THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  The engineer laughed and nodded again. “No one like night watch. Mattu get it every time. Ha ha.”

  Esther smiled at the man’s jollity in the face of the second officer’s gloom. She crunched on some toast and smiled. “So you do eat then?”

  Matthew looked at her. “The only damn thing Leonardo can cook.”

  Given last night’s dinner Esther had to admit he had a point. Sohn pointed at Esther as though Matthew had never seen her before.

  “Esther army stoodent.”

  “Yeah?”

  The engineer cheerfully ignored Cotton’s dismissive grunt and turned back to his considerably more charming companion.

  “You shoot guns and all?”

  Esther looked down at her plate as though she were talking about something dirty. “Standard MI6 A2. Nothing fancy. You get acquainted with your weapon at advance training camp.”

  Sohn nodded enthusiastically, wanting more. Nothing came. Matthew sat back in his chair and looked at her.

  “Guess you got on well with Lloyd last night then, huh?”

  Esther narrowed her eyes. “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s a Nam vet. Explosives. Used to defuse bombs, lay land mines.”

  She was interested. “Yeah? It didn’t come up.”

  Matthew drained his cup and poured another. “Doesn’t talk about it. You blame him?”

  Esther shook her head at nothing in particular.

  “Shit, it’s crazy when you think about guys Lloyd’s age, walking about looking like they spent a lifetime doing nothing more than mow a lawn and polish their Lincoln Continental, yet they’ve seen stuff that you and I only have nightmares about.”

  Sohn tried to keep up with what she was saying, watching her with rapt attention now she was talking at regular speed to a fellow English speaker, instead of the slow deliberate words she’d been enunciating for him in the last half hour. He caught the gist.

  “Yeah. He nearly go down on the Eurydice too. That really mess him about, I think.”

  Sohn pointed to his head to illustrate where exactly he thought the captain had been messed about.

  “What was that?” enquired Esther of Cotton, knowing that Sohn’s explanation would be tortuous.

  The same waiter as the previous night brought a plate across to Matthew and set it down. Obviously Cotton was a creature of habit. He picked up a fork and shovelled some scrambled egg into his mouth.

  “Carrier Skinner sailed about five years ago. Got called ashore for some personal reason halfway through the voyage, and handed the command over to another captain at Lagos. Damn thing disappeared without trace a day later out of port. No survivors. No salvage.”

  Esther was genuinely horrified. “Jesus. That must have been rough. He would have known all those guys well?”

  “Sailed with the same crew for nearly two-and-a-half years. Like family.”

  “Did they find out what happened?”

  Matthew shook his head. “Lloyd had to give evidence at the enquiry. He’d kept his own log after they’d left Luanda and for some reason had taken his notes ashore when he left for Florida.

  “Apparently he thought there’d been an irregularity he couldn’t prove with cargo stowage by the African stevedores, and on account of everything he was able and obliged to check having been in order, they had forced him to sail.

  “But he hadn’t been happy, so guess that’s why he took his copy of the log. Company loved him for that. With no wreck to examine, Lloyd’s evidence was the only thing that counted. His log proved everything had been done just right by the captain and I guess by Sonstar too. Meant the insurance crooks had to pay up in full.”

  Esther’s estimation of the captain had risen again. No wonder the guy was reticent and distracted. It sounded like he’d had more than his share of shit. Sohn was nodding enthusiastically at this story.

  “They make a lot of money when ship go down like that.”

  Matthew looked sour. “Yeah. They sure as hell ain’t got the reputation for charity.”

  Esther ate in silence, thinking of the horror of being sucked down on a ship this size into the blackness of that trench below them, and her food lost its taste.

  Sohn pushed his chair back and bowed cheerfully to Esther. “You want I show you my engine room later?”

  Esther beamed. “Aw, neat. I’d love that.”

  “I on watch for four hours now. Any time.”

  He bowed again and left. Esther was once again stranded with company she could well do without, and she watched Matthew eating in silence, much of her cheerfulness having exited the room with Sohn. Now might be a good time to set things straight, so she took the chance.

  “Listen, I’m real sorry I made you mad on the cargo deck.”

  Matthew shrugged as he ate, then mutely nodded his forgiveness.

  She continued. “Find out what that stuff was?”

  He shook his head and shrugged again, completely uninterested, his mouth overful with hot food. Esther could see a repeat of last night’s one-sided conversation looming, and she wiped the sides of her mouth in readiness to go. No one could say she hadn’t given it her best shot.

  Matthew looked up at her and intuitively caught the body language that meant she was getting ready to leave and, to Esther’s surprise, did something to halt it. He waved a fork. “So tell me. Why’d you choose the military?”

  She looked at him to see if there was bitterness or sarcasm behind the question, and when she saw none, she answered. “I wanted a degree. It was the only way I could afford one.”

  Matthew looked genuinely interested. He swallowed what he’d been chewing and gesticulated at her again with his fork as though he needed it to talk. “Yeah? What kinda service you need to put in for that? Three, four years?”

  “Seven.”

  Matthew raised both eyebrows. “No shit? Hell, you must want that degree real bad.”

  It was Esther’s turn to shrug.

  Matthew took another swig of coffee, watching her over the rim of the cup. “Or maybe I’m getting it wrong here. Maybe you wanted to join up anyhow. Seen those commercials myself, the guys rappelling in California and cross-country skiing and shit? Makes me almost want to do it too.”

  She scratched her neck and gave a light laugh. “Well, since you ask, funny thing is, sure, I thought it was just a way to buy me some academic time. Stuff I thought my whole life I wanted to do. Kind of always dreamt that it was education could let me escape. Know what I mean? But when I went to advance training camp? You know, I found I had an aptitude for it I never knew I had. Surprised the living shit out of me.”

  “Aptitude for what?”

  She picked up her coffee cup and looked him square in the eye. “Combat.”

  Matthew looked at her, smiled weakly, then returned to his breakfast.

  She knew he didn’t believe her. He knew nothing about her, but she could practically read his thoughts.

  He’d picture some white-collar home, see her playing at being a soldier, getting off on the masculinity of holding and firing a semi-automatic weapon. How could he know she’d been shooting guns since she was nine? Dogging off school with Henry-Adam Shenker to go to the wasteland of scrub willow a mile away from the trailer park, and shoot at everything that moved and everything that couldn’t with his big brother’s hand gun. The same gun that eventually helped put him and his other two drug-dealing, store-robbing siblings behind bars. And how could he know she’d spent her teens fighting with her fists and her teeth, against almost every kid at school that called her trailer-trash, or asked after her daddy with those shit-eating smug grins?

  All that until the autumn term when Mr Sanderson took over as her grade teacher and discovered, like some lion tamer with the magic chair of academia and genuine concern for her, there was a brain in there, under that wild animal that tore and kicked and bit anything that got in her way.

  Matthew Cotton couldn’t know any of that, and frankly she didn’t care. She was civili
zed now, a tamed creature that read philosophy and studied culture, and that was all that mattered. She would give her best to the US army, and then see what life held at the other end. But that was enough. It was Matthew’s turn for spilling the beans, she decided.

  “What about you?”

  He stabbed some bacon. “What about me?”

  “Well where you from?”

  “Nowhere special.”

  Esther pursed her mouth. She was a private person by habit, and it annoyed her to have shared even a tiny part of her life with him when he was plainly so reticent to do the same.

  “Oh pardon me. Did I say I came from anywhere special? Texas sure ain’t frigging Arcadia.”

  “You sail, you live on ships. There’s nowhere else.”

  “So I guess you were born and raised on a bulk carrier? Cool.”

  He looked up and the pain behind his eyes made her regret her tone. He wiped his mouth. “I was born and raised in New York. I lived for a time in Atlanta. Now I don’t live any damn place. Okay?”

  Esther held his gaze, embarrassed, then nodded.

  “Sure.”

  He got back to his meal.

  Esther waited until a decent amount of time had passed to let the dust settle from his inexplicable ire, then pushed back her chair and stood. “If I run tomorrow, I guess I’ll wear the hard hat.”

  Matthew nodded down into his eggs. “You do that.”

  She nodded back to the top of his head, cleared her throat and left. As she walked back up the corridor to her cabin, Esther let out the breath she’d been holding in for nearly a minute. A peal of laughter burst from the crew’s mess hah, and she rubbed at her hair with an exasperated hand. Right now, Esther Mulholland wished she’d majored in languages. Namely, Filipino. Life ahead for the next five days would have promise to be a lot more entertaining if she had.

  Fen had been keeping out of the bosun’s way all morning, when he finally caught up with him on the main deck, crouching in front the accommodation block, staring at the long perspective of holds in front of him.

  “What the hell are you up to?”

  Fen looked up at Felix Chadin from the bucket of unused water he was squatting beside and blinked. “Deck,” he said, standing and waving a hand weakly at the surface as if he had just named it. “I was scrubbing the deck.”

  “For the whole of your watch?”

  “Eh, no. I was helping cook move some crates.”

  Chadin crossed his arms. He was in a bad mood. Sleep had evaded him last night and he was grouchy.

  “Well isn’t it convenient that I find you just as your watch is over, particularly when the derrick cables need checking?”

  “I can check them. I don’t mind.”

  Chadin looked at the man. It was not the answer he expected from a rating he suspected of skiving. It threw him.

  “No. Go on.” He dismissed Fen with an imperial wave that was peculiarly Filipino, used liberally by foremen, mothers-in-law and dictators alike in their homeland.

  “I want to know exactly where you are on the next watch though,” he called after the hastily-retreating figure. Fen disappeared into the block’s door, and Chadin looked down at the bucket. It was clear that the man had not been scrubbing at all, yet the eagerness with which he’d offered to extend his watch was confusing. Chadin looked up along the open holds and squinted against the low sun, then went to find someone else he could make suffer for his poor night’s rest.

  Fen entered the crew’s mess room, went to the coffee machine and punched in his command. The whining machine pissed a spiralling stream of brown liquid into a plastic cup that was too flimsy to prevent it burning any inexperienced hand that attempted to hold it. He waited until it had finished its business, grabbed the cup by its thick rim, and went to join the four men, three of whom sat smoking, one sulking, at the Formica-covered table nearest the serving hatch.

  “Ah, now then, the very man,” exclaimed Parren the storekeeper, slapping the table top. He pointed at the surly sixteen-year-old cadet, Hal, and laughed. The other two men laughed in a snickering kind of way, childish, but entirely unkind.

  “This little shit-eater wants to know if his girlfriend’s being faithful.”

  Fen looked from face to face, then sipped carefully at the nasty coffee. “So?”

  “So you’re the guy to tell him.”

  Fen scowled. “Yeah, well not today. Okay?”

  Hal emerged from his sulk. “Aw come on, Fen. I’ll pay you.”

  “No.”

  The boy snorted and picked up his own white plastic cup. “Yeah, well it’s a load of bullshit that stuff anyway. It doesn’t tell you anything you don’t know.”

  Fen’s face darkened and he lowered the cup. The three older men looked at each other with eyebrows raised gleefully in anticipation of an explosion.

  “You want to be careful, kid. Stupider people than you have fallen foul of Saanti. The dumber you are the harder it is to take the truth.”

  The boy made a face, pretending he was scared, then laughed. Parren leant forward, trying to break the iron rod of gaze that Fen had fixed on the boy. “Do it for us then, Fen. Come on. I wouldn’t mind asking a couple of things.”

  Fen looked round slowly at the storekeeper and frowned.

  “Yeah,” added the steward who sat slouched to Parren’s right. “Why not?”

  Why not, indeed. Fen knew why not. Because when he had scattered the Saanti bone-dice last night and laid out the alphabet cards, reading them for himself instead of for someone else for the first time in fifteen years, they had terrified him. He would never normally cast those dice for himself. It had been the dream that had made him do it. The dream that had made him doubt what was real and what was not when he awoke in a sweat. But he had done it, and as it was with those he read for, he took what the dice told him very seriously. The reading always required the card-caster to read out the message that was being spelled for his eyes only, and sometimes Fen found that his voice adopted the tone of the person who was communicating, whether they were alive or dead. It had been uncanny at first, and almost everyone he read for imagined at first that he was faking it. Until, that is, someone they loved, or had lost forever, spoke through Fen’s mouth. Then they believed. They had no choice.

  But last night… Fen shivered at the memory. Someone—no that wasn’t quite right—some thing, had spoken to him, or rather made him speak, and done so in a voice and a language that was both unintelligible and indescribably horrible. He had broken off the reading even before it had completed its first communication, his mouth fouled by the noise that had come from it, and now he was afraid that if he read again, it would come back.

  But that had been in the night. He had been too tormented by his dreams to sleep well, no doubt fuelled by the schoolboy superstitions of ridiculous peasant stevedores. Now it was day, and he was sitting in the brightly-lit mess room that was familiar as his own skin, the faces of his long-time shipmates looking at him expectantly, waiting for some fun. If ever there was a time to exorcise the demons of the night with a playful and harmless reading, telling these men of their loved ones at home, then perhaps it was now. Cowardice was not compatible with being a Saanti-master. Fen licked his lips and wiped the sides of his sweaty shirt with his palms.

  “What kind of things?” he asked Parren.

  The men smiled, sensing entertainment.

  “Well, for one, I want to know if my boy working in Dubai will marry a good girl and give me grandsons.”

  The man at the end of the table laughed and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I can tell you that Parren. I have it on good authority he’s choking on Arab cock right now.”

  Parren made a mock-threatening swipe with the back of his hand, but he was smiling. He looked back at Fen. “So?”

  Fen toyed with his cup, his gaze fixed on the brown circle of liquid, then slowly put his hand in his trouser pocket and brought out the pack and dice. The four men shifted in their seats with delight and s
at forward in anticipation.

  Fen held the pack and looked from face to face, then slowly began to shuffle the cards. They watched closely as he laid out a semi-circle of ancient and bizarrely-marked cards, each with letters of the alphabet inscribed over a lurid illustration. The three bone dice had occult symbols burnt into them, two of them inlaid intricately around the symbols with tiny slivers of gold, one with silver.

  Fen realized his hand was trembling. He stopped and took another swallow of coffee. This was ridiculous. All the more determined now to shake this night terror off, he sped up, concentrating hard as he laid and arranged the cards.

  This task complete, he gathered two of the three dice together in his hand and looked up. “Who’s first?”

  Parren wiped his mouth with a hand then looked to the cadet. “Well I suppose it’s Hal whose losing most sleep.”

  “Yeah. Or his girlfriend,” sniggered the carpenter.

  Fen looked to the boy. “You answer only when I ask you a question. You touch none of the cards, but only this die when I tell you to. Understand?”

  The boy smiled and nodded, looking round for approval. All eyes were on Fen, and the serving hatch filled as the two assistant cooks leaned forward happily on their elbows, well used to the show that the rating could put on.

  Fen placed the single die in the centre of the semi-circle then shook the other two in his palm and cast them. They clattered onto the table top, rolled and came to rest in front of Parren.

  “What’s your name?”

  Fen was looking at the cards, not the boy, but Hal knew to answer when he was poked in the ribs by a sharp finger.

  “Hal Sanin.”

  “What’s your question?”

  Hal licked his lips. It felt more tense now, less of a game. Fen’s face was stern with concentration.

  “Em, will my… no, sorry.” He took a breath and composed himself. “Is my girlfriend, Phaara, being faithful to me?”

  Fen looked at the two cast dice. “And who do you ask? The wind, the sun, the water or the fire?”

  Hal looked to the other men and gave a worried shrug. Parren shrugged back cheerfully and mouthed silently the word “water,” for no other reason than to keep things going.