“Oh God, it’s worse than I feared,” Christopher said quietly. He smoothed his hair, brushed off his jacket and poised himself like a general awaiting the charge, for there were already two launches approaching with party guests.
“Are you finished?” Fish glared from one to the other.
“Yes,” Christopher said. “Excuse me, I must speak to the cook and the steward.” He nodded to Fish and walked off without another word.
“The steward?” Fish could not help laughing. The steward was actually Sven the Baby, who had the duties of steward only because he was the most junior of the crew.
“Go clean yourself up,” Fish said to Aiden. “What have you been doing—rolling in the guano?”
“Yes,” Aiden said. “Actually I have. I can’t stay for a party. I will go fishing. I’ll take the small rowboat by myself.”
“You can’t take a boat alone,” Fish said with a sigh. “It is a ship rule for everyone. You know that.”
“I won’t go far.”
“It’s dangerous. The wind comes up, the sea becomes choppy, a sea lion jumping for a fish knocks your boat over. I will ask for a volunteer.”
“No.” A smear of blood was crusting on his lip, and Aiden wiped it roughly away. “The men should have their leave. They might enjoy the music. I promise I will stay in the anchorage. I won’t go beyond where the farthest ships are anchored.”
Fish rubbed his hand across his forehead. “You will still not escape this infernal music.”
“I know.”
“Promise you will return before dark comes.”
“I will,” Aiden said.
“And promise you are not going mad from this place—” Fish said quietly. “As I’ve learned too often happens.”
“I promise,” Aiden said. “But if a man were mad—well, he wouldn’t be likely to tell you so, would he?”
“I suppose not.”
“Perhaps a man not going mad here would be more horrible.”
Fish nodded. “Go on, then.”
A gunshot cracked in the distance. A flare went up and streaked across the sky. Cheers erupted from every ship. The Diana, a ship out of Liverpool, was leaving the anchorage, starting her homeward journey. She was heavy in the water, her great hull loaded full with guano. Aiden and Fish watched as she unfurled her topsails and picked up speed.
“What a terrible machine we are,” Fish said softly. “With our ships and desires.”
iden honored his promise to come back before dark, but he still hung off in the little rowboat once he knew Fish had seen him. He waited until the last of the visitors were rowed away before he climbed aboard. The smell of the party lingered. Perfumes, powders, hair oil, tobacco and the unique smell of sweaty linen, like burned toast and sour milk. The crew was gathered on the aft deck, enjoying an after-party ration of pisco. Christopher was sitting in a canvas chair in the bow, his feet propped up on the capstan, his eyes closed. His tie was undone and his shirt collar open. A lantern cast flickering shadows across his face. Aiden sat down in a chair beside him. Christopher opened his eyes and looked at him, then picked up the lantern and held it closer to Aiden’s face.
“My God!” he said with unseemly delight. “Have I given you a black eye?”
“It wasn’t a fair punch,” Aiden said.
“Of course it wasn’t fair! I’m not stupid—I’ve seen you fight. I wouldn’t last ten seconds with fair. Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Well, it ought to. My knuckles are still aching.”
Aiden’s face did in fact hurt quite more than he thought it should, but he would never admit that.
“How was the party?”
“Horribly dull.” Christopher leaned back in his chair. “Exactly as I expected. The people were dull, and the pretty girl was dullest of all. And whoever invented that god-awful oompah music ought to be shot.”
“If you knew it would be horrible, why did you have it?”
Christopher sighed and spoke with exaggerated slowness, as if explaining things to a dull child. “Because Captain Heifer-weasel is well placed here. He plays chess every day with Koster and lets him win. Because the accordion player is his wife’s idiot nephew. He loves to play his accordion. He plays dawn to dusk, and they love to have one evening on the ship free from his playing. It is simple as that. Heifer-weasel is a man with influence. And now we have done him a favor.”
“Ah,” Aiden said. “So, basically, you’re flanking?”
“Yes, I suppose.” Christopher laughed.
A fish splashed in the water nearby. Soft murmurs of conversation drifted back from the sailors. Twinkling lanterns from all the ships draped a blanket of tiny stars over the water. It could almost be a normal evening in a normal world.
“I am sorry I hit you,” Christopher said quietly.
“I know.”
“Why did your parents eat grass?”
It was a very unexpected question. “It was the famine,” Aiden said. “In Ireland, when all the potatoes went bad. Have you not heard of that?”
“No.”
“How do you go to your fancy school and not know that?”
“It’s the past.”
“Rome is the past and you know about Rome.”
“They have ruins,” Christopher said.
“Well, I am a ruin,” Aiden said. He looked over toward the island. It was so still and silent now. “It is true, what I said—that I would not have signed on for this place. Not in the worst starving, not to save my own family. But I confess, I would have killed any friend, or any man’s child, for a bag of this magic dust. I would have swung the lash myself, as hard as any overseer, to make them dig it out. I would have chained any one of them to the rock. I would have chained you. I would have chained Elizabeth or any one of the ducklings.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know that.”
“You oughtn’t go off brooding alone in rowboats,” Christopher said. “Contemplation always muddles up the mind.”
They sat silently for a few minutes, then Christopher spoke again, his voice tired, resigned.
“We couldn’t have expected this.”
“We should have asked—”
“Asked what? Asked who? Asked the mad captain— ‘Please, sir, what haunts your soul? Is it a thousand coolies worked to death on an island of bird shit and chained to a rock if they try to escape?’ It was a poker game! It was a chance.”
“And now it’s just business.”
“Damn right,” Christopher said. “For painters and poets don’t really feed anyone, do they? You want to feed the world? Well, this is how it works!”
he Lady May’s launch did not stop by the next morning to collect Aiden. Alice sent a note on the afternoon mail boat, thanking Aiden for his help with the sample collecting and explaining that they would spend the next few days testing and cataloging everything. But then nothing. Christopher invited them to a games party aboard the Raven, but they declined. More days passed, all alike. The weather never changed. New ships arrived and old ones departed, while those still at anchor waiting to load counted off the days that never changed. Aboard the Raven, there was little to do. Every morning and evening the sailors hauled up buckets of water and rinsed and brushed the decks stem to stern, but they were still always slippery from the dust. Laundry was hung out only overnight but was still often coated and slimy. Hatches were closed during the day, making the cabins generally unlivable. Fish kept the sailors busy in the mornings with repairs and general maintenance, but they were mostly idle the rest of the day. Everyone in the anchorage was mostly idle. Nearly two thousand men and at least a hundred women simply passed the days in small hours, seeking any entertainment or diversion they could.
One couldn’t swim or even take a dip in the anchorage because of all the garbage from the ships, and the sharks that prowled about feasting on it. Some of the sailors rigged little sailing boats and held races around the islands. Some rowed out and passed the
days fishing. But most of the idle hours were spent on the saloon ships. Fights were common and sobriety was rare. Guano ships, after all, did not attract the best of men.
Christopher went to the North Island every day, easing his boredom in the card games and always seeking the vital connections that might speed their escape from this place. Fish often went with him, but Aiden found the place too depressing. It was littered with detritus from the mining days, valueless bits of machinery, rusting gears and the splintering scraps of wood that were too flimsy even to be hauled over to the Middle Island for coolie shacks. The North Island was now nothing but bare rock, with only a glaze of new guano. Ten thousand years of accumulation of guano—three hundred feet, five million tons, countless millions of dollars’ worth—had been hauled away in just ten years. Aiden tried taking walks there but always felt depressed after; there was a bleak and ghostly desolation in the air. None of the locals who sailed out from Pisco to do business in the anchorage would even spend a night in a boat offshore.
“Too many spirits,” one of the cooking women explained to Aiden in halting English. “Very bad place.”
Bad place or not, there was nowhere else for most of the ship-bound to go to escape the boredom, confinement and dust, so they came here to frolic amid the ruins.
It was five days after the day of the rock before he saw Alice again, on board another ship for another dinner party. She was distant and formal with him. As the punch was passed on deck before dinner, she stood fixed by Nicholas’s side. Throughout the evening, she was the very picture of a quiet, proper wife. She was even dressed differently than she had been at the Lady May’s dinner, in the more traditional boned corset and full skirt with petticoats, and looked very prim. Aiden was seated too far from her to have any conversation at the table. Instead he nodded his way numbly through an endless discussion of labor unrest in England and the lack of quality house servants in India these days. But after dinner, when brandy was being served on the deck and Nicholas was smoking cigars with the other gentlemen, Aiden managed to have a few minutes alone with her.
“Have I done something wrong?” he asked. “Have I offended you someway?”
“No, no, of course not! Don’t think that.”
“You won’t talk to me and will barely look at me. What should I think?”
“That life is complicated and often goes askew,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“I miss your company,” he said simply. “And here,” he added less formally, “I have something for you.” He took the little shard of pottery from his vest pocket and handed it to her. Alice’s eyes brightened immediately.
“One of the coolies gave it to me,” Aiden explained. “I forgot about it for a few days, then, well, I didn’t see you until now.”
“Did he say where he got it?”
“He found it in the guano. He says he has more. Probably wants to sell them.”
Alice examined it closer. “It could be from the Incas,” she said. “I don’t know much about pottery, but I would love to see more. Will you go back and see what else he has? Oh, please, Aiden?” Her eyes were suddenly full of tears.
“Of course—but have I upset you?”
“No, not at all.” Alice wiped her eyes quickly on her handkerchief and glanced around the deck as if expecting to be scolded. “You are the least upsetting thing in the world. It is just this place. I am trapped here. I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I am kept from all that is interesting. Captain Nickerly never approved of me climbing all over the guano in the first place, and after the…troubles, I am forbidden to return.” Her voice was strained. “It is selfish of me to complain that I have lost my small freedoms when a man has lost his life.” She squeezed the little shard in her hand and pressed it to her chest like it was a magic charm. “But this is the sort of thing a lady scientist is allowed to do—look at bits of pottery. I have some books on the Inca civilization. It will give me a pursuit and keep me from stabbing every single person on our ship through the heart with a dagger at night as they sleep.”
“Well, I am generally in favor of not stabbing,” Aiden said. “So I will gladly go.” Returning to the guano mine would never be done gladly, but he felt honored—was that the right word?—to be given this task for her. His feelings for Alice were a complete jumble, scattered somewhere in the broad plain between sisterly affection and romantic desire, complicated further by his admiration for her intelligence and his simple happiness to be near any woman after these months of only men.
“I’ll go tomorrow. Will Nicholas and Gilbert want to come?”
“No!” she said, a little too quickly. “I mean, you are better alone.” She glanced around nervously. “This place is a horrid little village,” she whispered. “Full of gossip.”
Aiden had no idea what she was talking about. But before he could ask anything more, Nicholas walked over to join them.
“Our launch is second in the queue, dear,” Nicholas said, slipping possessively back to her side and resuming his hold on her arm. “Are you ready?”
iden had not been back on the island since the day of the execution, and he felt a sick twist in his stomach as they rowed toward the dock. But the punishment rock was empty, the chains clinking faintly as they were knocked by the occasional high wave. Everything was back to normal. He walked up the path past Koster’s office and down into the mine site. He glanced at every coolie he could as he passed, but he didn’t recognize the one who had given him the pottery shard. Aiden didn’t expect he would. He had only briefly seen the man’s face, and then he had immediately been nearly crushed by an avalanche of guano. Besides that, the coolies were all of similar build, with identical hair and clothing—and covered in dust. People in San Francisco joked about the Chinamen all looking the same, but Aiden had to admit that their features were still so foreign to him that he probably couldn’t have picked the man out even with close inspection.
But whatever the Chinaman’s real game—the sale of genuine artifacts or some kind of scheme—Aiden knew all dealings would have to be done through the scar-faced guard anyway. The coolies had little to offer for sale or trade, but what they did have was always brokered through the guards. Some made small wood carvings or decorative bone buttons that were popular as souvenirs. There was one valuable business, but it was never done in daylight. The bodies of coolies who had been buried for a while in the guano were passed off to museums or collectors in Europe as ancient Peruvian mummies. Sailors rowed out in the dark of the moon and returned with tightly wrapped bundles that, if successfully smuggled home, might earn them double their pay.
Aiden walked around the mine site pretending to be taking more samples of the guano, waiting for the scar-faced guard to approach him. He had no idea how he would receive the rest of the pottery bits. Neither the coolie nor the guard would have known he was coming. But there were always ways to arrange commerce.
It wasn’t long before the guard appeared almost silently at Aiden’s side. Aiden had seen plenty of rough-looking men in the lumber camp, but this man had the most frightening appearance. His eyes shone red in a face so black that, with the glisten of sweat, it looked like ink. The scar on his cheek was raised and ropey, knitted down the whole side of his face, from eyebrow to chin. His bare chest was coated with the yellow dust but striped with trickles of sweat. Aiden took the pottery shard out of his pocket and held it on his palm. The guard nodded slightly.
“Go to the houses at noon,” he said in Spanish, glancing toward the coolies’ village. “Do not let others see you go there.”
Aiden knew enough words in Spanish to understand. But then the guard spoke in English, the words clearly learned just for Aiden’s benefit. “See man near Buddha shrine.”
“Gracias,” Aiden said. He had assumed that the guard would expect some kind of payment for his part in the arrangements, so he had brought a few twists of tobacco, a universal currency. The guard tucked it into his pocket and walked quickly away.
Aid
en climbed up to the first terrace and crossed to the far side of the quarry. No one seemed to pay him much attention. He skidded down a rough path and walked toward the village. The shacks were clustered haphazardly, as the rocky terrain allowed. There was one main path, barely a yard wide, with dozens of narrower paths snaking off it into the warren. The ramshackle buildings tumbled and leaned into one another, so it looked as if one strong push would topple them all. The walls had such large gaps between the boards that Aiden could see through two or three rooms sometimes. It would have been crowded for a hundred men, but Aiden knew there were twice that many living here. Each shack held only a pathetic collection of rough wooden bunks with rolled-up reed mats and a few wooden crates. Aiden followed the main path until he came to what seemed like the center of the place, an open area, no more than twenty feet on each side—the village square. There were pieces of driftwood, a few canvas stools and some ancient, rusted pieces of a wheelbarrow arranged as seating. At one corner, a smooth, flat stone had been carried up from the shore and set upon a bed of smaller stones. In the middle of this altar was a Buddha statue about six inches high, carved from wood.
Aiden had seen shrines in Chinatown in San Francisco, but they were always cheerful and brightly painted, garlanded with flowers and surrounded by little dishes for offerings of rice, candies, fruits and incense. But this poor Buddha shared the barren world of his worshipers. There were, of course, no candies or fruits, but some pieces of old newspaper had been folded into flowers and placed carefully at his feet. Some kind of grass or reed had been cleverly twisted into a necklace for the idol, with tiny shells woven in like jewels. Tin can lids had been hammered into bowls. One held the stub of a candle, another a few grains of rice, a third a shriveled twist of orange peel. There were also three cans filled with water. Beyond recognizing the Buddha, Aiden knew nothing about the religion, but like all the other religions he was aware of, it didn’t seem to be doing much good for its people.
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