THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  The body of Thomas Inlatta was not that far below the surface of the trash in hold five. But in terms of accessibility it might as well have been on the moon. The instability of the pile meant that any disturbance would bury it deeper, and the random nature of the shapes and textures that engulfed it would make identifying a human corpse amongst such visual confusion a most unlikely prospect.

  But these difficulties were irrelevant at present, since the search for Thomas was taking place in a different hold. While the work went on elsewhere, his body lay still and undisturbed, bent and twisted like a broken doll, the fists still tight around tubes of unidentifiable spongy matter, the face an immobile mask of terror.

  The derrick operator starting work on hold two was perspiring, trying to ensure that the claw on the end of the crane only lightly scoured the surface as he lifted what he could from the massive pile. Eighteen pairs of eyes watched the process, all concentrating hard, hoping to be the first to spot the shape of a living man hanging from the grab.

  Captain Lloyd Skinner, however, was not watching the work in progress. He was watching his men, and considering all that had happened to his ship over the last twenty-four hours, he was doing so with remarkable composure.

  His crew glanced at him occasionally from the corners of their eyes, admiring his collected demeanour, comforted by the fact that their master was still obviously so very much in control. But then even if Lloyd Skinner had been screaming inside with alarm, the men on board The MV Lysicrates would never be privy to a demonstration of that, or indeed, any other emotion.

  He had been nineteen years old when he had first appreciated the merits of keeping calm, and ever since, he had worked harder than anyone could ever guess at maintaining it. But right now, as Skinner stood by the rail, hands on his hips, eyes closed as the smell from the disturbed hold corrupted the light salt breeze, the force of will that kept him so inscrutable was being tested. It was the earth smell from the hold that made his stomach churn. The odour of sour soil and decaying vegetation that was thankfully almost completely absent in a life at sea, an odour that he had spent over thirty years avoiding. He opened his eyes as his mind threatened to start rolling its own favourite movie, but it was too late. It was the smell.

  The platoon leader had been only three years older than him. Ridiculous, of course, but then sanity had abandoned the entire war by the time he was forced to join it, and a twenty-one-year-old with the power over life and death seemed no wilder than anything else.

  Maybe some other twenty-one-year-old would have handled it well, grown, matured, responded to the nightmare and conquered. Not Mendez. The wisdom and judgment of the heavy-browed sullen boy was so absent that emotionally, he could have passed for a toddler. In some respects they were all children then, but Skinner knew he was smarter than Mendez, and the indignation he felt at having to carry out orders of complete incompetence and retributive malice, grew to a fever that kept him awake at night more than the mosquitoes or the heat.

  He had been anything but calm then. Lloyd Skinner was hot-headed and full of fury. He hated the war, he hated his part in it, laying mines in the red earth to kill and maim God knows who, and he hated Mendez for the simple but unforgivable crime of being stupid.

  At the age of eighteen he had believed in a lot. He’d believed that men were fundamentally good, that people could make a difference, that there was a future. All those beliefs were dead before he saw twenty, and though he would never allow himself the indulgence to take the dark truth out and look at it in the light, the fact remained that he blamed not Mendez, but the evolutionary process itself, the one that could create the miracle that was the human body and mind, and then furnish it with the spiritual intelligence of bacteria. Mendez was, to him, not an individual to hate, but an example that accurately represented his species.

  He had known what would happen. Despite his protests, Mendez made him do it anyway. Skinner knew, like the rest of the platoon, that the village housed no one but civilians. Irritating, unattractive, poverty-stricken civilians, who offered nothing of interest to homesick American teenagers, but civilians innocent of anything other than lack of education and silent resentment.

  The skinny children spat at Skinner behind his back as they played in the dust round their huts. They would stare up at him with their dark, almond-shaped eyes when he looked back at them, leaving Skinner chilled by the unflinching alien scrutiny that is the speciality of the child.

  Slow, shifty-eyed old men who shuffled from the fields with thin oxen on ropes, and women doubled over under the burden of sticks for the fire, or children strapped to their impossibly strong backs, were the only other inhabitants, and Skinner would watch them daily, aching to be elsewhere.

  Nevertheless, Mendez’s order was insane, and Skinner refused. But the eyes of his superior officer held nothing but dull, sullen incomprehension when he was challenged, and the order not only remained unchanged, but was enforced by the gun that he drew and held to Skinner’s head. There was no law to help him. They were feral. Boys in the jungle who could do anything and go unpunished. He had looked deep into Mendez’s eyes and knew that the crazy bastard was capable of pulling the trigger, and so he shut down another system of belief and survived.

  Mendez stood and watched him as he buried the plate-mines, smoking and drumming the rhythm of an unidentifiable tune on his thigh. Skinner remembered the feel of the hot red earth beneath his fingers as he carefully smoothed the area around the trigger plate, remembered holding the soil in his fist and glancing up at the waving corn stalks that had sucked their life-force from it. From the closest hut he could smell that sour, rancid rotting. A mixture of sewage and plant life, of hot earth and animals, wood smoke and the thin, acrid tendrils of impoverished cooking.

  Dawson had gathered the villagers, told them to leave. Told them that the enemy was coming, that the road north was mined and they would have to evacuate the village. That if they stayed, they stayed at their own risk. But Skinner knew they wouldn’t go. Mendez knew they wouldn’t go.

  And then, less than a week later, there they were. Three of them. A tall, gangly girl, probably about ten or eleven, and two younger boys, maybe seven or eight. Siblings, obviously.

  Skinner had been lying in the shade of a truck, watching the girl, idly examining the contours of the pitifully thin shift that covered her body to see if there was the swell of a breast yet and, finding none, transferred his gaze to the antics of the boys instead. The girl was in charge of the boys, an ox and a long, whippy strand of willow, but the stick was being used more on the two scampering brothers than the animal. They taunted her, laughing, running behind and in front of the ox to make her chase them, and although she used the sharp staccato bark of authority to bring them to heel, Skinner could see she was playing as much as they were. They wandered past him, the boys smiling and laughing, pointing at the ox, and darting into the corn as they headed into the fields, as the girl stared at him impassively flicking lazily at the ox’s rump. Skinner fell asleep.

  The sound of the mine, a dull sound, a deep-noted “whumph,” did not shake him roughly from his dreams, but brought him gently out of sleep. There was a moment as he blinked in the daylight, a coming-to, that timed itself precisely to coincide with the start of her screaming.

  Skinner ran. He ran into the cornfield, thrashing at the dry stalks that barred his way to the road, and when he burst through on the other side, chaff from the corn was sticking to him like flakes of diseased skin. The mine had taken one side of the boy away, but the mess of material that was left was still alive.

  The other two, the girl and the smaller boy, were frozen to the spot, the girl screaming, the boy shaking and panting.

  Skinner stayed on the scrub at the edge of the road, safe enough, and three others, including Mendez, stood further back, safer still.

  He had laid the mines. He knew where they were. The two surviving children were in the very heart of the minefield. He held up his hands to the girl. She
turned to look at him, still screaming, spittle penduluming from her lower lip. His mind worked fast. He could run back to the camp and get the detector, but they would have to stay still and calm.

  The war was already fucking crazy by the time he reluctantly joined it. There had been no tuition in anything, and so, at eighteen, Skinner was largely a self-trained explosives expert. He’d been interested in it. The physics of an incendiary device was easy to him. The procedure for dealing with the consequences was not. How did you make children stay absolutely motionless, absolutely calm, when the torn remains of their brother was oozing in the dust in front of them, his single existing arm twitching and flexing like a beached eel?

  Skinner turned to Mendez, and his heart chilled. Mendez was grinning. He looked back at Skinner and there was a message in his eyes.

  Mendez already had the gun in his hands, and he raised it as he held onto Skinner’s gaze. There had been a moment, a response to Mendez’s action that was so fast that memory had to be congratulated for logging something so swift. But Skinner could never forget it. For the mere fraction of a second as the gun came up to Mendez’s shoulder, he was grateful that his platoon leader was going to do the decent thing, and finish the suffering of the dismembered boy. And then, almost before that hope had time to mature into action, the secret that Skinner had been silently semaphored by Mendez’s eyes was made real.

  The first two bullets that thudded into the ground, missed the mines. The third hit the target, and the world was filled with the controlled columnar fury of the exploding earth.

  He shot three more, like a boy at a funfair trying to win the stuffed bear, and when it was over, Mendez spoke three words to Skinner before he lit a cigarette and walked away.

  “Dumb little fucks.”

  The earth. It was so red. So hot. Five months later, Skinner had lain down on the hot soil, and breathed in the smell of the rotting green jungle. The body of Mendez lay beside him, the hole in his forehead neat and black where Skinner’s bullet had entered, the hole where it had left, not so. The dead Vietnamese soldier whose gun Skinner had used and replaced lay a short way off.

  Lloyd Skinner had wanted the others to question him, to prove to him that men were not as stupid as he feared, to notice the obvious clues that would have pointed to his guilt. But of course they did not. The execution had been perfect.

  He thought often about the last words he should have made Mendez hear as he’d held the gun to his head, and watched with a detached calm as the sullen face had melted into drooling, pleading primal fear. But it was too late to change that. What he’d said was written in stone.

  “You dumb fuck.”

  The man watching the operations from the hatch cover of hold five, shouted instructions that the first grab load was free of anything human, and the driver opened its claw and let the garbage tip slowly over the side of the ship. The smell of earth and rot was unbearable, the odour sticking to his soft palate, and the captain swallowed back bile. He put a fist to his mouth in a silent cough, and walked towards the accommodation block. It was a measure of his presence that not one seaman questioned whether, given the two-person rule, they should accompany him.

  As second officer, never mind simply as a human being, Renato Lhoon’s thoughts should have been with the murdered boy and the possible death of Thomas Inlatta. But Renato, as he patrolled the corridors of B-deck with a deck cadet one pace behind, scuffing his feet, was thinking of neither. He was thinking about the approaching company ship.

  In all his time at sea, he had only ever once been on board a ship that was given an order to rendezvous during a voyage with another from the fleet, and the circumstances had been exceptional. A cargo had to be transferred at sea because of a paperwork emergency.

  It had been irregular, and most likely illegal, but then the big shipping companies were not exactly renowned for being upright, honest citizens of the ocean.

  What rankled Renato was that, in this case, he hadn’t been informed what the circumstances were, not even by the usual conspiratorial nod and wink to senior officers that a loyal company captain might employ to prepare his crew for something irregular. He still fumed over that exclusion, even now in their perilous circumstances, when the meeting was clearly to be their life-line. But Renato was more than angry and wounded. He was suspicious.

  Cotton, of course, hadn’t even noticed the irregularity of it all. But then Cotton wouldn’t notice a hairy mammoth playing a trumpet beside his bed unless Renato woke him up and pointed it out.

  But what if Matthew knew what the captain’s orders were and simply didn’t care? It was certainly a peculiar place to meet, in this odd spot out of the shipping lane, hove-to above one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean where the currents were not exactly ideal. Renato could only assume that he did, and that he had probably been too drunk either to acknowledge them or to care. But Renato cared. He cared about having been excluded. He cared so much that he had made a decision. This extraordinary voyage was going to be the last he made as the crutch for Matthew Cotton.

  When they next sailed, Renato Lhoon was going to be first officer and Cotton could panhandle for booze money in a doorway somewhere.

  All he had to do was to prove to the captain that he was worth the promotion, that Cotton was unreliable and dangerous, and that Lhoon’s loyalty was unshakeable. He must put aside his disappointment in Skinner’s exclusion of him and work at becoming indispensable, and if this wasn’t an opportunity, then what was? The other ship was coming, and when it came, there would be no doubt who was in charge, who had helped contain the horror, and who had been caught slacking on duty.

  He frowned as his thoughts churned, hardly even seeing the interiors of the cabins he peered into as the deck cadet threw open each door for inspection. Pasqual’s cabin door was opened and swung shut in seconds, and they moved on to the next.

  Renato stopped so suddenly by the next cabin that the deck cadet nearly ran into his back. It belonged to the irritating American girl passenger and there were voices coming from inside. Renato listened for a moment, then looked back at his companion.

  “It’s okay. This deck is clear. Go back to the mess and wait for me.”

  The small man started to protest and was silenced by a sharp look. He scowled and walked away, making a great show to his officer of checking round the corner of the corridor as though waiting to be ambushed by snipers. Renato watched him go with contempt and then walked cautiously to the cabin door, and pressed his face close against the metal.

  He listened for the voices again, but this time there was silence. He knew the girl was not alone, and he could have sworn there had been a deeper male voice in there. He waited a moment more and then was rewarded. The male voice spoke. It was Cotton. Renato stopped breathing to hear better, and was met only by Cotton’s muffled exclamations.

  The girl was speaking very quietly, but although he could hardly make out what they were saying, nor make sense of those words he did hear, the aspect of their conversation that interested Renato was the tone of it. It did not sound as though a senior officer was briefing a passenger in his professional capacity.

  Renato Lhoon allowed a contemptuous smile to curl his lips. Loyalty. Unswerving loyalty to his captain, come what may. It was to be his future.

  He walked on to join the cadet, putting a hand to his mouth to cough at the stench of the garbage in the holds which had quite suddenly entered the block, presumably, he reasoned subconsciously, with the opening of a door to the hold deck.

  His step was light, and his mind fully occupied, which was why he failed to register the ticking noise the soles of his shoes made, as they dealt with the resistant friction of red-brown stickiness that trailed along the corridor from the stairs.

  The engine room of the Lysicrates was never silent. Even at its most idle, as now, with the great turbines at rest, the ambient noise filled the senses with a low thrumming and a subtle, soft rushing.

  Sohn Haro’s senses, however,
were only just beginning to return from the journey of pain they had been on for the last twenty-five minutes. His eyes were filled with tears, and his face was still contorted by the effort of remaining sane under such duress. But even though the pain was subsiding, he was far from sane. How could he be? His fourth engineer had just performed a conjuring trick, a mind-reading illusion of impossible accuracy that had left him reeling in a state of confusion and terror. Until this moment, Sohn’s fears had been very simple.

  He knew he was going to die, and only two things worried him. The first was what was to become of his family. He’d sorted that. Illegally, yes, just as the boy had so chillingly pointed out. But it was sorted. The other worry had been how bad the pain was going to get at the end. It was only because of his unique position on board, the fact that he could hide away in the depths of this huge steel cathedral, that he had been able to hide the attacks from the rest of the crew. But the agonies were becoming more frequent, and almost intolerable. He blinked away the tears and tried the first tentative movements of straightening up. It was getting better.

  He blew sharply out between his teeth, and raised himself from the doubled crouch to a sitting position against the bulkhead.

  Now, at least, he could think. Chelito would be back at his duties checking the oil, and in a minute Sohn would be forced to go and face him again. What could he say? He needed to know where the boy got his information, but it had been so personal and impossible for anyone else to know, that Sohn already knew he didn’t want the answer.

  He tried standing. It was possible.

  Sohn Haro would never have classed himself as a brave man, but any independent observer would have certainly awarded him the title. He treated the management of his impending death as a duty, and likewise, he was about to go in search of the boy, to confront his worst fears and dark unspoken horrors, merely because he felt he had no choice.