The Castaways

by Iain Lawrence

  Best of all, we had light. We had lanterns and lamps and candles, and on the first night we lit every one we could find, mindless of any pirates, and turned the ship into a great beacon of shimmering light.

  Over the next few days we regained our strength as the ship carried us south. How it gladdened my heart to see the improvement in Midgely. I tried to confine him to bed; I told him he had the fever. But he admitted that he’d been drinking from the sea, and now claimed that the ship’s green water was sweeter than honey. Certainly, it drowned the madness that had swollen inside him, and I was much relieved to see that my friend was not at death’s door. As soon as I thought him well enough, I asked how we could steer the ship to England.

  “Well, we can’t,” he said simply.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t steer a phantom, Tom. She’s the Flying Dutchman; I told you that.” We were sitting on the deck, leaning against the cookhouse wall. “Wind and weather means nothing to her. She goes where she likes.”

  He tipped back his head, as though he could see the masts and canvas. There was a breeze that carried the smoke from Gaskin’s fire in swirls through the rigging. But the ship still wallowed along, rocking in the waves. The bell would have been tolling merrily if Gaskin hadn’t lost his patience and torn away the clapper.

  “You hear how the sails flap and slither?” asked Midgely “There’s wind to fill them, ain’t there? She could put her railing down if she wanted. But she’s plodding along instead, ’cause that’s what she wants.”

  When it came to sails and ships, Midge could see more in his blindness than I with my sight. But to me the sails looked all higgledy-piggledy, and I wondered if Midge wasn’t imagining what he wanted to see, or what he thought he ought to see if the ship was really his phantom.

  “She found us, didn’t she?” he said. “She came and picked us up, and now she’s off for someone else. When the time’s right, she’ll hoist her skirts and run. That’s the Dutchman’s curse; he has to spend the rest of time dashing here and there, plucking souls from the sea.”

  “I don’t know about the Dutchman,” I said. “But the ship is only a ship, and if we trim the sails we can go where we want.”

  “Don’t even try,” said he.

  “But—”

  “Don’t even try.”

  That was the end of it, as far as Midge was concerned. Without him, I couldn’t hope to get the ship turned around. So I got up and went into the cookhouse.

  Benjamin Penny, and Weedle in his pirate clothes, were down on the floor playing a gambling game with dried beans. Boggis was bent over the stove, his chest heaving as he blew mightily into the fire. He liked fire, Boggis did. With the stove open, the flames leaping inside, he looked like a sort of fire god.

  At his side was a book. He was holding a taper that he’d rolled from its pages, and smoke was wafting from its end, as though he held a magical wand.

  From curiosity—nothing more—I picked up the book. It was handwritten, carelessly blotted, so that many of the words were lost in splashes and puddles of ink. More pages were missing than were left, but from the first passage I read, I could tell I was holding a strange story of the sea.

  “We sail in search of Gold,” it began. I had to chase flies from the page to see the letters. “But I fear all of Us will die before this Journey’s done. Our Ship already is a tomb, though the Dead still hammer on the Coffin.”

  The next few words were drowned in ink, impossible to read. But I soon discovered that the ill-fated ship at the center of the tale was bound for the West Indies. It had last touched land at Java, where two sailors had joined the crew.

  “A Fever came aboard with the new Hands,” wrote the narrator. He had no respect for capital letters. “It was not Breakbone or Malaria nor any Illness of the Jungle. It was that Incurable Fever which comes from Gold! Within the hour the news had spread throughout the Ship, so that all knew of it from the boy to the Captain, and all shouted of it together. ‘There has been a strike in Georgia! In the Wilderness of the New World! Nuggets of the Precious Metal lie on the ground like cinders on a path!’ Ah, the "Yellow Fever of the Gold. How it poisons the mind! At the mere sound of the Word there is no thought of anything but Gold—gold in nuggets, gold in veins, gold in fine dust. I was not immune from this myself. But none succumbed to the Fever as quickly and wholly as our Captain and the Mate.”

  The rest of the page was torn away, and the next few missing altogether. When the tale continued, the captain and half the crew had apparently perished. There were fewer than six left on the ship.

  I was wondering about the story, and what might have happened, when I saw the smoking taper in Gaskin’s hand.

  Up I leapt and snatched it away. I waved it madly to extinguish the smoldering end, but it only burst into flame. I hurled it to the deck and stomped it to ashes.

  Weedle and Penny and Gaskin were staring at me as though I’d lost my senses. They said not a word as I picked up the charred remains and unrolled the paper.

  There was a list of names. It was headed “All Hands,” and in a very different writing it named the members of the crew. At the top was “John Roberts, bosun’s mate,” at the bottom, “Henry Nore, the boy,” with three of the names crossed over, and two others penciled in at the bottom. There were many strange marks and notations that I couldn’t make out.

  I asked Boggis, “Where did you get this?”

  He pointed at the book.

  “And where did you get that?” I said.

  “I found it in the wood bin, Tom.” He scratched his bottom. “I needed something for fire-starting.”

  There was no use being angry. I smoothed the burnt page and set it in among the others. I turned to the back of the book to see how the story ended.

  “I feel my days are numbered. I can hold out no longer, and now only await my end. If I am lost, and this Account survives, let it be known that our Murdering Captain and the Mate were the undoing of every man, and the Ruin of our Voyage. May Justice be done! God rest us all!”

  I knew the tricks of writers. They were crafty fellows who took bits of fancy and dressed them up to look like fact. But there was something about the ink-spotted journal, and the way it was written, that gave me no doubt it was a true account of the last days of the very ship we were on. I supposed that the writer had been the cook, and that his journal would have vanished forever if Boggis hadn’t stumbled across it.

  I carried the book outside and began, right then, to read it to Midgely I told him only that it was a story of the sea, but he guessed very quickly that there was more to it than that. For a while he listened as I read.

  “We were set South by the Winds. They blew with ferocity, forever foul. Not a man aboard had seen the likes of the Giant Seas that rolled on and on against us. The ship was fairly swallowed between them. Our poor Cargo was thrown hither and yon, while the Men were tossed like dice in their beds. But the Captain paid no mind to the suffering. Under All Sail we made our westing. I feared we had fallen from the Grace of God.”

  Midgely stopped me there. “Is this true or made up?” he asked.

  I told him I didn’t know. We were sitting with our shoulders touching, and he reached out and put his fingers on the paper, as though he could feel the ink and the scratchings of the writer’s pen.

  “The strength of the Wind gave to the spray the power of Grapeshot. The men could not face into it, yet the Captain drove them to their work. On Christmas Day we saw God’s face in the clouds, Bearded and angry. Every man saw it. Thomas Davis, the carpenter, fell to his knees at the sight. He raised his hands together and wailed for Forgiveness. For Mercy. The Captain himself took up the lash and gave the man such a flogging that it sickened the hearts of all Hands. Then he ordered the Men aloft, and piled canvas on canvas until it seemed the Ship would be driven under.”

  There was a gap in the story where pages were missing. Then a boat was being launched, and men were being thrown into it as they
struggled and screamed.

  “Their only crime was caring for the Ship. In the night they had eased a Topsail Brace, so that the Foremast would not be carried away. It was for that crime alone that our four poor Castaways were set adrift. The Captain and the Cruel Mate gave them guns and powder, a keg of water and Salt Horse each. But in those Monster Seas the Castaways had little hope of surviving. We had no doubt, as they fell away on the Stormy Sea, still waving and shouting for help, that we were seeing the last of them in this World.”

  Midgely closed the book. With a flick of his hand he slammed it shut on my fingers. “It’s made up,” he said. “It ain’t true.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “It’s someone telling tales, that’s what it is,” said Midge. “It’s true about the captain, and it’s maybe true about the gold. But the castaways, that’s rubbish. The Dutchman picks up the sailors, Tom; he don’t cast them away.”

  “Well, then maybe we’re not on his ship,” I said.

  “It says so right here!” Midge thumped the book with his fist. “The captain dared the storms, and God appeared and damned him for it. That’s the story there, Tom. Like it or not, we’re on the Dutchman. We’ll spend the rest of our days plucking souls from the sea.”

  I laughed at his notions. But soon enough, I came to wonder if he wasn’t right.

  That night there were more stars in the sky than I had ever seen. In their glow the horizon was crisp and flat. I could see a castle of ice floating miles away. The sea was so calm, the ship so steady, that I dreamed that night I was on solid ground.

  Yet I soon woke to the eerie sound of wind in the rigging, half a moan and half a song. The ladles and pans that hung from the cookhouse walls were all at a slant, swaying as the ship plunged through the waves. There was a roar of water, and a motion that made me queasy.

  Midgely was already awake. I said, “The sea’s getting rough.”

  “No, it’s the ship.” There was a smile on his face. “She’s sailing again.”

  He was right, as I learned when I stepped out of the cookhouse. Sails that had flapped from their stays now bulged with wind, pulling nicely. The ship leapt through the waves, flinging spray from the bow that pattered all over the deck. It was the sort of sailing my father had loved, and I could picture him grinning out across the sea with his clothes in a flap and his salt-covered beard in a tangle.

  I imagined that a shift in the wind had sorted out the sails. But it certainly seemed that a ghostly crew had gone aloft to set and trim the canvas, missing only the main topsail. High above the deck, it was strangled and throttled by snarls of rope, flailing in the wind.

  With the decks at a slant, the seas roaring by, we began to hear again the knockings in the ship. They followed each shuddering blast of a breaking wave, and came in chorus with the terrible moans from the timbers and planks. We could see the masts shaking, and hear the slosh of water rising in the bilge, but those moans sounded too human to come from mere wood.

  Through the day we stormed along. But at nightfall the wind eased again, and the ship passed slowly through a field of ice. The southern sky lit up in glowing beams and arcs of light, so that the heavens seemed to cloak themselves in shimmering colors. The strange light played on the ice, and Midgely nearly cried because he couldn’t see the shining castles and the slabs.

  In the morning the field was behind us. There was only one bit of ice to be seen, and it lay straight ahead. A thick slab with a hummock in the middle, it was not very big, nor very tall, but it stood out plainly on the ocean. The hummock was stained a deep red, as though the ice still held the glow of heavenly lights.

  Not until we were up close did I see that the ice was stained with blood, and that on its back rode a pair of ragged men.

  seven

  THE CASTAWAYS COME ABOARD

  My skin crawled at the sight of the men on their icy raft. A trick of wind and tide might have brought us together, but for a moment I believed that Midge was right, and that his Flying Dutchman was very real.

  In that instant I didn’t doubt that the ship would stop of its own accord, and the men would join us, and off we’d go to somewhere else. We gathered at the base of the big bowsprit, with no one at the wheel. Weedle’s red sash whipped round his waist in the wind.

  We saw white puffs rising from the ice, and thought the men were signaling with guns, though we never heard the cracking sound of the shots.

  Each minute brought us thirty yards or so toward the ice. Each minute made the scene before us more strange and terrible.

  The two men stood at the low summit of their little island, not six feet above the sea. It seemed at first that they were dancing, for they reeled round and round at the top of the ice, their arms waving, their feet kicking. It seemed the fury of their dancing set their small world tilting to and fro beneath them. But it was really the ice that moved the men, and their dance was only a struggle to keep their balance. All around them the sea was white with froth, and great black fish kept bursting from the foam, battering at the ice.

  I had to explain it for Midgely, who must have doubted my every word. “Fish don’t come out of the water,” he said.

  Well, these ones did. They were long and fat, their black hides mottled by patches of white. From their backs rose enormous triangular fins, while their gaping mouths were full of teeth that a bear would have envied. Puffs of white spray shot up from the tops of their heads, scattering away on the wind.

  Those black fish, like small whales but fierce as wolves, hurtled right from the water and crashed their bellies on the ice. Their tails churning the water, they drove themselves up onto the little island, until their own weight tipped them over, and they went rolling back to the sea.

  The cold island, streaked with blood, rocked wildly in the attack of the black fish. At the summit the two men turned round and round to face each one. They had guns, but apparently no powder, for they were using their weapons like clubs, to bash at the heads of the creatures.

  There was so much blood on the ice that the men must have killed or injured one of the black fish. I imagined they’d been fighting for days, balanced at the top of their pitching island as the fish charged up again and again.

  I called out as we shouldered our way toward them. The shadows of the sails raced ahead of us, over the foamy crests of the waves, over the ice and the black fish.

  Like wolves at the coming of the shepherd, the creatures scattered and fled. At last the men looked up, and the sight of the ship suddenly looming above them must have been startling indeed. They cowered from it at first.

  “We’re going to run them down,” I said. “How do we slow the ship?”

  “She’ll do it herself,” said Midge. “You watch.”

  It didn’t seem possible. Over the waves we charged like a great knight, the bowsprit our lance. The sea surged and foamed at the bow.

  The ship didn’t stop. But it did turn aside. The surge of waves breaking back from the ice caught the bow with a booming blow that nudged it away.

  We all hurried to the waist in the hope that we might drag the men aboard. Gaskin swung out from the rail and stood on the ladder. We held his shirt and the waist of his pants, and he reached out with both arms just as the men dropped their guns and reached up for him.

  The ship struck the ice and rolled it under. The men leapt up, clasping hands and arms with Boggis. The sudden shock of their weight nearly hauled every one of us over the side. But Gaskin held on, and the men twirled at the ends of his arms, skittering their feet on the tops of the waves like a pair of seabirds.

  Walter Weedle leaned farther over the rail. One of the men looked up at him with the most surprised expression I’d ever seen. His eyes doubled in size, and his mouth gaped open. It seemed he truly believed he was seeing a pirate, that he had come to the ship of Blackbeard himself. But he must have glimpsed the boy within the clothes, for just as quickly the expression fell away.

  So did the men, or very nearly. I
t took much puffing and cursing to bring them aboard, but at last we managed it. Side by side they stood on the deck, each dressed in many clothes, layer upon layer, all sodden with brine and blood. They gazed in wonder around the ship—down its length and up the masts—until their eyes settled on little Midgely

  “What happened to that one?” asked the taller of the two.

  “He was blinded,” I said.

  “How?”

  No one answered, though Benjamin Penny rather squirmed beside me. We were wary, like schoolboys sizing up a new teacher.

  The taller man had tattoos on his hands, and a stare as cold as the ice that he’d come from. He was a frightening figure, but the other was twice as horrid and twice as scary. He looked like a pig, his ears so large and squashed, his head so round, speckled with lonely hairs. From his mouth came the most vile breath imaginable, for his teeth were brown and rotten.

  “When I ask a question I expect an answer,” said the taller man, turning to me. “What happened to that boy?”

  His tone annoyed me. We had just saved his life, but he gave not a word of thanks, nor a how-do-you-do. I said only, “He’s blind, not deaf. You can ask him yourself.”

  The piglike man drew a whistling breath through his teeth. Weedle’s scar began to twitch. But the man with the tattooed hands only looked at me with the same burning gaze.

  Weedle spoke quickly. “Sir, it happened long ago. In a prison hulk at Chatham, sir.”

  “At Chatham? You’re convicts, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Weedle bobbed his head.

  “Stowaways too?” Not a line or wrinkle had changed on the man’s face. It was void of expression. “You escaped from Botany Bay, I suppose. Made your way aboard. Hid in the chain locker. Is that it?”

  “No, sir!” cried Weedle. “We never even got to Australia, sir. We was lost and near to death—because of Tom Tin there—when this ship come along. It was days ago, sir.”