Aha!
March 16
Silky sharks are mangrove dwellers normally, but the ones in this region have developed an affinity for juvenile cuttlefish, which make their nurseries in the sea grass. Ida’s already tagged one of the large maternal females, whom she’s dubbed Myrtle, and Fidelia’s using the university camera to snap a few photographs.
Below the passage, off in the margin of the page, her father had sketched a long, thin, fernlike leaf, with such thick, fibrous fronds that it almost looked like a feather.
Fidelia turned the book sideways. Parrot-feather leaf, her father had labeled it.
Low salinity and high temperature waters, tropical and subtropical. Anchored in rock beds, low drag. Fibrous leaf structure allows for air filtration and maximum surf flotation.
Filtration.
That word jumped out at Fidelia like a mako caught on a line.
She scoured the rest of the page for any information about the leaf, but the only other notes Arthur took on March 16 were to describe algae that grew on the bellies of sea lions.
Parrot-feather leaf !
Fidelia’s brain churned and whirred like a well-tuned engine. She found a blank sheet of paper in her observation book and, again, sketched out a prototype of the Water-Eater — the mouthpiece, the cylinder, the oxygen chambers …
This time, in lieu of the filtration system she had created — the tarred filter with the holes — she drew a parrot-feather leaf, placed gently sideways between the faux scales and the chamber. She reran her calculations.
It could work, she realized. It could really work!
The tropics were full of sea-grass meadows. In the morning, when daylight was on her side, when the Jewel was closer to their destination, she’d scope one out.
It would work. It had to work.
Bursting with the sort of confidence that always accompanied these frizzled, harebrained breakthroughs of hers, she dropped her pen on her observation book, sat back, folded her arms, and actually grinned.
It was then that she noticed the shadow, again, hovering above her. Merrick stood beside her, blue eye glinting.
“So you did it,” he said.
She nodded. “I think so.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?”
An ominous thing to say.
But nothing Merrick said could crush her now. This feeling, this rush of solving the puzzle, the flutter of possibilities flapping through her mind … This feeling was a memory, and she nestled into it, snug and content.
She would not let herself think about the fact that her parents weren’t around to join her celebration.
She would not.
A week later, she finally crawled out to meet the day and had to remove her peach spectacles to peek at the sun; she’d grown accustomed to the darkness of the cave, to the dim candlelight above her as she read book after book. She’d read all the novels in the grotto and had even paged through a fair number of sea charts and encyclopedias, until there was nothing left to do but sit, and worry, and wonder, and finger the brooch on her chest.
The brooch. Marry me, he’d asked as he pinned it to her dress, and she would have done it that very night.
Her eyes adjusted as she walked down the cliffs to the stretch of beach, and that’s when she saw him.
Just a body, lying in the shallows, crumpled like a wad of paper.
It was Merrick.
She ran to him, tearing across the sand with weak legs, and lifted his head onto her lap. He was alive, barely, and he croaked with closed eyes, “Bridgewater … almost had the Jewel … Swam back here alone … the others, the others were …”
He looked at her.
“Your eye!” She soon realized it didn’t matter how many times she used the hem of her white dress to wipe away the blood that pooled on his face. The eye was permanently red, almost turned inside out. She gagged at the sight of it, at the sight of him.
“Cannon hit the mast …” he said. “A splinter ricocheted … hit my eye …” He shuddered. “We outran him, but barely … Charlie’s hiding the ship on some island … He and Elle are okay, but the rest of them — the rest of them — he’s got them on the prison barge —”
He suddenly tried to stand.
“Hold still.” She pressed down on his chest. “You have to lie down. I’ll bring you some water.”
“No, no.” He clutched her arm. “Stay. Stay just a little longer.”
A plea to stay. How the tides have changed, she wanted to shout, wanted to slap him and swim away with the dolphins. But she stayed.
“Jewel,” he murmured. “Jewel …”
It was his pet name for her.
But her heart sank, down past the waves and the reefs, to the bottom of the sea, because she knew he wasn’t calling for her.
His ship. The Jewel. His greatest love.
Merrick’s eye was gone. That much was certain. Inside the grotto, she cleaned it as best she could, but what remained of the pupil had already begun scabbing, a film of red tissue building over the injury, the socket darkening and deepening. But the damage to his eye was the least of her concerns.
There was something else missing from Merrick, something delicate that had dried and hardened. A steel exterior that had always existed to everyone else, never to her — and now, it was all she could see when she looked at him. Cold and reflective. A mirror, her own confusion blinking back at herself.
“But if he is there … and we attack him from the north …” Merrick made conversations only with himself as he poured over his sea charts, his maps of the known and unknown world. He schemed day and night, pausing only to sip from one of his reserve bottles, draining the rum like it was medication. She tried to slip him bowls of fresh water, plates full of jackfruit cut into hearts, candies from BonBon Voyage Sweets Shop, but he acted like they were as invisible as she was.
Bloody Elle and Cheapshot Charlie made their way back into the grotto, one at a time, and Merrick barely greeted them beyond hammering out instructions for his strike on the prison. Then it was the three of them plotting on maps, sketching out possible courses — circumnavigating whole continents if they had to, all to surprise the Queen’s Own Navy and break out their crew. The three of them ignored her as she withered away in the grotto, as if she were a prisoner of Merrick’s instead of his supposed future bride.
And so nobody noticed when she slipped out of the grotto in a dory. Not even Merrick did, until he called for a book on tidal shifts in the tropics, and instead of receiving yet another lesson on the library’s card catalog system, there was only quiet.
“Where’d she go?” Merrick held up a handkerchief to catch the blood seeping from his black-and-red eye and listened — for the sound of pages rustling, for the sound of her breathing. But all he could hear was the dripping of a stalactite, the faint softness of the faraway waterfall.
“Captain.” Cheapshot Charlie pointed to the docks. “A dory is missing.”
Merrick’s arm muscles burned as he steered the Jewel out of the grotto and into daylight. Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle did their best to rush the ship across the sea.
They searched her hometown. No sign of her. They backtracked and searched the mainland’s every coast, every library, every bookstore, every sweets shop — no sign of her.
“Where else would she be?” they asked, perplexed.
And suddenly Merrick knew.
But even as they accomplished the impossible, manning a fifteen-person ship with a crew of three, Merrick rarely thought of her, basking in the shade of a jackfruit tree, the new brooch pinned to her white dress. He was fantasizing about a beet-faced man in uniform dropping to his knees, begging Merrick for mercy. Every hour spent dealing with her dramatic escape meant Bridgewater slipped farther and farther away.
And so, a week later, when he rowed one of the Jewel’s dories along the stretch of turquoise water, near the beach with the white sand and palm trees that he and his men had frequented over the yea
rs, his hands were tense, his face hard, impatience shining from his remaining blue eye.
“So you finally looked up,” she said, her oars jutting out at odd angles into the water.
He snorted. “Do I truly have to defend my voracious reading to you?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Not anymore.” Rowing the dory had blistered her palms; she flinched as she took a drink of water from a blackjack.
“You didn’t row all the way here,” he said.
“No,” she answered, her mouth a long black line. “Hopped a ride with a beanie ship, then sneaked away with their longboat and a whole crate of cocoa beans when the ship was asleep.” She raised her eyebrows. “I’d make quite a pirate, wouldn’t I?”
“Come back to the grotto,” he said. “As soon as I free my crew, I’ll take a break from —”
“We both know that’s not true,” she said. “You can’t resist the admiral.” She smiled, but behind her peach glasses, her eyes were sad. “As long as he’s still alive, there’s only one way it will end. Either you die or Admiral Bridgewater dies.”
“Bridgewater is the one who dies,” Merrick growled, “and then you and I —”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like? To be set aside, like a task to be gotten to later? When I saw you on that beach —” Her voice broke; she cleared her throat and tried again. “There’s a reason pirates don’t live long enough to retire,” she said. “Your life is gunfights, and enemies, and danger. There’s no room for anything else.” Or anyone, she clarified to herself.
She held the brooch in her palm; Merrick hadn’t even noticed that it wasn’t pinned to her chest. The pewter didn’t catch the sunlight or reflect it; it absorbed it, somehow. Like a little gray storm cloud in her hand.
Images flashed through her mind: a week spent pacing and fretting in the grotto … the way her heart had stopped when she found him strung across the sand like dried-out kelp …
“Jewel, please,” he said, and he made his words soft again — quite the trick, she thought. “As soon as Bridgewater is gone, we can go anywhere. I’ll take some time off work — a whole year. We’ll see the world —”
“A year is not enough.” She gritted her teeth to keep from yelling. “I want more. I want a lifetime — a proper lifetime, not just a pirate’s.”
“I can —”
“I want you to stop.” There. She’d said it. “Stop pirating. Stop and be with me.”
Before he could hold it in, he laughed — threw his head back and laughed, and she experienced, for a moment, what it was like to be ambushed by Merrick the Monstrous.
“I can give you anything in the world,” he said. “Anything at all — just not that.”
She shook her head, her face incredulous. “You really won’t stop. Not even for me.”
Merrick stared at her with his remaining eye — sapphire blue and cold as the polar seas. “Why not ask the moon to become a daylight creature?” he said. “Or ask a shark to give up his teeth? This is who I am. This is the man you love.”
“And what a fool I am for it,” she said softly.
Marry me, he’d said.
No, he’d ordered it. Ordered, as if the whole world were his ship and he the captain of it all — as if she were his to command.
Her sister had been right. She’d been a fool to trust a pirate with her heart.
She tilted her palm. “Here’s another piece of treasure for your cave,” she said, and she dropped the brooch into the water, where it sank down, down, to the mouth of the cave. His beloved cave, with his beloved gold and jewels.
She didn’t bother to watch the pewter disappear in the shimmering depths; she picked up her oars and rowed away.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he snapped. “Come with me. I’ll take you home.”
But she kept rowing.
“Jewel! Where are you going?” Merrick didn’t shout this until she was already a dot on the horizon. Such a display, from a woman he thought was all tenderness and books. Her behavior would have been worthy of a flogging if she were a member of his crew.
And this is how he had to think of her, to keep himself from shattering — as if she were just a lowly deckhand who had mouthed off and mutinied and now carried herself to her own exile. Marooned herself.
He glanced into the water. Something inside him twisted to think of the pewter brooch in his cave, touching his gold. Tainting it. He wished she’d hurled it into the waves like a broken seashell — lost in the ocean where it belonged.
Now he’d have to see it again someday.
Back in the grotto, Cheapshot Charlie and Bloody Elle had barely tied off the Jewel when Merrick leaped onto the dock and began packing ropes, food, and booze.
“Get your things,” he said. “We leave now.”
“Leave for where, Captain?” Cheapshot Charlie dared to ask.
“A thousand blue notes says Bridgewater’s camping out up near the prison barge. He’ll be expecting us.” Merrick refilled his pistol with fresh ammunition and practiced aiming it, his damaged eye already squinted for accuracy. “Let’s not disappoint him.”
“Captain,” Bloody Elle said, “where is she?”
Merrick rolled up his sea charts and placed them in a knapsack. “Gone,” he said. “Now, where’s the tar?”
His comrades exchanged a look. “Aren’t you going to go after her?” Bloody Elle pressed.
“I did,” Merrick said. “I did chase her. And she made her choice.” The gleam in his remaining eye said it all: end of discussion. “If we leave now, we’ll reach Bridgewater by morning. So pack the coffee and cast off.”
Fidelia fell into memories of what it was like to spend days at a time on the water: long spans of tedium followed by mild insanity. The Jewel had covered an incredible distance in a small amount of time — had sailed through three oceanic climates, down most of the mainland coast, and had even survived a run-in with the Undertow. “We’re close,” Merrick said between coughs, and as soon as the sunlight was strong enough, Fidelia parked herself near the port side railing with her binoculars and began scanning for sea-grass meadows.
The ocean levels had shrunk. The Jewel was cruising through water depths of less than a hundred feet now, and Fidelia spotted the many animals of the sunlit zone: a lone bluefin tuna, who darted away from the ship at double speed; three or four hammerheads, their strange craniums oscillating as they swam; a few men-of-war undulating like tissues in the water; and a common white surf clam.
A clam! She watched it closely as they moved past it; it yawned open, basking in the sunlight on its massive pink tongue, then sank back down below the surface.
Fidelia smiled. It felt like a message from her parents —
Hold on. You’re so close.
Just get his treasure, and then you’ll go home.
“There!” She pointed to a patch about fifty yards away — dark and amorphous, swaying under the water like a fluid sea monster, its strands floating to the surface like green mermaid’s hair.
The captain, at the helm, was huddled in his peacoat despite the warm temperature of the tropics. But he motioned for Bloody Elle to climb down the rope dangling from the stern and pick a few leaves.
“You’re putting your life in the hands of a leaf ?” Cheapshot Charlie stared at the parrot-feather leaf with utter distrust.
“Absolutely,” Fidelia said. She took the leaf to the bench, unscrewed the Water-Eater, and placed her new filter in its position. It fit perfectly, just as she’d known it would.
Bloody Elle appraised the contraption from over Fidelia’s shoulder. “That thing is really going to let you breathe underwater?”
Fidelia turned the Water-Eater around and around, a final check for any kinks or wrinkles. “If I’m truly the inventor Merrick believes I am, then yes.”
“Captain wouldn’t get this wrong,” Bloody Elle said. “It’s too important.” She reached out a hand and touched the dried tar, her swallow tattoo fluttering i
ts wings as her fingers moved. She watched Fidelia looking at the bird. “You said you’ve been to Canquillas?”
“I’ve been to the coast,” Fidelia said.
“Then you know Canquillas is the most beautiful country in the world,” Bloody Elle said. “Those crystal-clear lagoons. The white-capped mountains. Yucca on every hill. But it is very poor. So poor that I was picking pockets by age four, and by age ten, I was the breadwinner in my family.”
Fidelia set down her Water-Eater, listening.
“With a dead mother, two younger sisters, and a crippled father, what else could I do? I stole food, coins, shoes, anything that wasn’t strapped down,” Bloody Elle said. “Every time les bofies caught me, they locked me in the bostiel for the night and slapped one of their brands on me.” She held up a wrist; the bold, black lines circumnavigated her flesh. “Canquillas puts permanent cuffs on their criminals. That way every villager knows, when you reach out to shake their hands, that you’re a thief.”
Fidelia ran her eyes along the tattoos, losing count after twenty lines. “How many times were you caught?”
Bloody Elle lifted the billowing sleeve of her blouse — the black lines continued all the way up her bicep. “They ran out of room by the end. But my family always had rice and beans, and so did the widow next door, and the homeless dog that scratched at our back door for bones.”
Fidelia pointed at the swallow tattoo on Bloody Elle’s hand. “What does the bird mean?”
Bloody Elle smiled. “I got this the night I stole a uniform.”
“A uniform?”
“Took it right off a member of the royal guard,” Bloody Elle said, her eyes twinkling. “I found him staggering drunk by the river and persuaded him to go for a dip.” She grinned. “I ran off with his velvet tunic and bearskins and strolled right in to the bostiel. Unlocked a few of my friends, and anyone else who asked to be released.” Her expression turned serious. “There was only one prisoner who didn’t cry out for me to break him free.”
“Merrick,” Fidelia guessed.
“Yes,” Bloody Elle said. “‘You’re wasting your talents here,’ he told me. ‘This village is too small for you. Come work for me, and your only bounds will be where the seas end and the sky begins.’ But I told him I wouldn’t leave my family behind to rot. And he promised to see them taken care of, if only I would come to his ship right that minute and become a thief on the sea.” She laughed. “He also threatened to slit my throat if I said no. ‘That threat’s emptier than the mayor’s wine jug,’ I told him, ‘considering you’re still behind bars.’ But then he held up the keys, and jingled them — I still don’t know how he lifted them off me. He opened his cell and put his knife to my neck, and that’s when I knew I’d found my captain.”
Race to the Bottom of the Sea Page 17