by Morris West
Johnny Akimoto was bending over the fire, stoking it with driftwood. He straightened when he saw me. His calm eyes were full of questions. I told him bluntly.
“She knows, Johnny.”
He looked at me, wondering. “Knows what, Renboss?” “Why we are here—about the treasure-ship—everything.”
“You told her?”
“I had to, Johnny. She found this on the reef.”
I spun the coin in the air, caught it and slapped it into his palm. He looked at it for a long time without speaking.
“I had to tell her, don’t you see, Johnny? If I hadn’t . . .”
He looked up at me. His dusky face was beaming. “I understand, Renboss.
I understand very well.”
“Did I do right, Johnny?”
“I think, you did right, Renboss,” said Johnny Akimoto. “Now there are three of us.”
It was easier now that there were no secrets between us. Every morning Johnny and I carried Pat down to the beach and made her comfortable under the awning. She was growing stronger now and the area of infection was receding down the calf towards the ankle. Soon she would be able to hobble about, but for the present she had no choice but to lie on the stretcher under the canvas and read or doze or write up her notebooks or watch the small bobbing shape of the dinghy, where Johnny and I were diving.
We were working the outer fringe of the reef now—the small narrow shelf where the anchor hit sand at ten fathoms. We had not yet begun our search for the Dona Lucia. I was still training, adapting body and brain to new conditions of depth and pressure. I was learning the art of decompression—staging slowly to the surface ten or fifteen feet at a time, resting after each ascent to prevent the accumulation of nitrogen in the bloodstream. At first I clung to the anchor-cable, measuring my ascent as if on a notched stick. In the fantastic underwater world is seemed at first like a link with reality, and in my first contacts with the strangeness and terror of deep waters I clung to it desperately, while I struggled to regain my self-control.
I made new acquaintances, too. Acquaintances who might become enemies, but who seemed content for the present at least to regard me as a curious phenomenon in their undisputed territory: the long, slim Spanish mackerel with his predatory saw-toothed mouth; the big groper, huge and bloated; the scarlet emperor; the big snapper whose flanks are striped with the broad arrows; and now and again a cruising shark.
As first I was terrified. Then I learnt to lie still, suspended in the blue water, while the fish stared at me coldly and then whisked off when I blew out a stream of bubbles or clapped my hands in the fashion of a child.
Johnny said little until he saw me gain confidence and then he talked to me calmly, logically, about danger.
“There is always danger, Renboss. Never forget that. We do not know how a fish thinks, so we cannot tell what he will do. A dog—yes, a horse—yes. They belong to our world. They have lived with us for thousands of years. But a fish—who knows. One day a shark may come at you. You will have little warning. He will swim towards you. He will stop. He will circle. Then go away, perhaps. And the next second he will be coming at you like a bullet.”
I grinned sourly. “What then, Johnny?”
He shrugged. “You are in the world of fishes. You must fight like a fish—by swimming, by twisting and turning away, by trying to frighten him.”
“And if he won’t be frightened?”
“You have a knife. You must try to strike him in the belly. There is no other way.”
Always it was the same lesson—conquer fear by understanding. Conquer danger by courage and common sense. Naked in the underwater world a man has no other weapons.
Sometimes Johnny himself would come down with me. I would see him swimming about fifty feet above clad in nothing but a mask and a breech-clout and a belt with a long knife in a leather sheath. I would lie on my back and watch him. I would see his dark body double up like a jack-knife, then stiffen into a long, shearing dive that brought him down eight, nine fathoms in a matter of seconds. Then I would see how the pressure of the water squeezed his belly and his lungs and his rib-case until I thought the bones must crack under the enormous strain, but he would still swim with me a little and grin behind his goggles and raise his hand in a comical gesture before he slanted upwards into the sunlight.
I was proud of my new-found skill, but Johnny’s was an older one and a greater one. I could breathe. I had air in bottles on my back to keep me comfortable for an hour or more, but Johnny had nothing but two lungfulls and his own strength and skill and calm courage. Then, when the lessons were over, we would row back to the beach, totting the small sums of my new knowledge. And when the shadows lengthened we would sit beside the fire and eat the meal Johnny had cooked, while Pat Mitchell lay on the mattress and added her small, wise voice to the quiet flow of our talk.
One evening in the warm darkness she gave voice to a thought that had vexed me for a long time.
“About your treasure-ship, Renn. . . . ”
“What about it, Pat?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot these last days. It was wrecked outside the reef, wasn’t it?”
I nodded. “I think so. I think it must have been. When I was away from the island I used to believe there might be a possibility that she had been flung onto the reef itself and broken up. The finding of my coin seemed to confirm that. Now that I’m here, I’m not so sure.”
Then Johnny Akimoto spoke.
“I think it was outside, Renboss. I am sure it was outside.”
“What makes you so sure, Johnny?” asked Pat.
“I will tell you, Miss Pat. This Spaniard—she is a bigger ship than my Wahine, yes?’’
“Much bigger, Johnny,” I said. “Two hundred tons—three hundred, maybe.”
“So. . . . Now look at the Wahine. She is a small boat, yet she draws five feet of water. It takes a big sea to lift a boat like that and throw it into the middle of the reef. More likely I think, that your Spaniard drove straight onto the outer reef, stuck there, perhaps, until the water and the wind hauled him off and he sank on the ledge.”
“It reads all right, Johnny,” I said, “but how do you explain the coins in the rock-pool?”
“That’s the point I was making, Renn.” Pat’s voice was eager and full of conviction. “It wasn’t the ship. It was the men.”
“The men?”
“Yes. Think of what happens in a wreck. They are out of control in uncharted waters. They know there is land but they have no idea whether it is inhabited or not. It’s the natural instinct of men in danger to cling to whatever possessions they have. The ship strikes. They know she must founder. The boats are useless on the reef. They jump and try to swim to the island. What would a man take with him when he jumped?”
Johnny Akimoto’s voice came out of the darkness.
“I can tell you that, Miss Pat. His knife and his money-belt.”
And there it was. A neat hypothesis, certainly. A piece of logic that gave me new respect for this small brown girl with the proud chin and the dark, flashing eyes. But there were other things I wanted to know.
“If that’s the way it happened, some of them must have reached the shore. I’ve been all over the island and I’ve never seen any traces of them.”
“No, Renboss,” said Johnny. “If the ship broke up on the night of the storm, none of them would have survived. The surf would have rolled them over the reef and tom them to pieces. After that, there would be the blood and the sharks. You see?”
“Yes, Johnny. I see. I see something else, too. If your theory and Pat’s are right, then we’ve an even-money chance of finding the Dona Lucia on the outer shelf.”
“That is if she did not break up, but foundered immediately.”
“That’s the even-money chance.”
For the moment nothing more was said. It was a working theory. We should have to test it. And to test it, Johnny Akimoto and I would have to dive over hundreds of yards of shelf
outside the reef, ten fathoms down. Deeper, perhaps, because the shelf was narrow in places and the Dona Lucia could have slid and rolled down the sloping edge into the blue depths of the ocean. And if she did, I would have to go down alone, because the limit of Johnny’s dive was ten fathoms higher than mine.
Johnny Akimoto stood up and began to pile more brushwood on the fire. I went into the tent and brought back a blanket for Pat’s shoulders. When we were seated again she made a small announcement.
“I walked today.”
“What?”
“I walked. It was painful at first, but after I’d hobbled about for a while it wasn’t too bad.”
Johnny’s deep voice chided her.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Miss Pat. You can’t afford to take chances.”
“It wasn’t a chance really, Johnny. The swelling’s gone down—most of it, anyway. If I do a little each day, it won’t hurt me. . . .”
I caught the odd note in her voice and looked towards her; but her eyes were in shadow and I saw only the defiant lift of her chin.
“So now you can send me home any time you like.”
Chapter 10
A TWIG exploded into a shower of sparks. New flames leapt up among the driftwood. The noddy-terns in the giant pisonia-tree chattered stridently and then fell silent. There was the distant boom of the surf, the steady whisper of the wind, the creak of branches and the small rustle of leaves and beach-grasses.
Between the three people on the outer edge of the circle of firelight there was a long silence. Then Pat Mitchell spoke again. Her voice was steady and controlled.
“Will you take me back, Johnny?”
Johnny’s voice answered her from the shadows.
“That’s for Renboss to say, Miss Pat. I work for him. This is his island.”
And there it was laid neatly in my lap. A decision that I had to make at a moment when I had neither wish nor need to make it. Abruptly and unreasonably I was angry. I said bluntly, “Do you want to go back?”
“No.”
I stood up. I tossed my cigarette away irritably. I heard the words come tumbling out and did not recognise my own voice.
“Then, if you can walk, you can damn well work. You can cook the meals and keep the camp tidy. You can plot the reef where I want it plotted. You can stay in the boat while Johnny and I go down together. And for God Almighty’s sake keep your mouth shut and don’t get under our feet.”
With which courtly little speech I left them and walked down to the beach with the uneasy conviction that I had made a fool of myself.
The moon was rising; a great cold disc in a purple sky. Its track lay across the water in a broad blade of rippling silver. The Wahine lay in the middle of it, riding at anchor with bare spars, like a ghost ship.
Far out on the rim of the reef I could see the white froth of the surf-line. I could see the uneasy water with the channel cut through the coral. I knew, almost to a yard, the position of the rock-pools where Pat Mitchell had found her coin and where Jeannette and I found ours.
Jeannette. . . . I realized with a shock that I had not thought of her for a long time. When I tried to recall her face I could not. There was a new face there, engraven on the tablets of memory, a small, brown, lovely gipsy face, crowned with dark hair. I knew that I had just committed a singular folly. I knew that I could not recall it. I looked out again towards the dark water beyond the reef. I told myself that the time of preparation was over. Tomorrow we would begin work.
Tomorrow Johnny and I would plot a line on the outer edge of the reef and we would search it, step by step, on the sea-floor for a ship that had died more than two centuries ago. And if we did not find it I would have to summon my small courage and move out from the safety of the shelf into the blue pelagic deeps beyond.
I would go down into a continent of giants—among the manta ray which fly like great bats through the blue twilight, among the killer sharks and the giant gropers. I would go down to the fringe of madness, where the detritus of life from the upper levels filtered down to feed the other lives, nameless, primitive, in the ooze of the ocean floor.
I was suddenly cold and afraid.
Johnny Akimoto’s footfalls in the sand made me start like an animal.
“Miss Pat says to thank you, Renboss.”
“I’m a fool, Johnny . . . a bloody fool.”
‘‘No. Renboss,” said Johnny quietly, “no man is a fool when he does what his heart tells him to do.”
“It’s not a question of my heart, Johnny. It’s a question of. . . of time—and convenience. We start work tomorrow.”
“Yes, Renboss.”
I raised my arm and pointed, drawing a wide arc across the sector of the reef where the coins had been found.
“That’s where it will be, Johnny. Thirty, forty yards to the right of the channel and from there to the big nigger-head.”
“That’s a lot of water, Renboss.”
“That’s why we start work tomorrow.”
“Miss Pat says to use her boat, Renboss. It is bigger than our dinghy and easier to work in the outside water.”
“She is a shrewd one, isn’t she, Johnny?” I said, with sour admiration.
“No, Renboss, she is not shrewd. She wants to show us that she is grateful for letting her stay.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps, but she knows what she wants, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, Renboss. She knows what she wants.”
“And what does she want, Johnny?”
“Why not ask her yourself? Good night, Renboss.”
He gave me a wide grin, turned on his heel and left me.
I walked slowly up the beach to the big tent. I brushed my teeth and sluiced my face from the water-bucket. I doused the warm coals and watched the fire die in small clouds of smoky ash and hissing steam. I slacked off the guy-ropes a little against the damp of the night. Then I took off my shirt and shoes and went into the tent. I lay down on my stretcher, pulled the sheet over me, lit a cigarette and lay back, watching the small hypnotic glow of the tobacco-tip in the darkness.
From the other side of the tent came a small, uncertain voice. “Renn?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“No need to thank me. I did what I wanted to do.”
“Thank you for that, too.”
I said in a fiat voice, “Do you want a cigarette?”
“Yes, please, Renn.”
I threw back the sheet, crossed the tent, handed her a cigarette, then lit it for her. In the brief flare of the match her face looked like an old cameo, timelessly beautiful. I stood looking down at her while the flame burnt down and scorched my fingers. Then I threw it on the floor and kicked sand over it. I said bluntly, “Tomorrow you’d better go back to your own tent.”
“Yes, Renn.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Renn.”
I went back to bed. I drew a blanket over me because I was cold. I did not go to sleep for a long, long time.
In the morning over breakfast we made our plans. The tide was high, so our search of the rock-pools for more relics of the ancient wreck would have to wait till later. There was a fiat calm, so we would be able to work the boat close to the reef and move gradually outward to the extreme edge of the shelf. My training exercises had already used a third of our air-bottles. We would have to conserve the rest, not only for the search but for salvage operations if we did find the Dona Lucia. This worried me. Underwater work is slow. We had a big area to cover, and if I had to go down into deep water it would be slower still. Then Pat Mitchell came up with her suggestion.
We would weight the anchor-cable of the work-boat with pig-lead from the Wahine ballast. We would trail it a fathom short of the shelf bottom. I would go down and cling to it and, with the motor at half-speed, they would drag me along in continuous sweeps along the whole length of the search area. Given a few hours of calm, we could make our first survey of the shallow waters. A fishing-line attac
hed to my belt would be held at the upper end by Johnny Akimoto, and if the lines fouled or I wanted to stop and examine a given area, or if danger threatened, I could tug on the line and signal. It was simple, time-saving and economical. Pat Mitchell was childishly gratified when we agreed to it.
Leaving Pat to hobble about cleaning the dishes and tidying the camp, Johnny and I took the work-boat out to the Wahine. Johnny fastened the pig-lead into a bag of heavy fishnet and secured it at the top with stout cord. We took fresh air-bottles from the crates—three sets—enough for four hours’ work, with a little to spare for safety. Then Johnny took one of the rifles from the cabin locker and shoved three slips of ammunition into the pocket of his shorts.
“Just for safety, Renboss.” He grinned.
Then he took out a long rod of polished wood, like the shaft of a golf-club with a barbed spearhead at the top.
“What’s that for, Johnny?”
“Fish-spear.”
“For me?”
His teeth showed in a flashing grin.
“For me, Renboss. In case you get into trouble and I have to come down after you.”
It was a grim reminder that we were engaged, not in holiday sport, but in a dangerous enterprise, with wealth or death at the end of it.
We loaded the gear into the work-boat and Johnny, meticulous as ever, oiled the outboard motor, cleaned it, primed it and filled the small tank with petrol. Then we went back to the beach.
Pat Mitchell was waiting for us. She had made our lunch and packed it in a wooden box with a billy of cold tea. My harness and flippers were ready on the sand. She smiled happily when I acknowledged her forethought.
Desire stirred in me when I saw her standing there—small, brown and perfect, boyish in a checked shirt, open at the throat, and denim shorts, a canvas cap flopping comically over her forehead.
We loaded the boat, pushed off, started the engine and puttered across the glassy water to the channel entrance. Then I noticed two things which must have escaped me while Johnny and I were loading the gear. They were glass floats covered with fishnet, each with a small lead weight hanging on the underside.
“Marker-buoys,” said Johnny. “We used them for the lobster-pots. Now we use them to mark where we start and where we finish. We cruise between them, working farther and farther out. When we have finished we bring them in again.”