“I got you into this, Anastasia. I can’t sit here while they fight it out.”
“You didn’t get us into this. This started years ago, before you were even born, Erik Karlsefni. No one blames you.”
“I blame me.”
“I don’t. Your intentions were honorable.”
“My intentions were selfish, dear lady. I came here thinking you could love me. For that I would have done anything. For that I traded you and your husband to Polmak. I am to blame.” Behind us there was another explosion and a cry that I knew was not the wizard’s. I broke away from her grip and her startled eyes, running back through the flames, the falling trees, and the heaving ground.
Rosendal was down with an oak tree across his legs. He was holding the shattered remains of the narwhal tusk, a poor weapon for keeping the mighty sword at bay. As I approached, Polmak chopped at Rosendal, hacking through the branches of the oak. Where the blade cut, the world came apart, burning at the edges, gaping to reveal other times, other places.
One rent was dark, an empty vista awaiting some catalyst, some spark of creation. I felt the flask in my hand. Without thinking, I hurled it into the void. A part of Erik Karlsefni for catalyst. The flask sparked and flared red as it entered the black. Blood and bone. Red sea and charcoal sky. There in an instant, the only world I knew how to conjure. My world. There was a splash as the flask struck the sea of blood. Polmak heard it and looked up just before I hit him, then we were both falling through the tear. I saw the sword spin aside, remaining on Rosendal’s side. Then we were through, falling.
A gleam of bone passed to my right and then I struck the blood. I came up retching and sputtering, wiping the foul ichor from my face, spitting to clear it from my mouth. My gut heaved several times, but all that came up was bile and rum. The bitter taste of it in my mouth was preferable to the rancid whale blood. I looked about for Polmak, expecting him to attack me, but there were no shouts, no bolt of lightning or maniacal charge. A moment later, I saw why.
He hung atop the rampart of whale bone, his body torn and pierced in a score of places. The white bones ran with red rivulets of his blood. Where the black robes were ripped aside, his flesh gleamed, pale and impotent. The shadow that he cast upon the waves of red was like a desiccated insect caught in a bizarre web.
The strip of cloth was still tied about my forearm, but it was soaked in blood. I rubbed it, but its magic was gone. They had the sword on their side. Polmak was dead. They’d be all right.
But I’d never see them again.
• • •
I think about them now and then. I wonder if he loves her as much as he did when the forest was green and perfect and new. I wonder if, by loving her, he has rebuilt, replacing the burned stretches with strong young saplings, flowers, and grass. I think he has. I think in their world, there are such things as perfect love, absolute truth, and magic.
I wonder if they ever think of me.
I get by. Though Davies passed on several years ago, the Valiant continues her journeys. We’ve traveled a few new seas together, she and I. Sometimes I take on sport fishermen from Newfoundland, sometimes it’s cargo through the Hudson Strait, but most often it’s rich tourists who want to see a whale up close. I show them the right and the bowhead and the sperm. I’m known as a man who knows their ways, knows where to find them at any given time of the year. Marine biologists pay me to show them where to take their census counts. Environmentalists pay me to take them into the Arctic for core samples and ozone tests. Photographers and writers pay me to show them the most beautiful coastline on Earth.
I still have my nightmares.
I still have that place where bones and blood and a tattered human corpse wait. But every year, the level of that red sea is lower, proof that my current voyages are repaying, in some small measure, the debt I’ve accrued. This year, the blood is no higher than my knees. In time, I’ll find the bottom of that sea, at which time I hope to start removing the bones.
And when there’s nothing left save Polmak’s corpse and me, I’ll find my grandfather’s flask, drink a toast to Rosendal the warrior king and his fair queen, and see if I can’t start building a new legacy in that fertile soil. A garden would be nice. A garden based on a son’s love for his father, based on a man’s love for the sea and everything within it, based on new beginnings and warm memories.
Crocodile Gods
* * *
The saltwater crocodile locked its jaws in the roots of the mangrove and shook with every ounce of its two thousand pounds. Barbara Jo Fletcher huddled naked in the very back of the recess beneath the tree. The roots rattled and cracked, whipped from side to side, spraying her with water, mud, wood chips, and the fetid breath of the crocodile. The giant lizard roared its anger and thrashed, roiling and churning in the water, but the roots were flexible, bending with its rage. If it worked at the roots long enough, it could probably break through, but it didn’t seem smart enough to realize this. Instead, it submerged, looking for a route beneath the roots, digging with its powerful claws, but the bottom here was some sort of volcanic, island bedrock into which the roots had securely anchored themselves over a period of decades, above which the waves had worried at the sandy loam of the bank and the roots of the mangrove tree, eventually excavating the small cavern in which B.J. had sought sanctuary. Aggravated, the croc tried to shove its massive snout through the roots, but the tangled mangrove screen was too dense. The roots had just barely allowed B.J.’s slender frame to slip through. The croc’s advance was arrested at the shoulders, its massive jaws snapping just inches from where B.J. huddled, its breath hot on her face.
She could still see her husband’s blood in the gaps between its teeth.
Finally, it settled down, growling softly like an aggravated but patient Rottweiler, fifteen feet of death lying sublime in the dark water of Utupua’s bay. B.J. allowed herself to breathe... and then finally to cry, sobbing desperately in the mud at the back of the cave. The croc took exception to her breakdown, thrashing again at the roots, roaring and opening its mouth so wide that she could see the white of its throat darkening to grey way down deep in its gullet. She bit her lip until she tasted her own blood, stopping only when her teeth came together. She forced herself to remain quiet, when all she really wanted to do was scream so loud her head would explode. Hysteria was called for. Warranted, in fact.
Damn the croc for not understanding that.
“Please,” she whispered, “just go away...”
It settled down again. Floating in the water. Waiting. Its long, thick tail occasionally flicking languidly. Its eyes were yellow. Unwavering. They were the most evil set of eyes she had ever seen, serpent-like with intensity. How does an animal like that go without blinking? Its teeth gleamed just inches beneath the surface, set in jaws that were an interlocked mesh of nightmare proportions. Darwin’s most successful eating machine.
It waited.
B.J. had time, then, to think about how she’d come to be here and to wonder how she was going to make it back through the water to A Singular Moment of Grace, anchored just forty yards away.
• • •
“Barbie, could you bring up those charts I left out down there?”
She hated that name and typically refused to answer when Eric used it. Today, however, she was willing to cut him a little slack. Today was going to be a very good day. She called out to let him know that she was in the head.
“Well, hurry it up if you can, hon. There’s an island coming up to starboard, and I’d really like to know which one it is.” This said as if they’d be passing the island at light speed, instead of sailing past at a stately eight knots.
She took one last look at the EPT indicator, smiling like an idiot, then gave the pump handle on the head several vigorous strokes. Yeah, she could cut him some slack today.
“And don’t forget to shut the valve on the head!” he added.
Damn, forget to close the valve one time in three years and you have to
hear about it for the rest of your life! She considered withholding her good news, maybe teasing Eric for several hours by telling him that she had a secret. Make him beg her to share it with him. That would teach him. But she knew she couldn’t do it. This was something they’d been waiting for... well, for ever.
B.J. grabbed the charts from the nav table and climbed the stairs to the cockpit, blinking in the bright mid-morning sunshine. The wind had shifted while she’d been below cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Grace was on a run, her main nearly perpendicular to her keel, her ginny bulging out in front like the shirt stretched across a fat man’s belly. Eric would probably want to run up the spinnaker now that she was on deck. She’d played this game with him before. Run up the spinnaker. The wind changes again. Run it down and put the genoa back up. It’s what made sailing fun for him—after all, he was behind the wheel barking orders. It’s what drove her crazy. For all the more speed it got them—and what, were they in some kind of hurry these days?—they might as well just leave one sail up all the time.
The sun was out. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, just that all-encompassing, surreal blue fading into the indigo horizon, Despite the strong tail wind, the sea was fairly calm, curling back from Grace’s bow and rippling down her flanks with just the lightest of spray whenever they broke the crest of a wave. B.J. could see the island, lying low and green at two o’clock.
“Spread those out and see if you can figure out which island that is,” he told her. He pointed to the GPS. “That’s our current location.”
“Happy Father’s Day, Eric,” she said slyly.
“Father’s Day? It’s not—” His eyes went wide as she held out the results of the pregnancy test. He took it from her and held it up for a closer inspection, as if he didn’t trust his eyes at more than a few inches. Then he let out a whoop that made her heart skip.
It really was going to be an incredible day.
• • •
The afternoon waned. The sun touched the horizon and bled into the sea. The crocodile hadn’t moved. Its eyes had narrowed to red-yellow slits beneath armored brows, as if it were dozing, but it never blinked. Not even once. B.J. was reminded of alligators she’d seen at the zoo. Lying unmoving in the sun, their skin the cracked dry landscape of an ancient riverbed, they never looked real to her. She always wondered if they were some sort of plastic prop manufactured in Taiwan for zoos the world over. You could watch them for fifteen or twenty minutes, until boredom sent you to watch the leopard’s frantic pacing or the bears begging for peanuts, but you’d never see anything except maybe a deep shifting of focus in that reptilian eye.
The tide had raised the water level by nearly a foot, crowding B.J. against the roof of the small cave where the air was thick with brine and humus. If the tide continued to rise, she’d drown beneath the mangrove.
Desperate, B.J. sought an escape route up through the mud behind her, despite the fact that this required her to turn her back on the crocodile. Her movement excited it. The croc shoved its head through the tangled roots again and snapped at her. Her hair was caught in its teeth. For a moment, the two of them strained in deadlock, her screaming at the top of her lungs and hanging onto the roots at the back of the cave, the silent croc hauling back with great pounding sweeps if its tail, churning the water so that at times it rose above B.J.’s mouth, which set her to gasping and choking between her screams. Her head was drawn back to the point of snapping her neck. Tendons and ligaments in her shoulders sang with pain. A part of her wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to just let go. One snap of those jaws, her head would be crushed, and it would all be over. It probably wouldn’t even hurt that much.
But then, strands of hair popped from her scalp, and she was suddenly free. She hurled herself to the back wall, burying her face in the mud as the croc struck again. There was a great crunch of jaws closing behind her and a blast of swamp-fetid breath against the back of her neck. She hung there in the mud, whimpering, while the croc scrambled and strained, thrashing in the water, its jaws snapping just inches behind her back. Once. Twice. Three times... then it slunk back to wait again, growling somewhere deep in its gut.
“Go away,” she begged, weeping. Blood ran from her scalp, trickling into her ear. She was only distantly aware of the sensation, of the pounding in her head matching the hammering rhythm of her heart.
The crocodile waited.
She became aware of something in her hand. Extracting it from the roots and the mud, she found she was clutching a strip of palmetto frond. The saw-toothed edge had cut the palm of her hand. Her blood ran a spiral down her wrist and dripped darkly into the sea, but she didn’t feel any pain. Her body and mind were numb from the day’s horrors and the long afternoon in the water. She couldn’t feel a thing. But the palm frond...
How had it come to be here?
She didn’t see how... unless a wave had washed it beneath the mangroves... But her hands had been buried in the mud and the roots when it had cut her.
She shoved her hand back into the mud, clawed several handfuls aside, pulling at the roots. The crocodile stirred menacingly behind her. Reaching into the wall of the cave, her arm buried to the shoulder, she felt the rest of the palm.
Somewhere up there was the surface, on the other side of the mangrove tree, where the palm was growing. She scooped out more mud, tore aside the smaller roots. Several minutes later, a ray of fading sunlight shone down the length of her scratched and bleeding arm.
• • •
Their marriage hadn’t so much been falling apart as it was suffering extreme indifference. Much of the passion that had sustained them in younger years was gone, replaced by Eric’s law firm and her hobby shop. Success had increased the time they spent apart. Lacking children, some essential ingredient in the recipe for a family was missing; they were two separate individuals who happened to share a house and a bank account. Not that they hadn’t tried to have children. For years it was all they thought about. Eventually, however, failure got the best of them. There were specialists to consult, but who had the time? There were more and more dinners apart. More and more nights when one went to bed several hours before the other. They had become strangers.
“We have to do something,” B.J. said one morning at breakfast.
“Oh?” was Eric’s response. There was no pretense that he didn’t understand what she meant.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
“What kind of question is that? Of course I still love you, Barbie!”
He sounded sincere. She wanted to believe him. She wasn’t so sure, however, that she still loved him. If she wasn’t certain, then how could she expect him to be?
“I’m selling the store,” she said.
“What? You’ve spent ten years making that store successful. You can’t sell it!”
“Watch me. I’ll sell the store and use the money to travel. Europe. Egypt maybe. Some time on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean would be nice. You can come with me if you want. We’ll take all the time we need to work on us.” She took a deep breath and delivered her ultimatum. “If you don’t come with me... I’ll expect you to be gone when I get back.”
He simply stared at her, not knowing what to say.
The next morning, she found the classified section of the newspaper waiting on the kitchen table. It was folded back, a listing circled in angry red. 1990 Beneteau 40’ Sailboat. Ocean ready. Fully equipped. Radar. GPS. Yanmar diesel engine. Two sets of sails. $115,000. Weston Marine, San Diego.
Beside the ad, Eric had scrawled, “How much money do you think you’ll get for the store?”
• • •
By the time B.J. had a hole large enough for her shoulders, it was dark. The croc’s eyes were red in the moonlight. Its snout looked like a rotting log floating just at the surface. When B.J. pulled herself up into the hole, the croc went berserk, snapping madly at the mangrove roots and forcing its head into the six inches or so of air space that remained. One of its teeth ripped
a deep and jagged cut in her ankle as she scrambled to freedom. She cried out in pain, but didn’t stop. The splintered ends of broken roots tore at her breasts and gouged her ribs as she slipped up through and out into the moist night air behind the mangrove tree.
She lay there, gasping, sobbing with relief, staring at the star-swathed sky broken by the thick limbs of the mangrove above her. The jungle here was thick, the typical South Pacific island paradise. Palm fronds and bamboo pressed in from all sides. She couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction through the heavy flora. Somewhere beneath her and on the other side of the tree, she could hear the crocodile thrashing about. She should get up and run, but for the moment exhaustion claimed her. She couldn’t move, not even to touch any of the hundreds of places where her body cried out in pain.
And then the crocodile shoved its head up through the hole beside her.
It whipped its head wildly from side to side, widening the hole. Its snout struck her shoulder a numbing blow. That was all it took; she was on her feet. The croc’s forelegs came next, ripping open the soft ground, scrambling for purchase in the moist jungle rot. It snapped at her as she scrambled away, white teeth glistening in the moonlight. B.J. stumbled back, her heart caught in her throat, too terrified to even scream.
She could run, but for all she knew she might be running straight into another one of the monsters. Her torn ankle was aflame with pain now that she’d put weight on it. And she had no idea how fast the crocodile could move on land. In a few seconds it would be free of the hole. For all she knew, it could outrun her. Its night vision was bound to be better than hers. And this was its jungle.
She made her decision quickly. The one thing she was fairly certain crocodiles couldn’t do was climb trees. She hauled herself up into the limbs of the mangrove tree.
• • •
B.J. pointed out the island on the chart. “Utupua,” she told Eric. “Pretty small. Part of the Santa Cruz Islands. Port of entry is Nendo, which—” She tapped another island on the chart. “—is a good 25 miles north.”
Salt Water Tears Page 7