The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  They were hungry. Ben watched, thinking not of Jan Dyckman nor of justice nor of the long year ending; thinking only that quiet must presently arrive when this was over, and that in his home country it would be spring. The young apple tree by the kitchen garden—might that be in bloom this morning, and Reuben there to see it? The water briefly boiled in muddy red, and sent its diminishing ripples to infinity, and was still.

  Ledyard was tugging at his hand, which could now release its grip on the rail, and urgently shoving something into it—the handle of Ben’s knife. “Look to yourself—he’s coming!”

  Daniel Shawn was framed in the cabin doorway, blankly staring. He could certainly see them all—Joey and Ledyard now by the open forward hatch, Dummy squatting in the shadow of the mainmast cherishing his dying companion, Ben naked at the rail, the knife his father gave him unsheathed and brilliant in the sun. Shawn closed the cabin door and came a step away from it. He remembered; drew out the key from under his shirt and turned his back on all of them, carefully locking the cabin. Then he was advancing, astonishment giving way to some partial understanding, savage and cold. He glanced aloft.

  Ben did so too, having almost forgotten Manuel. Manuel was frozen at the masthead, gazing down. Manuel must have seen it all. Ben guessed that not even a roar from Shawn would bring him down at this moment, and Ben was aware of having laughed.

  “Well?” Shawn came forward another step or two. “Well? What’s this disorder, and thou naked and shameless?”

  “Why,” said Ben, “this is the garment and shield I wore when I came into the world, as they say, and one day I’ll die wearing it, maybe not today. It’s my intention to live a long while, after this ketch is returned to Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury.”

  “Mutiny,” said Shawn quietly. His head canted to one side, a danger sign. He had stood so, without a word, when the body of Cornelius Barentsz was cut in quarters and tossed to the sharks. Then as now, the copper farthing had appeared in his left hand, twisting and sparkling. It caught the sun this morning, sending lances of sharp light at Ben’s eyes, and Ben turned his knife until it shot the same small cruel messages to Shawn, who winced and briefly turned his face away. “Judah!”

  “He can’t run any more of your errands. He’s sharks’ meat, five minutes past. Don’t be calling the others and disturbing their breakfast.”

  “This from you.… Ben, you shall have part of your wish. You shall go in the cabin, immediate. I order you to go there, and here is the key.” He took it from under his shirt and tossed it across the deck.

  Ben made no motion for it, watching its fall with the corner of his eye. “Joey,” he said, “take that key and open the cabin. Tell Captain Jenks that if fortune favors me I’ll come to him presently with the key to his leg irons. Tell him, Joey, I am hoping to redeem a year of my life that in folly and weakness I threw away. Tell him that, and return here at once to me.”

  The key had fallen near to Ben. Joey Mills did not need to pass close to Shawn in order to retrieve it. Small, old and terrified, he was sidling for it when Shawn bellowed: “Joey Mills, do you take orders from a bare-naked child and not from your captain?”

  Mills leaped and fluttered like a hurt sparrow. But he had the key, and scuttled to larboard, intending a quick rush aft along by the larboard rail as far from Shawn as he could get. Shawn was wearing no pistols, only his short knife. Ben said: “He won’t harm you, Joey. His business is with me, not with you. If he tries to stop you, Ledyard and I will both help you.”

  “Dummy!” Shawn called that name not in command but in pleading. But even as he spoke, Dummy sobbed once, wetly and loudly, and shambled away up to the bow. Ben glimpsed the monkey’s head flopping limp, and the spidery arms. She must have died, and Dummy must have known the moment—yet up there at the bow Dummy was still trying to support her head and make it live.

  “Shawn, you spoke of these men as phantoms. Only some of them are that. I think your Judah Marsh was a phantom, and so likely he made a thin meal for the fish. Mills there is a man, and Matthew Ledyard, and Dummy. Men are creatures you’ve never understood, never. I can see that now. Myself, I begin, just a little, to understand them.… Joey has opened the cabin. Needn’t trouble to look behind you. Take my word for it, and now give me that other key.”

  Shawn did not look behind him. He drew his own knife, slowly, without threat, and leaned his back against the mainmast. “Compassed about.… Ben—why, why? Why must it be so?… And if I do not give you that other key?”

  “Then I must take it.”

  “With that knife. You’ll use that knife against the man who would have given you the key to a whole new world.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were we not to go there together, Ben?”

  “Certainly I dreamed that once myself, before Jan Dyckman was found dying in a dirty alley. And afterwards too, until I learned why he had to lie there.”

  “Did I not give you the vision?”

  “Yes.”

  “And see it strike fire in you?”

  “Yes.”

  “As I never saw it in any other.… Have I not been kind?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forbearing too? Forgiving a thousand things I’d never take from any other man?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you will use the knife. Have we not spoke together a thousand times like friends? Haven’t I made you laugh?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you will use it.… Why?”

  “Shawn, do you think I could walk into Heaven across the flesh of Jan Dyckman? Dyckman and others—how many? The men of the Schouven—how many, Shawn? And how many more, before we ever saw the new lands?”

  “Does it matter? The vision is greater than the man.”

  “Nay, I think not, but even let that be so if you wish. But if you follow the vision through blood and deceit, in mad denial of what your senses tell you, then you lose it. Maybe the vision is there yet, but you’re mired down in your own folly. You’re lost.… Shawn, you’re truly compassed about, as you say.” Ben raised his voice, knowing that in this windless air it must reach into the open cabin, if Jenks was in any condition to hear it. “Mills and Ledyard and Dummy are with me. Manuel won’t fight for you. If Jack or Tom Ball would come on deck, they must pass my friends there at the hatch. I don’t wish to fight you, Shawn, nor to harm you. We were friends. I know what you gave me and I value it. But you’re lost. You’re mired, and I will not go down with you. Now hear the alternatives. If you—”

  “I see,” said Shawn, perhaps to himself. “I see you will not go with me, the way I should have known it all the while.”

  “Shawn”—Ben understood that he himself was pleading—“Shawn, there are those who love me, or there were. My life is more to them than ever it was to you. You never knew me. You never saw me. You saw the image of a follower, and that you may have loved, but me you never saw. Now then—my life is all I own. I’m naked in every way. And if you’d take that from me I’ll fight you to the last breath, and I’ll win. Now hear the alternatives. Throw your knife away and give me that other key. Then, sir, I will not release Captain Jenks until he gives me his word that he will take you unharmed to Boston.”

  “To man’s justice!” said Shawn, and laughed. “No hearing. The short gasp on the tricing line and all vision dead!”

  “Men know little enough about justice, that’s true. And so I’ll give you another alternative. If you will yield, I’ll even set you free in a boat when we raise the Cape—as you could have done for me a year ago when I told you plain I’d have no part of your venture.”

  In dark astonishment, Shawn appeared to be considering that a while. His gaze wandered over the deck. Certainly he would be understanding the open cabin behind him, and whatever Mills and Ledyard were doing at the hatch—Ben could not turn his head t
o look—and Dummy up there at the bow, shut away in a private world of grief. “Your friend Peter Jenks would never be consenting to such a thing at all.”

  “He would. His first duty is to Mr. Kenny and to the Artemis. To carry out that duty he must be free of the leg irons. If I say he cannot be free until he gives me his word to let you go, he will give it, and he will keep his word.”

  “He will not. I know his kind.”

  “You know nothing of him. You see all men, including me, through your fog of ambition and vanity—and visions.… Well, a third alternative—nay, I can’t put that in words.”

  “To turn this knife against myself?” Shawn’s eyes were all black. The copper farthing had been put away. He was shifting lightly from one foot to the other. Ben caught some blurred noise from the forward companionway, but could not turn to look. “I might even do it, Beneen, now that’s no lie—if so be the voyage is ended, and wouldn’t it be the lightest demand your tender heart has made of me? But Mother of God, I wonder a little what you can do with the pretty ketch, and I not here. Will you look to the northeast?”

  Ben did so, a glance not so long as a heartbeat, taking in all that part of the horizon. The faint smudge had grown to a rolling wall of black, far away, maybe not so far. No least breath stirred here aboard or over the near waters still ardent under the sun, but the pressure of storm ached in Ben’s eardrums, and over yonder, where the advancing shadow fell, the water, no longer beaten gold, wavered in a troubled darkness. So much Ben discovered in less than a heartbeat, and Shawn chose that moment to leap for him.

  The knife was up and aiming for Ben’s heart—flashing, perilous enough, intending death, but not shrewdly held as Judah Marsh would have held it, in the flat of the hand, circling and slicing.

  To Ben the man’s action seemed almost slow; clumsy, weary. He was able with amazing ease to catch the wrist of Shawn’s right hand and force it away. His own was seized in the same moment, the blade only inches from Shawn’s corded throat. Then indeed a slowness settled over them, a long straining, a silent tension like that of the nearing squall—it must break sometime, maybe not for a long while. Ben became a fighting machine, the power in his left arm sufficient to hold destruction away, the power in his right sufficient to maintain the ultimate threat, but—because of the quivering effort in Shawn’s bent arm and because of a tortured reluctance in himself—he was not quite able to fulfill the threat, not quite able to drive the point the two or three inches more down into the soft pulsing spot in Shawn’s neck where the life could drain away.

  Locked so and waiting, Ben heard commotion break loose behind him. A yell, a shot, a tramp of loud struggling feet, a shrill hollow squeal that could only be French Jack’s war cry, and then a different kind of yell from him—higher and thinner, maybe a scream of pain. Ben thought he heard some strangled cursing in Ledyard’s voice. No way to learn about it. Nothing to do but hold the fighting machine to its cold purpose until it should win through or take a knife in the back.

  It seemed to Ben that he knew, before it happened, everything that Shawn would try to do. Shawn shifted his feet, seeking to bring his boot down on Ben’s bare foot. The foot was not there, and Shawn nearly lost his balance, regaining it with a groan of stormy breath—but Ben could still breathe deeply, evenly. After that, he knew, Shawn would not dare to try raising a knee to foul him. I am a little taller after all.…

  In chill calculation, the fighting machine forced Shawn aft by gradual steps. Behind Ben the noise went on, a thrashing and a snarling. Two men must be rolling about all over the forward deck—which two? Not Joey Mills—surely Mills could do nothing with bare hands against Jack or Tom Ball. It ought to be possible to turn about in this hideous embrace, at least long enough to see—

  Ben jerked his right arm backward, hoping to throw Shawn off balance or at least to turn him.

  It turned him, but in the swirling and writhing readjustment Shawn’s knife found Ben’s forehead and drew a hot line downward. Ben heaved at it long enough to save his eye. It returned, for that instant inexorable, gouging Ben’s cheek in a lingering kiss of fury to the edge of the jaw. Then Ben’s left hand could drive it away, and Shawn was down on his knees and his face was turning brilliant red. But that’s my blood on him. Shawn was staring upward. “The color,” he said. He was staring directly into Ben’s eyes. “The color of the western sea.” And his knife clattered on the deck.

  Yet he was up on his feet once more, still pressing Ben’s knife away, even forcing it downward a little, and the motionless deadlock continued. Weaponless and gasping, knowing defeat, Shawn would not yield. “It’s over,” Ben said. “Can’t you understand?” He would not yield.

  Ben’s left eye clouded with blood from his forehead. The right eye could discover all things in brilliant detail. A small gray heap by the open hatch—Joey Mills, shot in the forehead. Up near the bow, Ledyard and Tom Ball in a tangle of tom clothes and flailing arms; Ledyard had him by the ears, beating his round head against the planks, and Ledyard’s marred face was a great gash of grin. Nearer, a redheaded thing crawled aft inch by inch, holding a pistol, trailing a leg broken between knee and ankle. This thing should have been creeping and suffering in sunlight, but in the sky beyond it a blackness had done away with the sun, while over Ben’s head had begun a dubious mutter of troubled canvas.

  And only three or four feet away—Dummy, his head swaying from side to side on the blunt neck, moaning, unable to advance, or understand, or take part. Ben could understand that somehow. Dummy had two gods now, and the gods were destroying one another, and the world had fallen to bits while he clutched dead love in his tremendous arms.

  Ben could not understand how there should again be huge noise behind him, now that he was facing forward and could see them all with his one unclouded eye, the living and the dead. Manuel? Never. The noise was metallic, a crashing jangle, and the repeated thud of some heavy object striking on the deck. He yelled: “God damn you, Shawn, give over!” Shawn might not have heard that. Shawn was staring fixedly over Ben’s shoulder. Except for the grip on Ben’s right wrist he was certainly relaxing, weakening fast. It was possible to swing him around again, and look aft, and understand.

  With shackled ankles the giant could move in a horrible and careful hopping, the chain jerking behind him. He carried in his hand the three-foot plank that he had torn loose from the floor nails and all. His broad face was one whitened granite calm. Clear of the cabin doorway, he swayed for a time without support, observing—the wrathful sky, the full spread of sail fitfully trembling and stammering under the first warning gusts, the human deeds completed and not completed. His little blue eyes brilliant with all the pure cold of northern ice, he raised the plank, and balanced it, and hurled it.

  But French Jack rolled his crawling body just clear of it, and leveled his pistol with some care. It crashed in the same moment that Jenks flung himself forward, and Jenks struck the deck still a yard or two from his enemy, blood seeping from his leg above the iron band. Jenks could crawl too. They would meet in a moment. The thunder of the shot had galvanized Shawn into a last effort, and Ben could watch no more, but he knew that the other thunder following was not from any human source.

  That was in the sails, a roar of stricken canvas above a deck gone mad. Out of the torn sky the northeast wind with a booming outrage of rain fell upon Artemis, slapping her over on her beam ends. The twisted knots of human warfare rolled tight against the larboard rail, inches away from a suddenly boiling sea.

  Pressed down in that inferno, his face cold, and still, and streaming with the flood of rain, Shawn forced Ben upward away from him, until his right hand could join his left in grasping Ben’s right hand. Shawn was trying to speak above the uproar; Ben could not hear him. Ben felt the agonized living shudder of Artemis as a thing within himself, and then he saw, not believing it, that his knife had gone down, its blade hidden in the green
cloth, buried to the hilt. Ben could not know, then or in all his life, whether Shawn’s own hands had drawn the blade in upon himself, or whether this had been done by the wrenching struggle of Artemis in her extremity, or whether Ben’s own right hand had sent it down and so blotted out in one motion all the hope and the madness, the cruelty, the blindness and the radiant visions, and the pain.

  Chapter Four

  “In such a gale, and my father shot down, and no one at the helm?”

  “Ay, but she did rise, Charity. I felt her bear up against it slow and brave, and I trusted her. Call it a fancy or a vain thought, but surely any vessel will carry under her ribs some part of the spirit of the men who made her, a spirit of her own. Yes, she answered that blow, and no one at the helm. It had caught her flat-aback, but some-way, rising against it, she brought herself clear into the eye of the wind. There she hung in irons a moment, only a moment, found herself, paid off, heeled over to starboard and scudded away to the southwest before it, steady as an arrow. No one at the helm.”

  “Do you notice, Charity?—he speaks louder, and plain, my little brother. That will be from answering back to the winds, and I think they will never be so big my little brother can’t shout ’em down.”

  “They’ve shouted me down many a time and will again. Well, when she found her way like that, of course we were all flung to starboard too. I cannot remember taking that key from Shawn’s body. I must have done it during that moment while she hung in the wind’s eye, for I had it in my teeth when I reached your father, and he helped me drag him to the mainmast where he could brace himself. He knew me and spoke to me. He held my knife for me while I unlocked the irons—I remember seeing it in his hand, and the rain was washing it clean.”