Journey of the Pale Bear

by Susan Fletcher

  It was a dangerous word, a word I craved to hear, and yet . . . Men used it carelessly. They used it to mean merely boy.

  But the sound of the word itself—son—could echo down through your memories; it could quicken old longings; it could betray you.

  The deck pressed hard against my hip; I turned onto my other side.

  The copper-haired man—Ketil. I should have asked the doctor how he fared. Was it a pirate who had felled him? Or the bear? Would he survive?

  I could hear some men still bailing. Although they had patched the breach as well as they might while still at sea, I could feel that something wasn’t right. The ship lumbered heavily through the waves. Spray shot up in great, gushing fountains and pelted the deck, though the wind blew light and the seas ran smooth.

  All at once, I remembered my knapsack. I’d had it with me before the pirate ship rammed us. But now . . . Where was it?

  The letter.

  I needed it to help me find my father’s kin. For surely there would be clues written therein—names and places. I needed it as a token to prove I was my father’s son.

  I hadn’t marked my knapsack on deck when I was alone there with the bear, though I might well have missed it. Likely, someone had returned it to the storeroom.

  Tomorrow, I would search there.

  I tried again to sleep, but the familiar restlessness was twitching in my legs now, was singing in my bones. I arose, taking my bedroll with me, and padded across the deck to the cage.

  The bear lay sprawled on her belly, her fur frosted blue with moonlight. Her back and sides rose and fell in a slow, even rhythm.

  Sleep.

  The plasters on her ear and snout had nearly crumbled off; underneath, her fur was dark with dried blood. I could see the black swatch of shaven skin where I had stitched, but couldn’t make out the stitches themselves to see if they yet held.

  She had not touched the new fish I’d put out for her.

  I squatted on my heels and watched. The bear shifted, twitched her good ear.

  I leaned back, gazed up at the sky. The clouds had cleared, and the stars gleamed, dense and bright, for as far as I could see.

  Somewhere, to the far north and east, the bear had been free. Maybe she had had cubs, or a mate. And now she was alone, among strangers.

  As was I.

  The bear shifted again. Swiped at her nose. Moaned softly.

  I stood. Breathed in the night air, tinged with salt and fish. I slipped between the bars.

  I did not approach the bear, but stood watching her from a far corner.

  Breathe in: the great back rose.

  Breathe out: it sank again.

  Beneath the sounds of bailing and the hiss of the sea, I heard, or maybe just felt, a deep rumbling from the bear—a sound like a heartbeat, or like the coursing of blood, or like the deep solemn echo of stars wheeling their slow circuits across the sky.

  Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  Breathe in.

  The round moon was striped with iron, as if the sky itself were held prisoner.

  I eased myself down to the cage floor, in the corner. I leaned back against the bars. Just for a moment, I closed my eyes.

  Sometime later, I looked up to find the bear’s eyes open and watching me. I was not afraid.

  Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  Breathe in.

  The bear held my gaze for a long, still time. I wondered: Am I dreaming this? Am I dreaming right now?

  Then the bear yawned, showing the great, white blades of her teeth, and settled back down, tucking her eyes beneath a paw.

  I slept.

  CHAPTER 23

  Sinister, Soft Sound

  I AWOKE WITH a prickling sensation, as if some sinister, soft sound had roused me, but I didn’t know what it was. I opened my eyes to swirling mists in the twilight just before dawn.

  The creak of lines. The whuff of wind in the sail. The swish and thud of men bailing. Cold iron bars against my back . . .

  I remembered now. The cage.

  Had I been here all night?

  The bear . . .

  My eyes found her nearby. Asleep.

  But wait. She hadn’t been there before. She had moved in the night.

  Did she know I was here, in her cage?

  Whispers:

  “He’s waking.”

  “Let me do it now.”

  “No. You take the spoon.”

  “Please? You never let me—”

  And then I heard it again, the sound that had awakened me. The clink of metal on metal just behind me.

  I leaped to my feet.

  It was Hauk—tapping one of the bars with a knife blade. My knife. And there was Ottar too, tapping at a different bar with . . .

  My spoon case.

  “Hey!” I lunged for it. Ottar jerked it back.

  “Lost something, Dung Boy?” Hauk said. He held up my knapsack and dangled it before me.

  The bear shifted, raised her head. I squeezed between the bars and reached for Hauk’s arm, but he twisted away. “Listen,” I pleaded, “you can have my spoon, but give me back the letter.”

  “Aww, Dung Boy wants his letter,” Hauk said.

  “Poor Dung Boy,” Ottar said.

  Hauk shoved Ottar into me; we went down together, with Ottar on top. In a moment, I was on top of him, raising my fist to cuff him hard. He cried out and covered his head with his arms. I checked my punch and flung myself at Hauk, tackling him about the knees. He let out an oof as he crashed backward onto the deck. I smote him hard, and then again, but he was flailing at me with my knife. I rolled off Hauk and was about to rise, when Thorvald appeared before us. He seized Hauk’s wrist, stripping the knife from him, and then took my cloak in his fist and hauled me to my feet.

  “Enough!” Thorvald said. “Get you to work.” With a clattering of footsteps, Hauk and Ottar disappeared into the fog. I looked about for my knapsack, but it had disappeared too.

  I picked up my cap and, when I stood, saw that Thorvald was holding out my knife. “This is yours?” he asked.

  I nodded, took it, tucked it into my belt. I started to leave, but Thorvald said, “Arthur, wait. What happened here?”

  I opened my mouth to tell, then shut it. I didn’t want to tattle. But still, the letter . . . I needed it.

  “Well?”

  “I’ve . . . lost a letter,” I said. “A letter addressed to my mother.”

  “And Hauk took it?”

  I shrugged. “He may know where it is.”

  “And Ottar? He’s in this too?”

  Ottar. He was a sniveling little ferret, but still . . . Hauk had his claws well into him. And I knew what it was to be the weak one.

  “No,” I said. “He had nothing to do with it.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Listing to Starboard

  THE SHIP WAS listing to starboard. Just slightly—not so much as you’d notice—until you went below and marked the slant of the bilgewater against the hull. It seemed to me that the water had crept higher, too.

  A low mood had settled over the ship that morning and soured the sailors’ words. Just the day before, they had clapped me on the back while singing of victory over the pirates. But now, as I braced myself on the ladder and set to bailing, I merited hardly a glance, not even from Ottar, who was bailing some few rungs below me. Hauk, I had heard, had been assigned to the lowest and foulest part of the bilge—as punishment for theft, it was rumored. So, Thorvald must have taken my part against him.

  “If Captain had made for land straightaway,” one man grumbled, “we’d be safe and dry by now.”

  Another man snorted. “ ‘No one to help with repairs ashore,’ he says. ‘We can repair her well enough to carry us to Bruges,’ he says, ‘but not so far as London.’ ”

  “Bruges is too far! We need dry dock to fix her,” the first man said, “and soon.”

  “And what of the pirates?” a third man put in. “We can’t bail
and fight at the same time. What if they come back?”

  “Who’s going to help with repairs when we fetch up at the bottom of the sea?” another asked.

  “A school of herring?”

  “A giant squid?”

  “A band of mermaids?”

  They joined in a burst of bitter laughter.

  I handed another pail of bilgewater up the ladder. The man above me said, “So what do we do, then? Bail until our arms fall off?”

  The man below me grunted, “Just pray the weather holds.”

  The stolen knapsack preyed on my mind all morning. After a time, I managed to break away from the bailing brigade and make my way to the storeroom to search for it. I left the door open the merest crack, for light . . . and nearly tripped over a body on the floor.

  It was Ketil—sound asleep. The doctor must have sheltered him here.

  I edged around him to the stacks of seabags and chests and began to sort through them. At last, I found my knapsack, but it was empty—no spoon, no letter.

  Hauk!

  Likely my things were in his seabag, but the bags looked nearly the same; it would take all day to go through every one. Desperate now, I rifled through the contents of some of them, to no avail.

  But I did find Ottar’s bag. I had seen him the night before—alone, fidgety, hunched over—and whittling away at a block of wood. Now, I unpacked his knife, some chunks of pinewood, and a carving that looked familiar.

  In the narrow shaft of light from the doorway, I could see that it was a bird—lovely, round, and sleepy. One wing and one foot had not yet released themselves from the wood out of which the rest of the creature had emerged. Still, you could clearly sense the temper of this bird—utterly secure in itself, and at peace. It was not a gull—angular and shrill—but another kind of bird entirely. A bird from memory, from home.

  How could a little ferret like Ottar . . . create this?

  Or maybe a better question: How could someone who had this within him . . . choose to bind himself to the likes of Hauk?

  On the other hand, I knew what it was to be afraid, to sacrifice honor for protection.

  I sat back on my heels, now, fighting off the leaden weight of dread. I might be able to find my way to my father’s people without the letter. But would they believe I was who I claimed to be, or would they take me for a fraud?

  So, I would watch both of them—Hauk and Ottar—whenever I could, in hopes that they hadn’t destroyed the letter but had secreted it somewhere else.

  “Arthur! What are you doing here?”

  The doctor! “I, uh . . .”

  I was about to tell him about the letter, when Thorvald appeared in the doorway behind him. “There you are, Arthur! Sailing or bailing. Back to your post!”

  Quickly, I tucked the little bird into Ottar’s seabag and hied myself back to the hold.

  Early that afternoon the wind picked up. The ship pitched hard; water formed sloshing waves in the hold. In a while, Thorvald came to bid me calm the bear, who had become restive. “Doctor says, ‘Stay with her, and don’t leave her.’ ”

  As I emerged from below, I saw the storm—a mass of blue-gray clouds that blotted out the western horizon and boiled up to the roof of the sky. The captain stood on the sterncastle, bellowing out orders. Seamen swarmed all across the deck and up into the ratlines.

  A cold rain began to fall.

  The bear was pacing. I felt the running energy on her, a twitchy buzz that crackled in the air and echoed in my bones. I hummed to her for a while, but the humming held its own restless tremor, a tremor that comforted neither her nor me. A dark line blurred the horizon to the south—land. The Low Countries. If it came to the worst, if the ship sank . . .

  Some of us could fit into the shore boat.

  But not all.

  I could swim, and likely there would be wreckage to cling to, and land couldn’t be too far away.

  But the bear, confined in her iron cage . . .

  The doctor had ordered me to stay with her. But I had to speak with him—now.

  I made my way across the deck, which was devilish slick and treacherous. Wind tore at my cloak, and rain like pea gravel pelted at my face. I had thought that the doctor might be attending to Ketil, and I wasn’t wrong. As I entered the storeroom, the ship pitched, a lantern swung overhead, and light flooded the two men’s faces. Ketil was breathing heavily, and blood oozed through the dressing cloths the doctor was applying. In a pail, I saw the old cloths, rust-red and sodden.

  Would he live? I wondered. How could he, with so much blood lost . . .

  I recalled how the bear had tossed the pirate into the air, like a child playing with a toy. The doctor was right. The bear was wild, dangerous, unpredictable. What had I been thinking, sleeping in her cage?

  The doctor looked up. “Arthur, I sent word for you to see to the bear. You’d best get back there now.”

  “But—”

  Ketil moaned in pain. It felt oddly wrong now to defend the bear in the presence of the man she had nearly slain. But someone had to defend her. And she was the king’s bear, after all. It was the doctor’s duty to save her.

  “But the bear. What’s your plan for—”

  The doctor rolled Ketil onto his side; he let out a cry. The doctor murmured to him, adjusted his dressings.

  “—your plan for if we sink?”

  Ketil started up from the deck, a feverish look in his eye. “Sink? Are we sinking?”

  “No,” the doctor said. “Don’t fret; this is a good, sound ship, and we’re well afloat.” He pressed his hands against Ketil’s shoulders; Ketil lay back down. The doctor set to work quickly tying the ends of the dressings to hold them in place. “Get along,” he bade me. “You have work to do.”

  “But the bear will drown if—”

  “Let it, then,” Ketil said. “Let it drown! If I could get up off this pallet, I’d drown it with my own bare hands!”

  “Off with you, Arthur!” the doctor said. “If worse comes to worst, we’ll set the bear free and capture her later. But it’s too soon for that. For now, we wait and see.”

  As I opened the door, a wind gust tore at my cloak and hurled a hard spray into my eyes. I squinted out toward the dim line of land to the south and then turned to face the storm looming to the west. It had grown nearer—darkening, eating up the sky.

  We’d better not wait too long.

  CHAPTER 25

  Storm

  SOON THE STORM was full upon us.

  The clamor of it filled my ears: the whistling of wind, the roar and hiss of waves, the pounding of rain. The ship pitched alarmingly, and the timbers ground and shuddered, as if they were trying to wrench themselves apart. The captain called to strike the sail. The land before us, which had been dimmed by the curtain of rain, now vanished entirely, blotted out by hill after looming hill of water.

  I stayed beside the cage, not only because the doctor had ordered me to, but also because the cage was lashed securely to the deck, and the bars gave me something to hang on to. The bear came to huddle in the corner near where I stood; she grumbled deep in her throat in a way that sounded like complaining, as if telling me she wasn’t pleased with things as now they stood. I told her I agreed with her and began to hum, not only to soothe her, but to comfort myself, as well.

  Just after sunset, the seas gathered themselves into a single, towering wave that streamed white mist like the manes of galloping horses. The ship labored up the steep wall of water; the bear slid sternward in her cage, scrabbling at the cage floor, moaning piteously. I clung tight to the bars. A bailing bucket clattered past. A pot. A spoon. A boot.

  And then suddenly, it was over; we had crested the wave. But hardly had I caught my breath before we were sliding into a deep trough, and another monstrous wave bore down upon us.

  We were going to sink. I knew it now, with a certainty deep in the pit of my belly. If the pirate ship hadn’t rammed us, we might have survived this storm, but we were listing, listin
g to starboard, and what had been a slight tilt before—a tilt with some buoyancy to it—was now a deep, leaden sluggishness, dragging us toward the bottom of the sea.

  I heard shouting but could see only moving shadows through the veil of rain and flying foam and spray. Were they heading for the shore boat? I stepped away from the cage for a better look, but then the deck shifted beneath my feet, tilted up the steep wall of the wave. My feet skated out from under me, and I was sliding—sliding like a turtle on my back, sliding astern. . . .

  I slammed hard against the door of the captain’s quarters. Water poured down the deck toward me. I tried to pull myself to my feet, but the ship bucked with a mighty thump, and I fell, cracking my head against the timbers. There were terrible creaking and groaning and splintering sounds, as if the world itself were being rent asunder; a wall of water crashed down upon me; the deck canted disastrously to starboard . . . and then it jerked hard and went still beneath me.

  I wiped my eyes and blinked to clear them. Beneath the din of the ship, I could make out the boom and suck of beach waves, but they seemed distant, and I wondered if we had hit some offshore shoal or sandbar. I could see little in the dark and the rain, except that a black sheet of water was creeping across the starboard deck. Not waves, but the body of the sea itself.

  I staggered to my feet and groped my way along the wall of the captain’s quarters, toward the storeroom. The helmsman, I saw, had fled, leaving the tiller unmanned. But the doctor would know what to do. At last, I reached the door, but it was jammed. I threw my weight against it; it yielded. “Doctor!” I said.

  But he wasn’t there. By the faint light of the lantern that swung from the rafters, I saw that Ketil was gone too, and in his place lay a tangle of dressings.