Son of Fortune

by Victoria McKernan

  “So why aren’t you dead?” Aiden asked.

  “Ah, yes.” Jian nodded. “You ask the wise question. If Silamu Xie had me killed, the revenge would be great. This way, he can explain that I was kidnapped without his hand. And I think it is more pleasure for Silamu Xie to have me here as a slave.”

  “I’m sorry,” Aiden said cautiously. “But any man might tell this story to escape the life he has signed on for.”

  “No man signs for this place,” Jian said angrily. “All are brought wrongly. They are promised a job in California for the gold or work on the railroad. Some are simply taken—fishermen or poor farmers. They are locked up in a prison and beaten until they agree to sign the papers. Some are sold by the family to pay off a debt. But you hear that I speak English very well—although not so right now. Also, look at me. You see the other men here. When men come here from China, they have been on a ship for six months. In that ship, they lie the whole time on bare boards. They are crowded like firewood. They cannot move or sit up. They lie in their own waste, in the dark, at the bottom of the ship, always wet and with disease and rats. Many die. The ones who live and come here alive are skinny as the bones of a dead man. And their skin is all covered with sores. But on our journey from China, we slept on cushions with silk sheets. We ate fresh eggs and pork.” He ran his hand down the side of his thin belly. “I was a fat man then. My sister teased that I would not find a beautiful wife. After I was kidnapped, I spent only one month in chains. So, compared to the other men, I was fat like a seal when I landed here.”

  Aiden could see that while compared to any normal person Jian would be considered wasted, in this place he did indeed seem almost robust. His skin did not have the brittle yellow color, his joints were not swollen, his gums were still pink and all his white teeth were still there.

  “Also, in China, who will have teachers from England except a rich family?” Jian went on, pressing his case. “I know Shakespeare.” He closed his eyes and took a quick breath. “‘To be, or not to be: that is the question,’” he spoke rapidly in a soft monotone. “‘Whether ’tis nobler to suffer—to suffer—arrows—ah—’” Aiden saw that the strain of this desperate confession was wearing.

  “Stop,” Aiden said. “I believe you.” Hamlet on the guano mountain after a tidal wave was more than his brain could handle. The story was absurd. The kidnapped son of a wealthy merchant—it was something straight out of Dickens. Aiden lay back and looked up at the stars. There were so many the sky looked like a lace tablecloth. His body felt like stone.

  “Did you tell Mr. Koster all this?”

  “No coolie may speak to Koster, or even go near him.”

  “I can talk to him on your behalf—”

  “No!” Jian said sharply. “He will not believe. He will make things bad for me. Say nothing to anyone else. Promise this!”

  “All right, I promise. But then what do you want me to do?”

  “Take me on your ship,” Jian whispered. “I must free my sister from this man and restore honor to my family. Take me to San Francisco.”

  “I could sooner take you to the moon.”

  “Whatever it costs, my father will pay five times.”

  “Five times or ten times, I still need Mr. Koster’s permission.”

  “I will hide.”

  “There is no place to hide.”

  “The Lady May is a big ship. There will be a place.”

  Aiden leaned up on his elbows. “I’m not aboard the Lady May,” he said, puzzled. “I’m on the Raven.”

  Jian frowned. “I know the science men come from the Lady May. My guard told me.”

  “The geologists?” Aiden said, gradually understanding. Jian Zhang, always looking for his chance, had observed him with Alice, Nicholas and Gilbert.

  “I’m not a scientist. I’m just a friend of theirs,” Aiden explained. “I was helping them. I’m on a different ship. The Raven. A very small ship. There is no place to hide.”

  “I will hide in the guano.”

  “It’s impossible. They would know you were missing. They count you before any ship sails.”

  “Once you are sailing, no one can stop you. They have no cannons.”

  “You could be whipped just for asking me this!” Aiden said, looking around nervously. “And then shackled the rest of your days here.”

  “Then I will jump off the cliff knowing that my death is good. If I do nothing, I will die badly.”

  At least once a week, a coolie leaped to his death. There would probably be one a day except that the guards were punished for not stopping them.

  “I will take a letter for you to San Francisco,” Aiden whispered. “I can speak to someone there on your behalf.”

  “Do you have a sister?”

  “I did,” Aiden said. “Two. They’re gone—dead.”

  “When I was a boy, ten years old, my father tied a rope around me and dropped me from a bridge into the river. It was the way to make me swim. But I had only fear. Then little Lijia picked flowers. She ran up along the riverside and threw the flowers in the water to float to me. She called to me that the flowers were her tears of love and I must catch them. I reached my arms to catch the flowers and so my arms learned to swim. Do you see? She is the flower of my life.”

  A bobbing light appeared in the dark distance.

  “The guard is coming,” Jian whispered nervously, jumping to his feet. “I cannot be found outside our village.”

  “I will explain to the guard.”

  “No! Say only that you came ashore from the wave. You climbed up and found this path. You did not come into our village. Please.”

  “All right.”

  “You must help me,” Jian said. He tensed up like a rabbit about to dart away.

  “I will deliver a letter for you. That is all I can do.”

  The guard shouted from the darkness and the lantern rose higher. Jian ducked and vanished. Aiden quickly brushed his hand across the dusty ground, obliterating his footprints.

  “Hello?” the guard called. “Is someone there?”

  The light swung across Aiden’s face, then a dark shape appeared behind it, only the Negro’s eyes visible.

  “I am a sailor,” Aiden said. The tremble in his voice was not forced. “I was washed overboard in the wave. I hurt my leg. Will you help me, please?”

  A large, rough hand grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet.

  he sky was just turning blue when Aiden woke. It was not the light that woke him, however, but the dusty steps of two hundred men as they walked past on their way to the mine. He sat up too fast and his head spun. He had been covered with a cotton blanket but was still chilled through, for there was a cool mist that fell on the island at night. He had been sleeping on a reed mat outside a hut. The hut was made of planed lumber, nicer and more sturdy than the twig houses in the coolie village. Aiden vaguely remembered the guard bringing him here last night. None of the coolies looked at him as they passed. Any boldness they may have felt last night had vanished with the bondage of morning. They walked silently and their silence was enormous. Aiden started to get up, but winced at the pain in his knee. It was so swollen it stretched the leg of his trousers. He was also covered in cuts and scrapes from the rocks, with guano dust caked in the drying blood, leaving slimy daubs. His lips were coated with dust. He wiped them as clean as he could on a corner of the blanket. He tore open the knee of his trousers and managed to get to his feet. As the last of the coolie crew shuffled past and their dust settled along the morning path, a Negro guard came toward him and handed him a cup of water.

  “Vámonos.” The guard pointed at the path. “That way.”

  “You’re alive!” Christopher cried as Aiden was rowed alongside the Raven. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “I’m no ghost,” Aiden said.

  It was a glad reunion aboard the Raven, with shameless hugs and some all-out tears. With all the chaos, it was almost noon by the time Aiden could get a ride from the island to the
Raven, so they’d had plenty of time to mourn him.

  “Is everyone all right here?” Aiden asked.

  “We are now,” Fish said. His eyes were red with fatigue.

  “I was tumbled from my bed and smashed about the cabin like dice,” Christopher said triumphantly. He pointed to a tiny wound on his cheekbone that had been sewn closed with two neat stitches. “So thank God you’re alive—for I’ve been getting no pity at all with everyone thinking you were dead!” He swiped his sleeve across his eyes. “Why aren’t you dead anyway?”

  Aiden told them very briefly what had happened, leaving out much. He wasn’t sure why. But telling them about Jian Zhang would make it too real, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to be real yet. Or maybe it was just because reality had changed so drastically. In spite of the lumps and aches all over his body, the wave now seemed like something that had happened to another person on another planet in another time. The feel of wooden deck under his feet was strange.

  “Here, sit.” Fish helped Aiden to a crate. “Your leg looks bad.”

  “I can stand on it,” Aiden said. But he couldn’t bend it, and sat awkwardly. “The Raven is all right—no damage?”

  “The rudder is twisted,” Fish said. “But nothing we can’t fix. And the cat is missing.”

  “She was on my lap,” Aiden said, feeling oddly guilty. Sven the Baby appeared with mugs of sweet tea and the bottle of brandy. Christopher poured a generous measure into the mugs, and Aiden didn’t object.

  “What about other ships and men?” he asked.

  Fish raked his fingers through his sweaty hair. “No one is sure of anything yet. There are two known dead, and eight missing, but that was early this morning and there may be more or less by now. The Lady May has become the place for lists and keeping track,” he said. “We have a captains’ meeting there at four.”

  “They are all right—on the Lady May?”

  “Yes, everyone there,” Fish said. “What about the island? We can see from here that the loading wharf is damaged—do you know how bad?”

  “The pylons looked secure, but most of the cross braces are smashed,” Aiden said. “Both the chutes are damaged. One was completely knocked off into the sea. The coolies were at work to salvage it this morning.”

  Aiden looked out over the anchorage, where every ship buzzed with activity. “I thought—I thought for sure every ship would be sunk.” His voice cracked. “Have you ever seen anything like that before? A wave like that?”

  “No.” Fish rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his shoulders. He had said nothing about his own bashing, but his face was bruised and his hands were leaking blood through bandages. “I’ve only heard stories. It’s thought to come after an undersea earthquake somewhere. I think we got off lucky. This anchorage is so deep. Maybe that absorbed the force.”

  “Maybe God just loves us,” Christopher said, raising the bottle of brandy in a toast. “And wants us to drink lots more before we die.”

  The afternoon was a time for repair—of both men and ships. Most of the injuries to men were split heads and broken limbs. There were only a handful of surgeons in the fleet, but every ship had someone who could sew up wounds, and many had bonesetters as well. But more essential than doctors were carpenters. A ship could sail with damaged men but not with a damaged hull. The wave had broken masts, torn sails away, blown out portholes and twisted off hatch covers. Everything loose on decks had been swept away. Fish had been diligent about keeping things stowed well despite the calm anchorage, so the Raven had lost nothing but a few chairs and lanterns and some laundry.

  Throughout the day, messages were relayed from ship to ship with semaphore flags. The good news—a missing sailor returned—was heralded with cheers. The bad news—a body found—was greeted with silence. By afternoon, fifteen more men were confirmed dead, three of the missing had been accounted for and three were still lost. It was rumored that as many as thirty ships had serious damage, but only one seemed in real danger of sinking.

  Aiden sat uselessly on deck, watching everything from a distance. A chair had been brought up from below, and a crate propped up his leg. Sven the Baby, who had assumed the role of ship’s medic, had stitched the gash on Aiden’s head, spread a foul-smelling ointment on his other wounds, cut away his torn trouser leg and made a poultice of capsicum and mustard for his knee. It burned mightily but did help the swelling go down. They had laudanum for pain in the medicine chest, but Aiden was wary of it and stayed with the more manageable dose of brandy instead. Christopher, who had no compunctions about the opiate and actually had been quite painfully battered, took a dose and slept away the afternoon.

  It was annoying to have nothing to do when there was so much to be done. But Aiden couldn’t very well hang over the side to help repair the rudder or crawl around belowdecks helping restore order. He tried to read. Alice had given him On the Origin of Species, but it was far too dense a read for right now. And evolution seemed suddenly irrelevant anyway. Everyone could die at any minute from all sorts of catastrophes, so what was the point? Tornados, blizzards, drought, famine, awful disease and war, of course—how was it that anyone lasted at all? And why? The people who lived were mostly cruel and awful to each other anyway. If either Darwin or God had the answer in his book, Aiden had not found it yet.

  But it was the fate of one man that most concerned him now. What to do about Jian Zhang? His story was crazy, but there was enough feel of truth to it that Aiden couldn’t just let it go. Besides, the man had helped him, maybe even saved his life. What was due him now? More to the point, what was possible now? There was absolutely no way to sneak him off the island. Perhaps he could convince Koster to let him take Jian—to buy him, really, for he would have to offer some price. They could take Jian back to San Francisco with them; he could find his sister and go back to his princely life in China. While every other Chinaman here—the peasants and barbarians that Jian considered unworthy to empty his chamber pot—slaved out the rest of his brief life in hell. Aiden was conflicted. Was he thinking more harshly because Jian was a son of fortune?

  But what could he do? Certainly he couldn’t try to smuggle Jian aboard the ship. Aiden thought again of the man on the rock. The penalty was too real. He felt vomit creeping up his throat again and forced it back down. The sea was uneasy, with low, choppy waves that seemed to come from every direction. Fish appeared and sat on the hatch cover beside him.

  “I’m going to the Lady May now for the captains’ meeting,” he said. “Shall I take a message to Mrs. Brock for you?”

  “Mrs. Brock? Oh, Alice—yes.” Aiden was filled with a sudden longing and also an urge to cry. “Tell her that I am well and hope to visit with her soon.” He took a deep breath and looked away.

  “Are you all right?” Fish frowned.

  Aiden sat up and tried to look all right. “I’m tired, is all. I didn’t sleep well.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.” Fish combed his fingers through his tangled hair. Aiden noticed that the blond locks that so enchanted the native girls were now thinning and streaked with gray. “You’ve had a rough go,” Fish said. “But there is more on your mind besides all the near-death parts.”

  “Do you read my mind now?” Aiden said.

  Fish shrugged. “No one’s mind is so different,” he said. “We all want the same things: safe home, love and dinner.”

  “Only that? A pretty wife and fat babies?”

  “As long as she’s nice and the babies don’t howl all the time.”

  “Isn’t that what we adventured out to escape? When you come home from a timber run, I don’t recall home and hearth being the main attraction.”

  “This is true.” Fish laughed.

  Aiden looked out over the harbor. “I was wondering about the coolies,” he said. “Do you know, is it possible for a coolie to buy out his indenture? Or to have someone buy it for him?”

  “You mean pay a sum of money and the man be allowed to leave?”

  “Yes. What
if, for example, one of them found a gold nugget while digging the guano—just say.”

  “It would be taken away from him,” Fish said. “And he would be put back to the digging, poor as ever.”

  That was awfully true.

  “Well, what if a coolie had relatives, let’s say, who came and offered Koster the price of the contract to buy his freedom?”

  “Has someone approached you about this?” Fish said suspiciously.

  “I was just wondering,” Aiden said.

  “Whatever you’re thinking—don’t.”

  “They aren’t slaves. Supposedly.”

  “What happened on the island? Did a coolie speak to you?”

  “All I asked was if you know whether one can buy out their indenture. If you don’t know, just say so,” Aiden said, more snappish than he intended. He wasn’t exactly sure why he didn’t want to tell Fish more. “I thought you might know. That’s all.”

  “Fine. Then the answer is, I don’t know.”

  “Fine. That’s it, then.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Fish glanced around to be sure no one was nearby to hear them, then leaned in close. “You know I abhor this business,” he said quietly. “And I will never sail this trade again. But these aren’t just rich men with a stake here—these are governments. This is the wealth of nations. Peru would go bankrupt without the guano. The economy of Europe could collapse.” Fish wiped the sweat from his face with both hands in a scoop, like a monk in supplication. “I know something of you by now,” he said.

  “Of course you do,” Aiden said. “We’ve been on a small ship for three months. We know every man by the smell of his farts by now.”

  “I know what happened in Seattle,” Fish said seriously. “The Swedish Navy is a small world. News travels fast between the logging camps and ports.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about smallpox vaccine stolen for some Indians. About a man killed in the theft and his killer on the run. And about you arriving in Seattle the day after it all happened, desperate to leave and wounded from a fight.”