Sea of Two Suns

by Nicholas McAuliff

  “I work for the newspaper,” said Isaac.

  “I do not care,” said the captain.

  In the journal Isaac sketched a flintlock pistol next to black birds above calm seas, all in black ink. Above that were attempts at longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates and the markers N S E W with directions NW B W.

  “Did I not just say leave me?”

  “You read the newspapers?” Isaac assaulted the captain with his words, as was his way.

  “I do not read.”

  “Ah, I see. You may consider that one day captain. It can open new worlds. Reading is best taught young, before the brain grows. But even now, captain, I may teach you. It will be hard, but you can still learn.”

  The pirate said nothing as his red eyes flared to the side and cut through Isaac.

  “The newspapers are not trivialities and tales of wonders,” Isaac went on. “They tell of real things. Real news from Washington. Soldiers at Fort Leavenworth can read words that President Jackson actually spoke. And those words came less than a month prior. They can read about the happenings in London, if they see fit, or of the advancement of the railways, which I hear may one day forge themselves out to the far West-”

  “I labored in my youth,” snarled the captain. “I learned to haul stone and raise sail and handle riggings. I learned to suffer and earn my lot. Not to read about the lots’ of others.”

  “I see,” Isaac replied as he nudged his glasses higher up his face. “Well the offer is there.”

  “Prepare you the hardtack to go along with our supper. The only use you have aboard.”

  “Aye captain.”

  Julius appeared and cried and clutched his stomach.

  “Take the helm!” the captain yelled. Isaac did as he was bid and precariously grasped the helm which felt like the sea in his hands.

  “What is this!” the captain said as he cupped his brothers face.

  Julius was wordless but staggered and retched overboard.

  “He drank from the sea,” said Jerimiah.

  “How much? Julius, how much did you drink from the sea?”

  “He got a few mouthfuls before I wrenched him away,” said Jerimiah.

  “God damn you! I told you to watch him by the stern!”

  “Captain,” said Francisco. “We agreed to follow you. But that is not our duty.”

  The captain pushed Isaac aside and leaned onto the helm, watching the white salt spray below. “No, no it isn’t,” he said. “Francisco, stay with me. Lukas, get my brother below deck and get some chow and fresh water in him. The rest of ye, below deck!”

  Isaac froze. “The sun feels good on my face, captain. My heart doesn’t desire-”

  “I care not what you desire. Get below deck!”

  “Aye captain,” said the writer.

  Finally the sky blackened as the men played cards below deck.

  Jerimiah sat hugging his knees, rocking. Isaac eyed him as he ate and Nukilik offered the old man a drink, which he took vigorously.

  Francisco and the captain spoke in hushed voices still above deck.

  Isaac figured the night for a reprieve from the captain’s order and rose and climbed the ladder.

  He headed toward the duo of the captain and Julius, the captain’s eyes catching him as he neared.

  Others followed suit and spilled above the deck.

  Isaac chewed happily while the pirate stood quiet, eating a flat bread while Francisco worked the sails with Simon.

  “You want something besides hardtack, captain?” said Isaac holding out a jerky.

  The captain’s eyes shot up a glare, and the writer walked away.

  Francisco grinned and joined Isaac in step. “He’s a hard man. Not one for the pleasantries of life.” The Mexican patted Isaac on the shoulder and handed him a wedge of cheese.

  “I think he doesn’t like me much,” replied Isaac.

  “He doesn’t like anyone,” interjected Jerimiah. “Save for his little brother.” The old man shook vigorously as if under a snowy sky.

  “What ails you Jerimiah?” asked Francisco.

  “I’ll give anyone my day’s hardtack for your ration of rum,” the old man announced.

  A low rumble of laughter arose from all the men as if the old man had just told a joke.

  “Hardtack for rum,” quipped Herb.

  The other’s laughed heartily and the old man sat silent, his eyes down in shame. He sweat visibly and rocked just slightly, back and forth as if he were mimicking the motions of the vessel.

  “I’ll give you my salted pork for today and tomorrow’s-”

  “Enough!” yelled the captain. “You use a full sail’s ration in a third the time, that is on you!”

  “He will die if he does not get liquor in him,” spoke Nukilik. “I’ve seen it,” he said.

  The captain turned suddenly and slammed a bundle of sailcloth hard toward the deck. “You shouldn’t have come,” he shouted.

  Jerimiah held his head in his hands and shook.

  “Not our lot to cleanse your damned body atop the waters,” the captain went on. “No one has enough liquor for you. Now you may die.”

  Jerimiah cried silently, hugging his knees.

  The captain looked on in disgust. “Stop!” he yelled. “Fourteen years I’ve suffered your crying! Stop it!”

  “Take my share,” said Isaac, and he handed Jerimiah a green bottle.

  The old man took the offering and uncorked the bottle in one motion. He tilted his head back and drank deep as the rising moonlight spilled through the green like little verdant rays. The old man sighed after he swallowed, and his eyes lit up.

  “Damned drunk,” muttered the captain.

  Isaac met the captain’s eyes, feeling his nerves flare, and the pirate captain stared back. Isaac felt fear but no longer viewed the pirate as a captain. He no longer held for him a silent respect, but a loathing. All were silent and the tension rose as the seconds.

  “Isaac,” Francisco said.

  “Go on!” said the captain. “Your soft, pink hands think they can man this ship? Go on!”

  All looked on as Isaac averted his eyes.

  XV

  The crew all awoke save for Simon who had kept two watches through the night, pacing the whole time.

  Before Simon reached the ladder Francisco stopped him with a light touch. The Mexican worked intently atop snakes of heavy rope hanging from the lower riggings.

  “Sir?” said Simon.

  “I know you are tired,” said Francisco. “But I want you to watch something before you sleep.”

  “Aye.”

  The Mexican made two large knots and looped them in rhythmic fashion. “And that Simon is how you tie a bowline, sí?”

  “Aye sir, I see.”

  “One more time,” said Francisco. He untied and then slowly tied the bowline in distinct movements, stopping at each one and looking at the deckhand who nodded in acknowledgement.

  “Now I want you to tie it like I just did, then untie it, then tie it again,” Francisco said as he loosed the knot and it fell again to formless rope.

  Simon focused intently as he looped the rope over and about, the captain and Jerimiah also peeking on. He fumbled and the knots came apart before they were tied.

  “It is alright,” Francisco said. “Just try again and show me how, show me merely the first tie.”

  Simon placed the lines over top of one another as if layering them, he looked back at Francisco. He paused and then tied a simple overhand knot in the middle of the rope, tying another and another without form or security.

  Francisco looked at the captain and frowned.

  “I am sorry,” said Simon. “It is oft that my mind confuses things in this manner.”

  “Get some sleep,” whispered Francisco.

  A running rope cut through the ether sounding like a chorus of bees singing in unison. “Damn!” yelled Isaac.

  The captain paced toward the writer as the line spun through his hands and l
oosed about the winch, the sail likewise flapping in a disorganized manner.

  “Halfwit!” said the captain. “Set that taut about the coil god damnit!” he shouted as the line flopped aimlessly.

  Francisco ran in and coiled the rope instantaneously, his hands moving before his mind registered the command.

  The writer squatted and opened and closed his hands.

  “Your hands have seen little labor, I see,” said Lukas. The two sat on stools below deck and swayed with the waves.

  Lukas inspected Isaac’s palms with one hand, grasping the handle of a bronze candlestick with the other. The centers of the writer’s palms were open and raw but did not bleed.

  “Mine were constructed for the pen,” said Isaac. “And yours, surgeon?” he said, glimpsing at the surgeons chapped and lined palms as he worked.

  “Was once a stone mason,” said the surgeon without looking away from his work.

  “Ah,” said the writer. The surgeon poured whiskey unto Isaac’s hands, and the writer grimaced.

  “What there?” asked the writer as Lukas uncorked a thin vial.

  “Oil of the olive,” said he. He layered the stuff onto the palms with the care a painter takes upon a new canvas, finally wrapping those palms with cloth strips.

  “Stonework to medicine,” said Isaac. “Not a path taken by many men, I do not think.”

  “No,” said the surgeon.

  “My own father and uncle were stone cutters, of Milan.”

  The surgeon nodded.

  Isaac studied Lukas. “Forgive me for stepping out of place,” he said suddenly. “How does a stone mason acquire funds to board and study at a University of Medicine? My own time at Cambridge-”

  “The pirate,” he said, nodding toward the ladder. Lights and shadows from moving men ebbed and bounced downward.

  “You looted innocents?”

  “I did,” said Lukas. “Now I may treat them.”

  “You seem at peace with that.”

  “Never at peace, Isaac. The learned things of the world are oft built on blood and filth and things men would rather not see, myself included in that lot.”

  “I see. Yet you will profit from it.”

  “You are not my judge, Isaac.”

  The captain descended below deck, followed by Julius. He looked at the duo with a scowl. “Isaac,” he said.

  In steerage the captain rolled out the map on the carpenter’s bench affixed to the bulkhead. He moved it until the light caught it and ran his finger atop Norp Aegir.

  Isaac looked at the pirate captain in silence as he appeared to be studying the words as one might a rigorous text.

  “Now here,” said the captain, “Is nor…nor…”

  “Northern Ocean,” finished Isaac, leaning in and tracing the words with his fingers. A faded red started to seep through the bandages. “Or Sea of the North,” he said, pointing to each distinct letter though worn and blended with the very fabric of the map. “The letter N, our tongue or theirs, e-n,” he said slowly. “En, O,” he drew out the consonants and vowels. “Like an O that the mouth shapes when making the sound, captain.”

  “Northern Ocean, where we soon approach,” replied the captain. “So these characters, nor,” he said.

  “North,” Isaac said. “Yes captain, but of an older tongue, albeit similar in tone.”

  “Nor is always North then?”

  “It gets a little more involved than that. But a good start.”

  “Let’s get back up,” the captain said, rolling the map and tying it and pushing it in a cubby below the bench.

  With a brick of soapstone Julius sanded the quarterdeck in rhythmic motions back and forth; ahead of him Jerimiah swabbed.

  “That’s it brother,” said the Captain. “Lean your body into it.”

  “I know how!” countered Julius loudly. The captain’s face twisted and he walked away briskly.

  “Captain,” said Herb. “Should we not see the coasts of the Greenland island by now? Should we not see ice?”

  The Cree brother and sister laughed.

  “Let the sea farers take concern for the sea,” Arnaaluk said.

  “Yes,” said the captain. “That elephant gun may be needed. Until then, keep your mouth shut.”

  “What did you hunt in the West?” asked Isaac. “I would like to write of it one day.”

  Herb slowly turned toward the sea and a long pause followed.

  “Speak up man!” said Francisco. “Now is your chance for glory.”

  “Indeed,” said Isaac. “Or is your glory only the occasional seabird?”

  “Little glory to be had in an elk or two,” said Herb. “Ducks in the hot of August, when they wade carelessly about the many pools of the western mountains.”

  “Ducks!” screamed Nukilik.

  Julius laughed.

  “Ducks!” the Cree screamed again, and Julius laughed to the point of breathlessness.

  “Do you have any pelts on your hearth?” asked Isaac. “Wherever that may be?”

  “I have felled two Grizzly Bears in the Rocky Mountains of the great west,” said the hunter Isaac, humbler and more reserved than was his normal manner.

  “As opposed to what”? said the captain.

  “Well the black bear be less of a concern. And wolves only if you are stranded or starving, ‘les you run into a cat scowling down at you from some red rock cliffside. Now bull bears like that ain’t good eatin but they better than boiled leather and Chicory Roots.”

  The Mexican spun around and his eyes lit up. “The Rocky Mountains? The Northern fringes of the Mexican Territory?”

  Herb shook his head. “That’s too far south,” he said. “Yet I follow the same rivers as do the Crow Nations. Westward, mostly, but when the winters became too fierce for even Moose to tread, which they to do every twentieth winter or so, I would sometimes follow the mountains down to the northern most banks of the Rio Colorado. In the Autumn time.”

  “Grizzly Bears? The beasts they say can eat a man?” inquired Jerimiah.

  “They give no second chances,” said Herb. “Sometimes in dreams do they come back to me.”

  “The bear in dreams can be a good portent or bad both,” said Nukilik as he scrubbed the deck. He stopped and took a drink and wiped his face. “Though I am guessing you care not for portents.”

  “I always had an air of the superstition about me, Cree,” said Herb. “Though I don’t want yous anywhere nears my country I will admit that you know the lands better than us.”

  “As if we are one entity,” said Arnaaluk.

  “To them we are,” said Nukilik and he continued scrubbing the deck.

  “Go on,” said Francisco.

  “I seldom talk,” said the hunter.

  “Ah, but forgive me,” said Francisco. “For such a beast, how many shots, I wonder, to fell it? My curiosity is unquenchable.”

  Isaac side-eyed Francisco, and the Mexican grinned devilishly.

  “Terror rushing all together,” said Herb, his scarred face frowning. The rest of the men stopped working and looked toward the hunter.

  “I remember naught of the circumstances that put me in the thing’s path. There be a mutilated Mule Deer ahead on the trail but by the time I comprehended that it was…too late.”

  “Then?” said Francisco.

  “Beast was just upon me, Francisco. I remember having to look upwards even as it ran. As the baby pines shook so did it, trembling almost. Could not frame how such a lumbering animal ran so fast, it didn’t seem right yet it did. As a horse gallop so did it.”

  “Did you fall the thing with that,” said the Mexican pointing to the elephant gun which leaned near the bow as it usually did.

  “I procured that weapon as a direct result of that encounter of which now I speak,” said Herb. “I know not if I used my flintlock or eighteen-nineteen first. Two shots rang out, it be as if I wasn’t even firing, Francisco.”

  “Did two shots complete the task?” asked Isaac.

 
; “It was on me after that and it be like sharp hammers comin down on me, on my face, on my belly. I lay there I think for longer than a man should, pulsating with agony and it circled me as if a man savorin his comin meal I guess. Why I always carry two primed flintlocks, God be praised.”

  “God be praised,” repeated Lukas.

  “I don’t remember shootin the third round but when I came to in the dark the bear be crumpled in a mass not far from me, jaws agape,” the hunter went on. “Them jaws I see in my dreams time to time, and the smell of ‘em. I be layin there under the moon lookin at him for hours and it was like he lookin back at me with this hollow rage in his dead yellow eyes, as if to say ‘this ain’t over yet brother.’”

  Herb leaned onto the gunwale and crossed his arms and shook his head. “Not yet brother,” he said.

  A heavy silence fell over the ship and only the gentle waves were heard.

  After a long pause Francisco raised his cup. “Yet here you stand my friend,” he said.

  The other men followed suit and raised their cups, subtle clinks of silver upon silver, all in unison.

  “Hear hear!” toasted Francisco, and the crew drank in unison.

  “More of that rum,” said the captain.

  Simon fetched from below deck a dark bottle and the men partook once more.

  “Hear hear!” came a shout.

  “Hear hear!” all in unison.

  XVI

  Under a golden dome the Ordained ate and wrote amidst the smooth melody of a harpsicord. Papers lay unread; others dried and scribbled with orders from wet nib. Enveloping him were bundles of furs and some stacked together and tied with hemp. Fox, which shined redly through the fabric in which it was encased, Minx, Otter and Beaver. Though the Beaver itself was stacked high upon shelves and marked New France Only.

  A clatter of voices came from outside the chamber.

  The Ordained wiped his mouth and rose and unhinged the iron latch of the door, which was detailed with etchings of running beaver and caribou, all running toward the top crest of the door and over the golden friezes.

  “They’ve arrived,” came the voice from Dupan.

  “Good, splendid,” said the Ordained. “The pelts and the silver?”

  “Their quota met for the pelts. Though short on the silver.”