Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  The Revenge welcomed him thus. But once on board, he proved to be a demanding shipmate, for his mental simplicity was so great it was akin to having an infant loose on the vessel. Curious about everything and yet heedless of danger, Pietru repeatedly got under the crew’s feet as they heaved on spars or hauled at anchor chains, and on occasion only narrowly avoided causing serious accident and injury. At length, the captain assigned a watchdog (in actuality one of the young midshipmen) to accompany the scapegoat everywhere he went and ensure that he did no harm to himself or others.

  It worked, but it was a tedious duty, and though it was rotated through the midshipmen in turn, they all grew tired of it, complaining constantly to the captain that it was beneath even their lowly stature. Thus, when Roland was rendered fatherless and without influence, the captain finally relieved the midshipmen all – and gave Roland the chore.

  It was a vast insult to one the rank of lieutenant, yet Roland was powerless to protest: at sea a captain’s authority was more absolute than that of a king, let alone a dead High Chancellor. It was obey, or be thrown in the brig for insubordination. So swallowing his outrage, Roland reported to Pietru’s cabin as ordered. And for the next three months, as the Revenge and its three companion frigates sailed south and east for Twin Isles waters, his every waking hour was spent watching over the scapegoat.

  And hating it.

  Everything about Pietru of the Innocent annoyed him. For all Roland’s scrawniness and awkwardness of manner, he was neat in personal habits, and a fastidious dresser. Pietru’s clothes, in comparison, were always disordered and dishevelled, tugged the wrong way. And he was forever dirty. True, it was only in the way that any five-year-old boy was usually dirty, but it infuriated Roland all the same, having to clean his charge’s face of food stains, or wipe his running nose, or scrape the filth out from under his fingernails. And yet do all this he must, for the captain demanded that the scapegoat be presented neat and tidy at dinner every evening in the Great Cabin.

  And whereas Roland was scarecrow thin, Pietru – who was nearly as tall as him – was as round and fleshy as a whale. And while it might be one thing to wrestle with a five-year-old boy as a last resort, when all other commands failed, it was another entirely to compel a giant fifty-year-old man into obedience. Many were the days that Roland went to his bed bruised and sore from the knocks Pietru had given him, even if unintentionally.

  And that was the worst part of it, in a way – almost everything about Pietru was unintentional. The scapegoat didn’t even seem to be aware of how much Roland hated him. He remained ever blithe and cheerful, his big moon face, childlike despite the greying stubble on its chin, smiling vacantly; his laugh, as light as a girl’s, bubbling up without cause.

  The only thing that made Pietru sad, indeed, was being confined to his cabin, for his great love was to patrol the ship, over and over. Every morning he would start on the high deck and work his way down, level by level, to the lowest hold, from whence he would retrace his path up to the high deck again, whereat he would start the whole tour over once more.

  He moved at a child’s gambolling pace, running for a moment here, pausing for another there to laugh at some unidentifiable thing, then darting on, hands flapping in pleasure. The crew could well have been annoyed by this constant motion, and by his many interruptions of their work or rest, but in fact they greeted him always with patience and humour. He was their scapegoat. And if indeed he did knock someone over, or upend their gear, it was only Roland, his watchdog, who would suffer the resulting tirades.

  Which of course only made Roland hate his charge all the more. And though he dared not make his hatred plain in public, in private, when he prepared Pietru for bed, or dressed him in the morning, he could reveal his loathing more openly, swearing at the scapegoat when he was slow to shrug on a shirt, rubbing brutally at his face with the wash cloth when he needed cleaning, or shoving him this way and that to get him to move.

  But Pietru didn’t even seem to notice. He liked his watchdog, always breaking into a vast smile whenever Roland came into the cabin, and laughing cheerfully at all insults. He had even learned to say Roland’s name – a rare feat, for the scapegoat did not know the names of anyone else on board, or at least had never uttered them. But even this honour Roland only found annoying, for Pietru pronounced his name ‘Rowand’ in his childlike lisp, which made it sound much more like a woman’s name, and the rest of the junior officers had taken gleefully to addressing Roland in the same way.

  But it wasn’t until the fourth month of this demeaning routine, with the Revenge and its small fleet almost arrived at their destination, that Roland finally lost his temper, and actually hit Pietru.

  Later, he would blame it in part on the weather, for the fleet was now deep into the tropics, drawing nigh to the very Barrier Doldrums, in the waters known as the Southern Reach, southwest of the Twin Isles themselves – and it was hot, hotter than Roland had ever known, a breathless oven heat that seemed to beat upon the brow like a hammer upon a drum. Roland sweated and stank in a way he found quite offensive – and Pietru was even worse, his great face turning red and streaming sweat, his body odour overpowering, no matter how often Roland made him change his clothes.

  But it was not the heat and discomfort alone that pushed Roland over the edge. The final straw was the incident with the bird.

  It took place on a morning that had already been a frustrating one for Roland. The ship was all but becalmed, making the heat worse than ever, and Pietru had been especially aggravating during their first few rounds of the ship, moving too slowly, or stopping completely and ignoring all pleas to shift along. Finally, the scapegoat kicked over a bucket of dirty water being used by a scrubbing party on the main deck, then went rolling deliberately in the mess. Amid a chorus of abuse from the scrubbing gang, Roland had to drag Pietru away and then back to his cabin to change his filthy clothes.

  Even that cabin was a sore point with Roland. His own cabin was a cramped affair on the lowest deck of the stern castle, but Pietru’s was on the uppermost deck, the same level as the captain’s. And it was huge, a great room with luxurious fittings and tall windows that could be opened wide. Roland would have given half his fortune for such quarters. (He did indeed have a fortune now, left to him by his father: or he would have it, if the war ever finished and he could go home.) His jealousy was made only the more galling by the fact that Pietru was oblivious to his own good fortune. The scapegoat could have been housed in a closet for all that he appeared to care.

  Now, Roland opened the cabin door to find a disturbing surprise. The windows had been left open in hope of a breeze, and through them, while Roland and Pietru were out, a great bird had flown, and had alighted – exhausted by the look, or ill perhaps – on a chair just within.

  Roland stared. It was months since the Revenge had sighted any birds at all, even so much as a seagull. But this was no common gull, it was far too large, and the wrong colour, for though its body was mostly white, its wings – spread across the chair – were a deep, dusty brown. Its great head had turned to them as they entered, but it did not rise to take flight, only remained sprawled ungainly where it was, its beak opening slightly and closing again, as if breathless, its dark eyes somehow conveying distress or pain.

  Roland hesitated, unsure what to do; the creature was so unlikely and so big. But then he saw that the bird lay upon a dark uniform jacket that had been draped across the chair. His uniform jacket. He had left it there early that morning. Now it was smeared with great streaks of white excrement. The bird had relieved itself all over the fine material.

  Roland’s taut temper snapped. The crew were on strict water rations in this heat, he would never be able to get the jacket clean again. ‘Get off it!’ he shouted at the bird, advancing. ‘Get out!’

  The bird reared up, wings spread and thumping softly against the wall, but did not fly, it only screeched at him in anger or fear: a warning. Heedless, Roland grabbed at the jacket’s sle
eve so that he might rip the garment free – and suddenly fire erupted in his hand. The bird had stabbed him with its beak! He stared at the bloody gash, and the bird shrieked at him again, clawing at the jacket with its taloned feet, tearing the fabric.

  ‘Oh, you filthy—!’ Beyond reason now – beyond realising that the bird must be ill and half-crazed with terror in this strange environment, and should simply be left alone – Roland took up a wooden stool from by the bed, and went at the creature in a killing rage, pummelling it as it squawked and screamed and fluttered its huge wings in desperation.

  Then all of a sudden he found himself spun about savagely, and Pietru was there, his usually bland face contorted now in huge alarm. ‘No, Rowand, no. Don’t hurt bird! Mustn’t hurt bird! Bring bad luck!’

  Roland’s rage went from red to white hot. The simpleton was going to order him about? Hardly! With an almost jubilant release – giving vent to his months of frustration and humiliation at the scapegoat’s hands – he swung the stool and caught Pietru hard across the skull, and had the delight of seeing the hulking fool tumble away with a cry of pain. Then Roland was free to attend to the bird again. It was screaming still, crawling across the floor, one of its great wings dragging, and now it needed to be killed anyway, because it would never fly again. Roland went at it with a black ecstasy, his vision a blur of blood and white feathers flying, his rage all-encompassing.

  Then it was over. The bird was a crumpled, deflated bag on the floor, and Pietru was sobbing in the corner.

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Roland told him wearily. Moving with swift necessity – for he guessed without quite knowing why that no one else must see this – he took up the bird’s body and toppled it out the window, then gathered all the feathers too. As for his jacket, it was quite ruined …

  ‘Bad, bad,’ Pietru was weeping. ‘Bad luck coming now …’

  ‘Shut up, I said!’ But the anger had faded from Roland. He felt merely wretched and disgusted. He saw that Pietru had a gash on the crown of his head. ‘Here, let me see to that.’ But the scapegoat only went scrabbling away in terror, his wide eyes stricken with betrayal. ‘Oh, to the deeps with you then!’ Roland cursed, and stormed out of the room.

  He’d had it, he really had. He would go to the captain and demand that someone else be appointed over Pietru.

  Ah … but he already knew what the captain’s reply would be. There was no purpose in even asking. He was stuck with the position. And it would be even more difficult now; the scapegoat would no longer trust him. Roland shouldn’t have attacked him, of course, but by all the oceans, he could be only so patient. Pietru would just have to learn, that was all …

  And yet when Roland returned after an hour to Pietru’s cabin, he found that the scapegoat had quite forgotten the incident, or forgiven it, and was eager only to be off on his rounds again. He let Roland tend his wound without complaint, and likewise waited blithely as Roland restored the cabin to order and scrubbed away the bloodstains; there were no more tears, and no more talk of ‘bad luck’, whatever that had meant. Roland could only shrug to himself. Pietru, it seemed, was too simple to even hold a grudge.

  So the day returned to normal.

  If Roland had been a true sailor, however, he would have known that there was no returning to normal now. He would have known that the bird he had killed was a King Shearwater, which was one of the breeds of great seabirds that roamed most of their lives upon the waves, along with albatrosses and gannets and frigatebirds and the like. Such magnificent creatures were held in awe and respect by all true seamen – and to injure or kill one was a grave offence to fate, initiating inevitable doom to the offender.

  Had the rest of the crew learned of what he had done, Roland might well have found himself keelhauled, or set adrift and marooned, as an offering to fate in return. But no one knew, other than Pietru, and whatever memory lay behind the scapegoat’s bland face, he said nothing; and the bird’s bloody body, floating upon the water, fell far behind the ship.

  But the very next day, the Revenge entered into battle.

  The exact purpose for which the fleet had come to the southern seas was something Roland had never quite grasped, excluded as he was from the captain’s strategy meetings in the Great Cabin. He had presumed at first that it was merely to test the readiness of the Twin Islander patrols in the Southern Reach, the pathway to the mysterious Labyrinth Corridors, in which it was now known the enemy had secreted their shipyards.

  But then he had overheard two of the Revenge’s marines in discussion, and learned that in fact their mission was to lure a Twin Islands patrol into combat and, by making use of a new weapon (it was a cannon that fired nets of some kind) capture one of their famous attack boats. That boat would then be used in a sneak assault on Pilot Island, in the hope of snatching a pilot, who could in turn reveal the hidden ways into the Labyrinth itself.

  But then Roland heard of a different purpose again, in a hushed exchange between two of the senior officers. (It was because he was always in Pietru’s company, whom everyone ignored as they would a child, that Roland too was ignored, and able to eavesdrop upon such secrets.) The fleet’s real intent, it seemed, had nothing at all to do with pilots, or with broaching the Labyrinth from the east. Rather, it was merely to convince the Twin Islanders that they were trying to do this, so as to distract them from the fact that the genuine Ship Kings assault would come from another direction entirely.

  The truth of any of this, Roland could not judge. Nor did he much care. All he knew was that they were now deep in enemy waters, which was obviously dangerous. The last thing he needed, among all his troubles, was to end up in a battle. His fervent hope, indeed, was that he would see the war through without once being in a fight. But the day after the killing of the bird, at a sweltering noon, as Roland and Pietru were on their fifth peregrination about the ship since dawn, the long-dreaded cry went up from the lookouts.

  ‘Enemy ships! Enemy ships to the west!’

  His heart abruptly thudding, Roland dragged Pietru – they happened to be on the high deck at the time – out of the way of the immediate frenzy that broke out with the call to battle stations, and over to a quiet spot by the rail. From there he looked out to the west. A haze was upon the sea, but emerging through it a few miles off were three sets of Twin Islander sails.

  Roland sighed in some relief. At least his own fleet of four outnumbered the enemy, rather than the other way around. But now it was time for him and Pietru to get below, for they had no place out in the open if there was soon to be shot flying. But here Roland struck a terrible snag. For Pietru had taken hold of the rail and refused to let go. The great oaf seemed to think that something entertaining was afoot amid all the bustle and rumble of guns being run out, for he was laughing and jumping up and down, even as he gripped the rail – and Roland was powerless to drag him free.

  Well, Roland thought hotly, he would just leave him there then, and get below himself. Except he couldn’t. It would be a sin unforgiveable, he knew, to everyone else on board. He was already hated and mocked, and it was shame enough that he had no useful role to play in the coming battle, but if he were to actively show cowardice now, and abandon the one duty that had been entrusted to him, then hatred and mockery would not be the end of it, he could well be court-martialled and thrown into prison too.

  No, he had to stay with Pietru.

  But maybe it would not be so bad – there might not even be a cannon battle, ship against ship, for that was not the way the Twin Islanders preferred to fight. Even now, as Roland glanced across the calm tropical waters, he could see that the enemy ships were turning away, deploying as they did so their attack boats, twelve of them in all. It was Roland’s first sight of the infamous craft, and they seemed as evil to him as scorpions might; black, sharp, and impelled by some unearthly power. Oh, yes, everyone knew by now that they were driven by engines, and fuelled by whale oil – but to Roland, who did not have a mechanical mind, it may as well have been witchcraft. />
  He jumped, as from below the Revenge’s first broadside exploded from the gun decks, long-range volleys of grapeshot that pattered the sea about the advancing boats. Pietru jumped too, but with pleasure, laughing and clapping his hands – before clamping them to the rail again.

  Roland gritted his teeth. Another broadside fired off, but seemed to do no more harm to the enemy than the first. The attack boats had fragmented into small hunting packs now, lining up for runs against the four Ship Kings vessels. Three boats were targeting the Revenge, curving about in an arc to approach from the stern. They weren’t fools then – for before setting out on this voyage, the Revenge had visited the shipyards to have its sides heavily reinforced as defence against Twin Islander ramming attacks.

  The stern and the rudder were more vulnerable. Roland felt a queasy wrench of fear – what if the attacks struck home and the ship was sunk! And yet around him, the officers on the high deck seemed to be observing the enemy’s approach with a mysterious excitement, even glee.

  ‘Just where we want them!’ one lieutenant cried.

  Less than a quarter mile behind, the three attack boats were now on their final runs, driving hard, white foam at their tails. On the Revenge, several swivel cannon had been set up along the stern rail, and these now fired off a volley that sent the enemy crews scurrying behind their shelters – but still the boats came on, one ranging out ahead of the other two.

  Roland’s stomach rolled again. The things were unstoppable, less than a hundred yards off now, so close that Roland could clearly see the face of the lead boat’s young commander peering up from behind the iron embrasure that protected the wheel: he seemed to be grinning.