by David Walton
"Hold your fire!" Sinclair called. "Stand aside."
The tamarins made their way closer, swinging on the ship's low- hanging ropes and spars rather than walking. Each of them wore a single article of clothing: breeches, jerkin, doublet, or hose.
"We don't know what they want," Sinclair said. "Remain calm. Assume they mean us no harm."
He spoke peacefully enough, but Catherine saw Tate and his men checking their weapons. Now was the time.
Where was Chichirico? Was he just going to leave this to her and Father?
One of the grays, wearing not only breeches but a sailor's cap on his head, began to speak loudly, moving his tail in complicated ways. It was too fast to understand. Catherine could only pick up "hairless ones," their term for humans. As he spoke, the other tamarins began fanning out, surrounding the gathered sailors and passengers, who shouted or backed away. Tate and his men advanced, their matchlocks ready.
"Wait!" Catherine pushed through the crowd. Father tried to stop her, but she twisted out of his grasp. She planted herself in front of the nearest tamarin and used both her voice and her hands to say, "Safety, friend," the greeting Chichirico had taught her.
Her heart was pounding out of her chest, but she had to stifle a laugh at the dumbstruck look on Sinclair's face. There, she thought. I can do things you never expected. Everyone stared at her, frozen, waiting to see how the tamarin would respond. It spoke and waved its tail again, but she couldn't tell if it was answering her with pleasantries or threats.
Father stepped forward "Speak slowly," he said, a phrase common from their conversations with Chichirico.
Instead of answering, the one with the sailor's cap presented Sinclair with a bundle of cloth. He accepted it gravely and beckoned to four men, who hefted two chests forward and opened them. Inside were glass beads, small mirrors of burnished metal, and cheap jewelry To the humans, they were not terribly valuable, but in this land they must be rare and unusual, like carvings and cloth from the Indies or Cathay were in Europe. The tamarins ran their pincered hands through the items, speaking animatedly.
It was a cordial exchange of gifts, which seemed a good sign for future dealings. Catherine began to think her language skills wouldn't be necessary. Until Sinclair unwrapped the cloth.
It was an English cloak, the wool dyed a light green, and it was stained with blood.
SINCLAIR stared down at the cloak, the dried blood unmistakable. There were other explanations than murder. Perhaps the cloak's owner had killed an animal, soiling the cloak, and then decided to be rid of it. Or maybe he had died in an accident, and the tamarins had simply found the cloak. But it didn't look good.
Sinclair had traveled to many places and had been on board when captains encountered new peoples for the first time. The trick was to impress the natives with the invincible, magical power of the English ship and its people. If they started to believe the English were weak, that all the rare treasures aboard were available for the taking, then the English would be in grave danger. Intimidation was the key.
He lifted both hands, palms out toward them, and said, "We come in friendship," in a loud and, he hoped, impressive voice. They ignored him. Catherine attempted more speech, but they ignored her, too.
He took a matchlock and powder horn out of the hands of one of his soldiers and showed it to the tamarin with the sailor's cap, who seemed to be the leader among them, though it was hard to tell. The gun was already loaded and primed, so he blew on the match, dashed some powder on the pan, and raised the weapon.
"Wait!" Catherine said. She pointed. The red tamarin, the one from their ship, had appeared from nowhere and was talking to the grays. Sinclair didn't know if that was good or bad. What would it tell them? That the humans had lured it with food and imprisoned it? If the tamarins attacked, he didn't know if Tate and his soldiers could fire without hitting their own people.
He couldn't risk it. A demonstration of their weaponry was the best way to guarantee good behavior. A bird wheeled overhead. Sinclair aimed the matchlock quickly and fired. The weapon roared. The bird flew off unharmed, but the tamarins reacted violently. They leaped high, clambered up into the rigging, and then, hanging upside down by their hooked feet, they let go, dropping straight through the deck just as if they were dropping into a hole.
A moment later, they reappeared, emerging through the gunports in the hull. Each carried an assortment of items: a doublet, a broach, an empty bottle, a length of rope, a knife. They leaped onto their living boat- creatures, which immediately began swimming back toward shore. He could see powerful tails churning under the waterline.
The passengers on deck shouted after the thieves. Tate lifted his weapon. "Should I fire on them, my lord?"
"No. Hold your fire. We don't want to start a war."
Thieving wasn't unusual among island natives, either, though most didn't have the advantage of being able to walk through walls. Finely woven cloth would be a rare treasure to them, as would steel and strong rope. What worried Sinclair was not what they had taken, but what they had left behind. He fingered the bloodstained woolen cloak, wondering about its owner, who was probably dead. The tamarins might just have found his body, but it seemed more likely they had killed him.
He decided to delay the landing party until the next day. The group would have to be well chosen and well armed.
He pointed at Parris and Catherine. "You two. In my cabin."
They followed him. Parris beckoned to Matthew Marcheford, who came along, too, carrying what looked like two wooden boxes.
Once they were inside, Sinclair shut the door and faced them. "How did you do it?"
"We've been speaking to the tamarin much of the voyage. Learning his language, trying to understand him," Parris said.
"How much can you communicate?" Sinclair said.
"It's slow going. We're getting better, but you saw what happened. Catherine tried to greet them, and they ignored her. I don't know if they understood what she said, but I certainly didn't understand what they said."
"Can you teach others what you know?"
Parris shrugged.
"We can try." Catherine said. "It's nothing, though, compared to what we could learn by bonding again."
"No." Both Parris and Matthew said it together. "It's too much of a risk," Parris said. Sinclair eyed Catherine, considering. Was she volunteering? Did she want to try to bond again? After all, they would need to communicate if they wanted to survive here.
"What did our tamarin and the gray ones say to each other?" Sinclair said.
"Our tamarin's name is Chichirico," she said. "The grays are from a different tribe. They weren't happy to see him. I know the word they use for humans— it means hairless— and they combined it with the word for 'like,' as in, 'I like raisins.' I think they were accusing him of being a human- lover.
They all considered this for a moment. "How sure are you?" Sinclair said.
She shrugged. "Not very. I mostly picked up the tone."
"Keep trying. We need to understand what's going on."
"There's one more thing," Parris said. "We wanted to show you these." He said it calmly, but his eyes were dancing— he was excited about something. He motioned Matthew forward, who produced the two wooden boxes, each with a handle and a bell attached.
"What are they?" Sinclair said.
"Devices for communication. Matthew made them."
Sinclair took a closer look. The boxes seemed identical. They were freshly and somewhat inexpertly constructed; the sides weren't entirely flush, and some of the nails were bent. On top of each was mounted a small bell. A string passed from the top of each bell through a hole in the top of each box. On the side of each box was a wooden lever.
"What do they do?" he asked.
"Pull one of the levers," Parris said.
Sinclair did so, expecting that perhaps the lever would pull the string and cause the bell to ring. And in fact, a bell did ring, so that at first he didn't realize what was happening.
He pressed it a second time, and only then it struck him. The bell on the other box had rung.
He looked up in shock. Parris laughed. Matthew and Catherine failed to suppress smiles.
Sinclair reached over and pressed the lever on the second box, causing the bell on the first box to ring. He lifted one of them, examining it on every side. There was no connection whatsoever between the boxes. He walked onto his balcony with it and pressed the lever again, and again the other box rang.
He came back inside, aware that his mouth was hanging open. "This is incredible," he said.
Parris pushed Matthew forward. "Tell him."
Matthew explained what he and Catherine had discovered with the broken fragment of ironfish skull. "I attached a piece of jawbone from different ironfish to each lever. The rest of the skull from each fish is in the opposite box. So when I pull this lever"— he pulled the one on the table, causing the box in Sinclair's hands to ring—"it closes the jaw hinge here, causing the skull in that box to grow heavy enough to pull down on the string and ring the bell. When I release the lever, the bones turn light again, and the bell rights itself, lifting the skull back to the top of the box."
Sinclair thought of all the street magicians who claimed to be able to talk to people across England through their minds, or witch doctors whose supposed powers included the awareness of events happening far away. He held the real thing in his hands, and his mind flew to all the uses such a device could have. Advance warning of an approaching army. Calls for rescue from ships in trouble. Centuries of men had longed for such a power, and this boy had created it with wood, string, nails, and a few bits of dead fish.
"We could assign messages to certain numbers of rings. One ring for 'arrived safely,' two for 'in danger, need help'— like that," said Matthew, and a whole collection of new uses exploded into Sinclair's mind. Why stop at predetermined messages? Why not create a whole alphabet of rings and communicate anything at all?
"How far apart do they work?"
"We don't know," Parris said. "It works across the length of the ship, but we haven't been able to test it any farther."
Sinclair clapped Matthew on the shoulder. "I'll take one of these to shore tomorrow. You keep the other one here. We'll test it and see how far it can go."
Matthew nodded. They filed out, leaving the boxes behind. When they were gone, Sinclair placed one box at one end of his table and the other box at the other end. For a long time, while the sky outside grew dark, Sinclair sat in his chair, pulling the lever nearest him to hear the bell on the other side of the table ring.
Chapter Twenty
PARRIS clambered nervously into the longboat. It tipped perilously, almost throwing him into the water, but a soldier grabbed his arm and steadied him. Five of Tate's men were already aboard along with Sinclair. Their destination was the wooden dock Sinclair had spotted the day before, and from there, the human settlement, if one existed.
They had seen no sign of humans. No one had spotted their ship in the harbor and come waving a flag. They'd seen no smoke to indicate a settlement was nearby. The most likely explanation was that the humans were all dead.
The currents in the bay were sluggish and mild, and they reached the dock easily. Built for large carracks like the Western Star, the dock was too high off the water to be useful for their small boat, so they splashed through the shallows and dragged it up onto the sand instead.
Sinclair stood hip- deep in the placid water, scooping handfuls into his mouth. Parris lifted a cupped hand and sipped tentatively. Like the water in the barrels, it tasted fresh and sweet. It occurred to him that he now knew why: the small amount of quintessence in the water— from dead creatures like the ironfish, or just soaked up from starlight— was magnified by salt, but over time, the salt was used up. That created the water's glow, and also its freshness. Though more likely the salt was transformed instead of being consumed, since the water became salty again if brought to England. Parris scooped greedy mouthfuls. The soldiers did the same. This water might kill them if they tried to go home, but here it was the stuff of life.
Before leaving England, the question of how to return had been theoretical. Now, walking on an alien land with potentially lethal water coursing through his body, he felt it more keenly. If he didn't solve the mystery, he could never leave this place. He wondered what Joan was doing, and how she fared, and if he would ever see her again.
The thin beach sloped quickly upward. A path had been cleared through some of the brush, and they followed it up into the trees. The trunks were deeply crenellated and the greenery was neither leaves nor needles, but furry green piles of what looked like moss. The moss was hard to see clearly, because most of the trees were tremendously tall, and the dense piles cast the mostly barren forest floor into deep shadow. Where smaller plants did grow, they were moist things with radiating gills that puffed powdery spores if kicked.
Parris touched one of the trees. He stopped.
"What is it? Did you hear something?" Sinclair said.
"These are the trees."
"What?"
"Feel them. They're covered with wax. These are the trees that the beetle came from."
Sinclair scraped one with a knife, and it released a familiar aromatic smell. "Cut it down," he said. One of the soldiers ran back to the ship and returned with an ax. After several minutes of hard chopping, the tree crashed to the forest floor. Though it fell through several layers of the mossy greenery of other trees, it passed right through without disturbing them. Parris ran around to the top of the fallen tree. It was swarming with beetles.
Sinclair clapped his hands and laughed. "Look at them all."
"It's just like you said back in London," Parris said. "The box was made from the wood of this tree."
He grabbed a handful of the foliage, which was soft and spongy. The lower branches, however, were covered in stiff brown curls that crumbled in his hands, presumably dead from lack of sunlight. "Look at the branches," Parris said, noticing how the branches of dead foliage interleaved from tree to tree like a stack of half- shuffled cards. "They're competing for the sunlight. If one tree blocks the light, another tree pushes right up through it and spreads a moss pile higher up. The dense foliage completely blocks the sunlight, and the lower layer dies." He looked around the forest, tracking the passage of time as each tree grew ever higher to steal the light from its fellows. "It's a battleground."
The path followed the river, and they continued on. Parris carried the
bell- box and pressed the lever occasionally as he walked. Every time he did, his own bell would ring a few moments later— an answering signal from Matthew to indicate that they were still in communication. They had agreed upon a pattern of three short rings to call for help, in case they encountered danger. They planned to work out a code to send more complex messages in the future, but for now this would do.
The sun glinted off of water in the distance. They emerged into daylight to find a large lake surrounded by forest. It fed the river to their left, coursing over scattered rocks and filling the air with the sound of rushing water and a fine mist. To their right, in a clearing by the lake, stood the settlement.
Despite the stories, Parris had envisioned a huddle of rough- hewn wooden houses. What he saw was a small but apparently prosperous settlement town, surrounded by a high wooden palisade. The houses were huge: mansions with multiple levels and stone chimneys, laid out neatly along several streets. A church stood at the center, its steeple and cross the highest point in town.
The party approached warily. No smoke rose from the chimneys, and they heard no human voices. As they entered the settlement, Parris saw that the palisade was made from the wood of the beetle trees. The walls of the houses, however, were not made of wood or stone, but of some other, whitish material that seemed uneven and sparkled when the light caught it. He couldn't see through it, but the wall looked translucent, like thick glass or crystal. When he was close enough to touch, he could see the endless matrix
of beveled sides, as if the wall had been built by an army of jewelers, and his growing suspicion was confirmed. The entire house was made of cut diamond.
Parris walked around it, marveling at the shifting colors as the diamond prismed the light. They explored the town like men in a trance, hypnotized by dazzling colors and scattered rays of sunlight.
They looked in each building, but found no people. Inside the church, they found the bones.
CATHERINE was proud of Matthew. Not only had he joined her in exploring the properties of the ironfish, he'd taken a leap forward and envisioned a use for it that never would have occurred to her. Now, standing on the forecastle and ringing patterns on his bell, he looked as happy as she'd ever seen him. To her, the exciting part had been discovering the property in the first place, but he reveled in this methodical testing. She was interested to know how far away the bell- boxes could get from each other, too, but sitting around ringing a bell all day was driving her mad.