. Or maybe everything now made him think of blood. Would he ever again be free of blood? “What is it?”

“It's called aquavit—water of life.”

“Then, to life,” Aiden said. They drank, then were silent for a few minutes, watching the sun sink into the water like a single burning coal.

“Why did you go in the water for me?” Fish asked quietly.

Aiden shrugged. “I know how to swim. It seemed like you didn't.”

“I don't,” Fish confessed. “Sailors almost never do, unless they sail the tropics. But the shark could still have been near.”

“I figured it was busy eating already. Figured I had a little time. I wouldn't have gone in otherwise. So you know.”

“No. That's good to know.”

“No offense.”

“No.”

“I didn't think about the water being so cold,” Aiden said.

“It was awfully cold.”

“Just—it wasn't a good-deed kind of thing. I only went in because I was pretty sure I would come out again.”

Fish reached for the bottle and poured another ounce out in each glass.

“I figured the odds were pretty good for me living,” Aiden went on. “If you lived too, so much the better. But if it came down to just one of us, me or you, well, it wouldn't be me all drowned or in the belly of that shark right now.”

“That's reasonable.”

“It wasn't a question of who ought to live or not, or why or why not,” Aiden went on. The strange Swedish liquor, plus the piled-up shock of the past few days, was making him strangely talkative in a way he somehow couldn't stop. “Only what could I probably do at the time with the way things were.”

Fish looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Well, whatever reasoning you like, I am glad to be topside of the sea and outside that shark.” He raised his glass and clinked Aiden's, and they both tossed back the water of life. They watched the last red arc of the sun vanish into the sapphire sea. Fish looked at the shark tooth that Aiden was absently rubbing. “Sven the Ancient can drill a hole in that if you like,” he said. “So you can wear it around your neck. Maybe even scrimshaw on it.”

“Thanks, but I think I've had teeth close to my skin enough for now,” Aiden said. He pulled out the little leather pouch he wore around his neck. “I have a place for it.” He did not look at the other tokens already there—the memories they held were still too sharp. The tooth was almost too big to fit.

“Is that an Indian thing?” Fish asked.

“Yes,” Aiden said, not offering more explanation. If his luck was strong, Tupic might be through the mountains by now, on his way back to his tribe with the smallpox vaccine. Aiden pulled the strings closed, and the weight of his new life tugged gently against the back of his neck.

he sweetness of that first day at sea was gone by morning, with a storm that terrified Aiden, though it seemed only to slightly annoy the experienced crew. Sven the Ancient just cursed a little more as he fried the eggs and boiled the coffee, his bony legs braced casually against the galley cupboards. Aiden huddled in the bunk belowdecks. He was halfway between trying not to die and hoping with all his might that he would, and soon. The ship pitched and groaned. The sky churned and the sea heaved. He lay twitching and curled in a ball. Seasickness was a unique and disconcerting ailment, especially bad because it seemed ridiculous and weak. This was not the smashing bullet of war. This was not the sword's deadly stab through the haphazard organs that turned out to matter so terribly much. It was not the gouge and tear of wild animals or the smash of an enemy's club. It was not influenza that killed half a town in one sweep. It was not smallpox, lockjaw, ague, rabies, cholera, typhoid, pneumonia or any of the vicious maladies of awful everyday life. Seasickness was relentless and dull as bad wallpaper. It was just stupid. But horribly, inescapably, nauseatingly stupid. Aiden felt like someone had turned his body inside out, scooped up his guts with a spoon, boiled his bones into jelly, sprinkled it all with poison and hung him out on the fence for coyote bait. Fish dragged him up on deck a few times to gulp at the fresh air, but the sight of the heaving gray waves just made Aiden worse. At least he learned to throw up over the downwind side of the ship. Finally, by evening, the seas eased and he found he could sit up on deck without fear of vomit boiling up and pushing his eyeballs out of his head.

“The barometer has steadied out,” Fish said. “So the roughest may be over with.”

Aiden splayed his jelly bones out on the deck and stared pathetically at the gathering stars. He had never thought in a million years that he would miss the plains of Kansas, but right now their absolute immobility was very enticing.

The next couple of days were milder, though the sky remained gray and drizzly and the sea sloppy. Aiden could not manage platefuls of fried potatoes and pickled fish, but neither was he begging for death. He mostly sat for hours on the piled timber, just watching the ocean. He did spend a few hours each day with the polar bears, playing with the cubs and coaxing the mother to eat. She was accepting fish now, as the gorge on seal meat had apparently wakened an appetite, but she still sniffed each morsel with suspicion and made her displeasure clear, swatting at the fish with a dismissive huff and peeling her lips back before taking it in her teeth.

The last day of the trip, as they sailed into San Francisco Bay, was beautiful and calm. The sky was a clear, deep, cloudless blue.

“Lucky you to see it so,” Captain Neils said. “I sail here twice a month since I am ten years old and have seen blue sky maybe a dozen times. Do you know, for a hundred years men sailed by this bay and never knew it was here? And always ships are looking for good harbor. But for a hundred years they passed it by. Paradise just there—but always in the fog.”

Aiden had heard about San Francisco, but nothing could have prepared him for the first real sight of it. It looked like a storybook kingdom. Fine wooden houses marched up the hills in every direction, trimmed with what looked like wooden lace, and all with glass windows! Not just one or two windows, but three or four on each floor—and each one with six or eight panes of glass! He hadn't seen a house with so many glass windows since he was seven years old on the plantation in Virginia. His sod house on the prairie had oiled paper or scraped hides covering the windows. The bunkhouses in the logging camp simply had wooden shutters and canvas flaps.

They dropped the sails as they entered the bay and chugged along with the steam engine. There were hundreds of boats here, oceangoing ships and coastal ferries, fishing boats of every size and kind. There were dozens of lumber ships like their own, hauling timber for the vast appetite of this booming city. As they neared the wharf, Aiden saw hundreds of people milling about, most turned out in what seemed like Sunday best. The women wore coats with fur-trimmed collars; the men were in fine suits and hats. Rows of wagons, glossy carriages and buggies were lined up on the road, some with coachmen in livery.

“Do people always come out to the dock like this?” Aiden asked.

“Oh yes,” Captain Neils said. “But many more today, for they've come to see the bears.” There was more than a hint of pride in his voice.

“Our bears?”

“What others?”

“How do they know?”

“Have you never heard of a telegraph?”

“Yes, of course.”

The telegraph had changed the world, connecting both sides of the country, so that messages that used to take months to travel by ship and horse now flew through the air in minutes.

“Ship news is important in San Francisco,” Fish explained as his brother steered them through the channel markers. “There are stations along the coast that watch for the ships and wire the news ahead. Every cargo means something to buy and sell, and the merchants want to know what's on the way. I suspect Mr. Worthington's bears have been talk for some weeks now, as there's precious little novelty this time of year,” he said as he readied the mooring lines.

Captain Neils turned to Aiden. “Can you get the cubs out of the cage?”

“I thought we were going to winch the whole cage up through the hatch.”

“Look at all the people!” Captain Neils tipped his bristly chin toward the crowd. “It's plenty of money Mr. Worthington has paid. I suspect he'd appreciate a bit of a show. Maybe you could walk them out on the leash, show them off. There's a bucket of fish,” he said casually, as if the bucket had just appeared out of thin air. “You can make them dance, eh?”

“Shall I tie bows around their necks too?” Aiden asked.

“Do you have some?” The captain's face twitched and cracked briefly in what passed for a smile.

“You should have seen when the kangaroos arrived!” Fish whispered. The crew began tossing mooring lines to the dock, and Aiden went below to arrange the show. In the four days he had cared for her, the mother bear had become somewhat used to him and no longer charged the bars when he approached. A full belly also helped her disposition, so it was relatively easy to coax the docile cubs out. Aiden slipped a bit of rope around each fuzzy neck, slid the door open just a foot and snuck them quickly out of the cage. There were of course no ribbons or bows to be found. He thought about borrowing a couple of the captain's bright red kneesocks—that would serve him right!

Bear cubs were not built for ship ladders. They were fat and wiggly, like sacks of wet grain that had come alive. Aiden was sweating by the time he got them up on deck. He led them to the opening at the top of the gangplank, and there was a swell of oohs and aahs from the excited crowd.

Aiden picked a fish out of the bucket and held it up. The cubs twitched their noses eagerly. The boy cub stood up and pawed the air, but his sister promptly swatted him away and took the treat. The crowd laughed. Many of them were rich, Aiden thought, dressed in fine shoes and clothing. His mother had been an expert seamstress, and he knew she would have needed twenty hours to produce the ruffles and trims on some of these dresses. And people certainly wouldn't be wearing their finest clothes to the docks in daytime, so these would be their second-best or even ordinary clothes—yet each outfit probably cost a month's pay for a lumberjack. For a farmer, they might as well be woven of moonbeams. But even the poor people didn't look so bad off. They all had coats and they all wore shoes. What kind of place was this, he thought with amazement, where the poor could turn out to look at bears in the middle of the day? Wouldn't they be beaten for missing work? Wouldn't their children go hungry for the lost pay?

The girl cub flounced impatiently and clawed gently at Aiden's leg. Her brother just sat on his haunches and surveyed the crowd with the calm aloofness of a raja who accepted adulation as his natural right. Aiden hated having so many people looking at him. He took a deep breath, ducked his head and led his charges down the gangplank.

Children pushed to the front of the crowd and squealed, but even the top-hatted men didn't conceal their excitement. When Aiden got the cubs down to the dock, the crowd erupted in applause. Both cubs cowered at the noise. They yelped and darted about, tangling their leashes as they tried to hide behind his legs. Aiden squatted down and scooped an arm around each one and held them close, trying to mimic the reassuring noises he had heard their mother make. They calmed down and began to lick his face. A few women squealed in delight, and Aiden wished he could slip through the cracks in the dock.

Then the crowd parted and a young man appeared. He looked fair enough to be fifteen, yet he walked with the command of a judge. People fluttered out of the way as he passed, then fell in a wake behind him, like blossoms in a current of air. Even the cubs noticed him. Aiden had no idea what clothes were in fashion, but somehow he knew these were perfect. His coat flowed around him, and the trousers appeared to change shape to accommodate his stride. The leather boots were closely cut and supple as butter.

The man-boy was beautiful, Aiden thought—not like a girl was beautiful, but just because there wasn't a better word for what he was. It wasn't a feminine beauty, but like an ancient Greek or Roman statue's. His features were strong and even, his eyes wide and alert, his hair a thick, lustrous dark blond, perfectly cut and never touched in nervousness. Just behind him, like a royal court, were four little girls—sisters, Aiden guessed, for their similar beauty—plus assorted servants, coachmen and porters and two wagon drivers steering a flatbed cart pulled by a team of draft horses. The young man stopped well out of clawing range and clasped his hands behind his back.

“What lovely bears!” he said. “My father will be very pleased. He regrets he could not be here to welcome them personally, but I thank you, sir, for their excellent care!” He nodded slightly in what was neither a bow nor a dismissal but a graceful acknowledgment of a special effort by an obvious inferior. Aiden couldn't think of what to say, so he simply held out the leashes. The young man stepped back.