Son of Fortune

by Victoria McKernan

  “So she ate it?” He tried to picture the little cubs instead.

  “Oh ja!” Captain Neils nodded happily. “She has milk now for the little ones!”

  “That’s great.”

  “But I am sorry to say your bow and arrows are gone,” Captain Neils went on. “Everything in the boat was lost. Except for one oar and all the men.”

  “Oh,” Aiden said dumbly. “Yes. I don’t suppose they would have floated.” The news hit him like a punch. He had had the bow since he was ten years old. It was the last bit of anything left from his old life. He looked out over the low swells and worked to make his voice sound normal. “Is this the real ocean now? Are we out of Puget Sound?”

  “Ja,” Captain Neils said. He waved a gnarled hand toward the western horizon. “China is just over there.” He laughed and nudged the wheel.

  Sven the Ancient began clattering loudly in the little galley, washing up the breakfast dishes, while the other men went about their ordinary tasks. In the sanctuary of day, on a sturdy ship with a fair wind filling the sails and genial dolphins escorting them along, they had little work to do, yet there is never time for real idleness at sea. The sailors passed the morning splicing ropes and patching up the dinghy. The sight of the torn wood made Aiden shudder. He could clearly see tooth marks in the wood, as if an expert carpenter had cleanly struck his sharpest chisel there. The men talked in Swedish as they fitted new planks across the gap. When they saw Aiden and Fish, they began to laugh and talk with more animation.

  “When a bad time is over and we tell the story afterward, everything changes,” Fish explained. “Now you are the warrior king who has split open the head of the sea monster with one stroke of a magical axe,” he translated. “Our little boat was tossed twenty feet into the air, but a great school of fish leaped up and whirled around it like a waterspout and brought us gently back down. By evening, they will have goddesses coming down from Valhalla to pluck us from the waves and feed you goblets of mead.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t turn any goddesses away,” Aiden said.

  The sailors made some comments that, even in Swedish, sounded ribald.

  “They all understand English just fine,” Fish said. “Except Sven the Ancient. But they aren’t good at speaking it. They all grew up on Swedish ships. They don’t spend much time on land, and when they do, it is among other Swedes.”

  “How come you speak it so well?”

  “I lived on land with my mother and little sisters until I was twelve.”

  “In San Francisco?”

  “Yes. My mother was a cook in a dining house. She wanted to keep me from the sea, but as you see, that didn’t work. My family all have salt water for our blood.”

  “Are all these men your kin?”

  “The captain is my brother. Though he is ten years older and more like a father. His name is Magnus. Our own father died when I was five. A storm put his ship on the rocks. Sven the Ancient is my uncle.” Fish pointed at the two men fixing the dinghy. “Jonas, there with the hammer, is his son; Gustav is another cousin. His father also died with mine.” Fish looked up at the sails, which were taut with the wind. “You have never been on a ship?”

  “I’ve never even seen a ship before, except in books. My family has dirt, I suppose, for our blood.”

  Fish laughed. “Well, come then, I will show you a ship.”

  They spent the morning looking at ropes and winches, pumps and sounding lines, sails and the steam engine—still only half of the hundred things that made a ship work. In one way everything was very foreign, but in another way it was also somehow familiar. It was all solid and functional and quietly ingenious. Fish took Aiden below and spread out charts with wavy lines and striped shades of blue and cryptic numbers sprinkled all over like tiny seeds.

  “These lines mean deeper water,” Fish explained. He tapped a few spots along the coast. “This indicates shoals, and these are visible rocks.” He traced his finger across the thick paper with casual command. To Aiden, it was all strange and exotic. He had always loved maps and could have looked at the chart for hours, but Fish rolled it up with an abrupt dismissal.

  “But we’ve sailed here so long we almost never need the charts,” he said. “Back and forth, back and forth, with the lumber. I am twenty-one—it’s nearly half my life! But someday I’ll sail blue water.”

  “What is blue water?” Aiden asked.

  Fish waved his hand toward the horizon. “Out there—open ocean—where you see no land for weeks or months. Where there is nothing familiar—nothing to depend on but what you have learned and what you feel and knowing the stars. Just the soundness of your ship and your crew and your own decisions. Hawaii, Tahiti, China, Europe, maybe Australia!” He put the chart back in its niche, then opened the top of the chart desk and took out a wooden box. “For blue water—real sailing—you need this.” Inside, cushioned well in a nest of red velvet, was a complicated brass instrument with gears and wheels, tiny mirrors, a lens like a miniature telescope and numbers etched along the arc of the bottom.

  “It’s a sextant?” Aiden guessed.

  “Yes!” Fish lifted the instrument out of the box like it was the crown jewels. “With celestial navigation, you can go anywhere! With the sextant, the whole world belongs to you!” He traced one finger longingly over the smooth brass. He sighed and looked away, out the tiny porthole, where the shoreline was always visible. “Come, it’s almost noon—I’ll show you how to shoot the sun.”

  Since they didn’t really need an accurate reading, Fish let Aiden take the sight. It was a tricky business, balancing on the moving boat while staring through the eyepiece, trying to keep the horizon level and the sun in view just exactly as it turned noon. Fish grabbed a handful of Aiden’s sweater to steady him, but shooting the sun was only the beginning. After that there were pages of calculations to do. Aiden had never been really good with math and was soon lost in azimuths and angles. He realized that if his fate were ever in fact to take him to sea, it would certainly not be as a navigator.

  “Well, according to your reading, we should be seeing Japan any minute now!” Fish said. “That’s the thing with navigation—one small error changes the course of the whole voyage.”

  So navigation was just like real life, Aiden thought. Errors went back forever, each one building into the next—a deadly daisy chain of fate. The wind was steady and the sails well set, so Fish let Aiden try his hand at the helm. He was nervous and zigzagged at first, turning the wheel too hard one way, then the other.

  “Don’t think,” Fish said. “Just feel.” He spread his legs slightly and bounced, sweeping his hands up with surprising grace, like a dancer. “The ocean is a live thing. The ship is a live thing. They are like lovers who love but sometimes want to kill each other. You must keep them both on the loving side.”

  “You’re kind of poetical for a Swede, aren’t you?”

  “A sailor spends a lot of time inside his own head,” Fish said.

  They sailed along in companionable silence until the clouds came in and the wind turned gusty enough to require Fish’s more experienced hand at the helm. Aiden went below to check on the polar bears. The mother bear seemed in much better health. Her eyes were bright and her breathing was steady. Aiden sat quietly for a while just watching them, until the mother bear’s wariness ebbed and the cubs’ curiosity overflowed. Then he eased the cage door open just enough to sneak the two babies out. Soon they were romping and tumbling all over. Aiden wrestled them, rolled them about and tossed them into the straw. They chirped gleefully, galloped gracelessly back and flung themselves upon him with furry vigor. The mother bear watched nervously at first, woofing and huffing, but eventually she seemed to understand that he was not going to hurt them and settled down. Once the cubs were tired out, he raked the dirty straw from the cage, shook in a fresh bale, then squeaked open the door and pushed them back in. The mother bear scooped them into her arms, sniffed them suspiciously and started licking them free of every dreadfu
l human scent. Aiden leaned back against a bale of straw and watched the little cubs suckle contentedly. Despite his previous twenty-four-hour sleep, he was still deeply tired and dozed off himself. It was a fitful sleep, full of violence, and he woke with tiny scratches all over his arms from thrashing in the straw.

  The bears were sound asleep, snoring in oblivious bliss. The ship creaked gently. He could smell the rich aroma of frying potatoes and hear the easy cadence of Swedish conversation from the deck above. In the main salon, the men were just sitting down for a meal. They had left a place for him. Evening came early in January in this northern latitude, and though it was only about four-thirty, the sun was already low, slanting sharp gold beams through the small portholes. It was all so totally foreign, yet so easy and comfortable.

  After supper, Captain Neils went to his tiny cabin to update the ship’s log, while the other men, like all sailors eager to take advantage of sleep when it was possible, took to their bunks. As long as the weather stayed fair, they would keep only one man at the helm throughout the night, each taking a two-hour watch. Aiden went up on deck and sat on a pile of lumber, watching his first sunset at sea. The clouds slid through ripples of gold and crimson, with fringes of purple. A hundred shades of blue melted gradually down through the sky. The ocean was the color of black plums ripened to bursting.

  He heard a noise and looked up to see Fish approaching. He carried a bottle and two glasses and sat down beside Aiden. He pulled the cork from the bottle and poured two small drinks. A dense aroma—spicy and slightly medicinal—floated up. The liquor was smooth and scouring at the same time and tasted very foreign. Aiden gasped and managed not to choke. He leaned back on the pile of wood. The fresh smell of lumber made him feel strangely sad. That part of his life was over now. It was a rough, harsh life, but there was a lot of good about it too. Logging was challenging and dangerous, but at the end of every day he always felt satisfied. And there were few decisions to make, nothing to wonder about. Eat this, sleep here, chop down this tree.

  “Here—a present for you.” Fish pressed something smooth and sharp into Aiden’s hand. It was a glossy white triangle, nothing like a stone, though closest to a stone, the size of a playing card, smooth on one edge, jagged on the other two.

  “Shark tooth. It was stuck in the sole of your boot.”

  The tooth was surprisingly heavy and had an odd prehistoric elegance. Aiden found a bit of leather boot sole caught between two of the tiny saw points. He pried it free and rolled it between his fingers. It was like mitten fuzz, only rubbery and dense. His hands began to tremble. Fish said nothing but poured them both another drink. The clear, pungent liquor was thicker than water but less so than blood. Still, there was the harsh iron smell to it that reminded him of blood. Or maybe everything now made him think of blood. Would he ever again be free of blood? “What is it?”

  “It’s called aquavit—water of life.”

  “Then, to life,” Aiden said. They drank, then were silent for a few minutes, watching the sun sink into the water like a single burning coal.

  “Why did you go in the water for me?” Fish asked quietly.

  Aiden shrugged. “I know how to swim. It seemed like you didn’t.”

  “I don’t,” Fish confessed. “Sailors almost never do, unless they sail the tropics. But the shark could still have been near.”

  “I figured it was busy eating already. Figured I had a little time. I wouldn’t have gone in otherwise. So you know.”

  “No. That’s good to know.”

  “No offense.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think about the water being so cold,” Aiden said.

  “It was awfully cold.”

  “Just—it wasn’t a good-deed kind of thing. I only went in because I was pretty sure I would come out again.”

  Fish reached for the bottle and poured another ounce out in each glass.

  “I figured the odds were pretty good for me living,” Aiden went on. “If you lived too, so much the better. But if it came down to just one of us, me or you, well, it wouldn’t be me all drowned or in the belly of that shark right now.”

  “That’s reasonable.”

  “It wasn’t a question of who ought to live or not, or why or why not,” Aiden went on. The strange Swedish liquor, plus the piled-up shock of the past few days, was making him strangely talkative in a way he somehow couldn’t stop. “Only what could I probably do at the time with the way things were.”

  Fish looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Well, whatever reasoning you like, I am glad to be topside of the sea and outside that shark.” He raised his glass and clinked Aiden’s, and they both tossed back the water of life. They watched the last red arc of the sun vanish into the sapphire sea. Fish looked at the shark tooth that Aiden was absently rubbing. “Sven the Ancient can drill a hole in that if you like,” he said. “So you can wear it around your neck. Maybe even scrimshaw on it.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ve had teeth close to my skin enough for now,” Aiden said. He pulled out the little leather pouch he wore around his neck. “I have a place for it.” He did not look at the other tokens already there—the memories they held were still too sharp. The tooth was almost too big to fit.

  “Is that an Indian thing?” Fish asked.

  “Yes,” Aiden said, not offering more explanation. If his luck was strong, Tupic might be through the mountains by now, on his way back to his tribe with the smallpox vaccine. Aiden pulled the strings closed, and the weight of his new life tugged gently against the back of his neck.

  he sweetness of that first day at sea was gone by morning, with a storm that terrified Aiden, though it seemed only to slightly annoy the experienced crew. Sven the Ancient just cursed a little more as he fried the eggs and boiled the coffee, his bony legs braced casually against the galley cupboards. Aiden huddled in the bunk belowdecks. He was halfway between trying not to die and hoping with all his might that he would, and soon. The ship pitched and groaned. The sky churned and the sea heaved. He lay twitching and curled in a ball. Seasickness was a unique and disconcerting ailment, especially bad because it seemed ridiculous and weak. This was not the smashing bullet of war. This was not the sword’s deadly stab through the haphazard organs that turned out to matter so terribly much. It was not the gouge and tear of wild animals or the smash of an enemy’s club. It was not influenza that killed half a town in one sweep. It was not smallpox, lockjaw, ague, rabies, cholera, typhoid, pneumonia or any of the vicious maladies of awful everyday life. Seasickness was relentless and dull as bad wallpaper. It was just stupid. But horribly, inescapably, nauseatingly stupid. Aiden felt like someone had turned his body inside out, scooped up his guts with a spoon, boiled his bones into jelly, sprinkled it all with poison and hung him out on the fence for coyote bait. Fish dragged him up on deck a few times to gulp at the fresh air, but the sight of the heaving gray waves just made Aiden worse. At least he learned to throw up over the downwind side of the ship. Finally, by evening, the seas eased and he found he could sit up on deck without fear of vomit boiling up and pushing his eyeballs out of his head.

  “The barometer has steadied out,” Fish said. “So the roughest may be over with.”

  Aiden splayed his jelly bones out on the deck and stared pathetically at the gathering stars. He had never thought in a million years that he would miss the plains of Kansas, but right now their absolute immobility was very enticing.

  The next couple of days were milder, though the sky remained gray and drizzly and the sea sloppy. Aiden could not manage platefuls of fried potatoes and pickled fish, but neither was he begging for death. He mostly sat for hours on the piled timber, just watching the ocean. He did spend a few hours each day with the polar bears, playing with the cubs and coaxing the mother to eat. She was accepting fish now, as the gorge on seal meat had apparently wakened an appetite, but she still sniffed each morsel with suspicion and made her displeasure clear, swatting at the fish with a dismissive huff and peel
ing her lips back before taking it in her teeth.

  The last day of the trip, as they sailed into San Francisco Bay, was beautiful and calm. The sky was a clear, deep, cloudless blue.

  “Lucky you to see it so,” Captain Neils said. “I sail here twice a month since I am ten years old and have seen blue sky maybe a dozen times. Do you know, for a hundred years men sailed by this bay and never knew it was here? And always ships are looking for good harbor. But for a hundred years they passed it by. Paradise just there—but always in the fog.”

  Aiden had heard about San Francisco, but nothing could have prepared him for the first real sight of it. It looked like a storybook kingdom. Fine wooden houses marched up the hills in every direction, trimmed with what looked like wooden lace, and all with glass windows! Not just one or two windows, but three or four on each floor—and each one with six or eight panes of glass! He hadn’t seen a house with so many glass windows since he was seven years old on the plantation in Virginia. His sod house on the prairie had oiled paper or scraped hides covering the windows. The bunkhouses in the logging camp simply had wooden shutters and canvas flaps.

  They dropped the sails as they entered the bay and chugged along with the steam engine. There were hundreds of boats here, oceangoing ships and coastal ferries, fishing boats of every size and kind. There were dozens of lumber ships like their own, hauling timber for the vast appetite of this booming city. As they neared the wharf, Aiden saw hundreds of people milling about, most turned out in what seemed like Sunday best. The women wore coats with fur-trimmed collars; the men were in fine suits and hats. Rows of wagons, glossy carriages and buggies were lined up on the road, some with coachmen in livery.

  “Do people always come out to the dock like this?” Aiden asked.

  “Oh yes,” Captain Neils said. “But many more today, for they’ve come to see the bears.” There was more than a hint of pride in his voice.