“We’re done for,” he squealed.
The First Mate raised him to his feet.
“Not if we stand together as men,” he said. “For truly that is the only way we will see home again. Cap’n... do I have your permission to break out the powder?”
“You have a plan?”
“More of an idea, but mayhap it will come to something.”
“Then have at it man, have at it.”
The Mate went below, while Crawford and I stood and watched the figures on the dockside.
They did not move. Their stares did not wander from where we stood. The snow got heavier yet, and still they did not stir.
“What do they want from us, Cap’n,” Crawford wailed beside me. “What do they want?”
In truth, I could not answer him, for fear had taken hold deep within me. It would not be shifted, no matter how many prayers I uttered up to the most high. My eyes were fixed on the pastor and Bald Tom, two men as far apart in temperament as you are ever likely to meet. Yet here they were, standing side by side, joined in a new hatred against their former shipmates that I was at a loss to understand.
The wind howled. The snow bit into my cheeks, but I was loath to move, loath to take my eyes from the host on the dock lest they creep up on me unawares.
The First Mate came back onto deck, joined by Eye-Tie Frank. They carried between them a half-barrel full of thick pitch.
“I’ve mixed in the powder,” the First Mate said. “Remember yon corsair we met off the Azores?”
And indeed I did. In a flash I saw his plan.
“Will it burn against yon cold flesh?” I asked as I helped manhandle the barrel.
“I know nothing else that might,” the Mate said.
He wrapped a linen cloth around the end of a broom-stick and dipped it in the pitch. He lit it from a small tinder box he kept in his waistcoat pocket.
“I trust no one but you with the flame,” the Mate said, handing it to me.
I looked him in the eye, this man who had been my friend for past twenty years.
“It’s risky,” I said. “I have mind of what happened to Slant-Eyed Jock,”
“And I,” the Mate said. “But I fear we have little choice.”
He thrust his arm into the pitch. He came up with a handful of black ooze in his hand.
“Do it quick,” he said. He thrust his hand towards me.
I lit the pitch. The Mate threw the lit mass away from him and it spluttered and spat as it sailed into the night. It hit Bald Tom on the chest, and ran down his torso, burning all the time.
The frozen man looked down, as if bemused. His whole face went up like a torch as the flame reached the powder that had been mixed in with the pitch.
Bald Tom fell to his knees, dropped forward. He tumbled off the dock and down to the frozen water below. He hit it hard, dropping through the ice with a sizzle and fountain of steam before he sank away out of sight, silent, like a stone.
Jim Crawford shouted in triumph, but the Mate hushed him sternly.
“I just killed a good man,” he said grimly. “Tis no cause for celebration.”
“He were dead already,” Crawford said.
“That don’t make me feel any better about it,” the Mate said grimly.
He stuck his hand in the pitch again, and came up with a second ball.
“You were lucky with the first,” I said. “Mayhap it is best not to chance it again?”
“We both know we have no other choice, Cap’n. Light it up.”
For a second time his arm seemed to grow a flame. The powder in the pitch spluttered before it left his hand. He threw it towards the dock, but it exploded and fizzled out well short, dropping away out of sight to the ice below.
“I can do better than that,” Crawford said.
Before either of us could stop him he plunged his whole arm into the pitch, coming up with a far bigger ball than the Mate. He leaned forward and touched the flame to the oily mixture.
His arm immediately burst aflame, fire roaring up the side of his head, flesh crisping and melting. He screamed, just once, and fell away from us. The powder went up and the whole right hand side of Crawford’s body burst, like a ripe fruit, a dead, smoking ruin before he hit the deck.
The Mate looked down at what was left of the man.
“Be careful,” I said.
The Mate bent to get himself another handful, when Eye-Tie Frank stepped in front of him.
“Mayhap I have a better method,” he said. He removed his cap, then his belt. He filled his cap with the pitch, and then tied it up with his belt. He was left with a two foot length of belt with a ball of pitch on the end.
“Shame on you,” he said to the Mate and me, his slight accent showing through. “Do you not do this yourselves at home to bring in the New Year?”
He lit the pitch, swung it around his head and sent in winging over the dock.
“That we do,” the Mate said, unbuckling his own belt. “Although I am usually too far gone in my cups to remember it.”
The fireball exploded just above the heads of the throng of the dead, sending burning flame over five of them.
The Mate sent one of his own after it. The air filled with black acrid smoke as flesh burned. The ranks of the dead did not move, even as their neighbours burned.
“All very well,” the Mate said. “But we have a limited supply of belts and caps. And I’d rather my breeches didn’t fall down... not in this weather.”
Dave the Bosun’s mate arrived on deck. We set him to finding twine and cloth, the better to make more fireballs.
For a while the air was full of flame and fury.
The snow got heavier still. Sometimes we could not even see the dock, but the smell of burning meat told us we still hit our targets.
We lost ourselves in a world of burning pitch and whirling snow, the only sound being the coughing, spluttering rattle of powder starting to fizzle, and the whoosh of flame as we hit our targets. The night went on without end.
I know not when the snow finally stopped, only that I looked up to see stars and a full moon overhead.
“My eyes deceive me, Cap’n,” the Mate said beside me. “For surely the moon was on the wane when we hove-to here.”
“There is deception here, right enough,” I replied, “But it is not your eyes. It comes from that one.”
Out over the dockside, the white native with the feather chest still stood tall and un-burnt. Around him the ranks of the dead lay, finally at rest, a smoking chaos of limbs and torsos piled higgeldy-piggeldly in a hellish landscape strewn across the dock.
The native thumped at his chest. He made an expansive circle with his arms before thumping his chest again.
He did this twice before I realized his meaning.
This land is mine.
He pointed at Dave the Bosun’s mate. The man jerked, as if jolted by lightning.
To our astonishment he threw himself off the boat, towards the pier.
It was a prodigious leap. I would not have placed a bet on him achieving it, but he seemed to have been given wings. He landed, a few feet in front of the white native.
The native thumped his chest again. He stroked Dave’s face, gently, as if romancing a woman. Once more we had to watch a colleague freeze. His body went stiff, and a last plume of breath left him, floating high in the air. I could only hope it was his soul, fleeing to its place in Paradise, for the thought of a man being frozen but yet imprisoned, mute, in his own body, was almost too much to bear.
Finally Dave turned back towards us, blind white eyes staring out of a blue face. The native once more made the circle with his arms.
“He’s showing us,” the Mate said. “He’s showing us that all this is his... including us.”
“It does not include me,” Eye-Tie Frank said. He leapt off the ship, screaming his defiance. Whether he intended to reach the pier itself we shall never know. His leap was well short and he fell away below our sight, never to be heard of agai
n.
The native stared at the two of us, his black-lipped mouth raised in a smile. He thumped his chest again. Somewhere, out in the wild reaches of the night, a wolf howled at the moon. It was answered, much closer, by a pack, a wild, ululating wail that seemed to pierce my very skull.
The First Mate looked at me, and I at him.
“We have served together over twenty years, Cap’n. I have been proud to call you my friend.”
“And I you,” I replied. We both had a tear in our eye, there at the end.
“Goodbye, Cap’n,” he said, as the native on the dock pointed a long white finger, straight at him.
What happened next will stay with me for the remainder of what is left of my life.
The First Mate shook and juddered, in the same manner as Dave the Bosun’s mate had done a few moments before. He gritted his teeth. He stuck both arms into the pitch, all the way up to his shoulders. Before I could move, he took the torch from me. He leapt from the boat, straight at the native.
“Havenhome!” he called, his voice ringing out loud and clear in the night. He landed just in front of the tall white figure, stepped forward, and grabbed it in a tight embrace. I have seen men’s backs broken by that grip, but the native ne’er flinched. The Mate put all his strength into it, but the white figure was unbowed.
Then, at the last, as the skin in the Mate’s face went blue, he yelled out once more, a formless word. He brought down the torch, and set light to his pitch covered arms.
I stood and watched, with tears running through a grim smile, as the pair of them burned. The feather crown went first, blazing all as one and sending flames up the creature’s back. Where the First Mate’s pitch-covered arms touched its body they stuck, searing huge patches of flesh at a time.
Together the bodies fell on the dock. The Mate was surely dead by now, but the creature could not escape from his embrace.
Even then I thought the creature might break free, for the flames had begun to die down, yet clearly, it still showed sign of what passed for life in that white frozen frame.
Finally, just as I was starting to despair, the powder in the pitch took.
A yellow flame shot ten yards into the sky. When it died down there was nothing left of either body that could be recognized... just one single, fused mass of blackened flesh.
* * *
I am decided. This will be my last ever entry in this journal, made in the hope that what is related may help some other Christian souls from sharing the fate of my crewmates. In the meantime I can do little more than offer up prayers, for the First Mate, and all the other brave men of the Havenhome who will ne’er return home.
This proud ship, my home these many years, has sailed its last, and I am no longer Captain of anything other than my own soul. In truth, I do not think I will ever be able to lead men again. If I make it to home port alive I will retire.
I will spend my time supping beer in the harbour and telling tall tales with the other old gentleman, content to keep my feet warm before the fires of hearth and home.
But that seems like a long way off, another lifetime where the sun shines hot and yellow on the fields, and my Lizzie stands at the door, smiling. I have some of the Havenhome’s tale yet to tell before I can begin my journey towards that most welcome of sights.
After the Mate had made his sacrifice I could do naught but stand there, staring at the smoking ruin of all that was left of my friends and shipmates. I paid particular attention to the charred mass where lay the Mate and the native, half expecting at any moment that a white figure would rise from the dockside to mock me once more.
Nothing moved except the stirring of acrid smoke on the breeze.
The wind died, like the last sigh of an old man on his death-bed. A cloud ran over the full moon. Slowly at first, then faster until water ran in runnels off the deck; the snow thawed.
And still I stood there, long into the night, long after the sun came up and the last of the frost was taken by the morning.
I felt empty, devoid of action, abandoned by hope. I was only brought out of my reverie by old Stumpy Jack, who emerged, blinking into the sunlight, looking near as dead as some of those lying on the dockside.
“Are we alive, Cap’n?” he said, “or in Paradise?”
“Does this look like any Paradise you might expect?” I said.
He stood beside me for a long time, staring out over the smoking dock.
“Is it over?” he whispered.
“I know not whether it will ever be over,” I replied. “But it is over for now.”
It was Stumpy Jack who brought me inside, him who made me drink and eat, that I might stay alive when all of my brethren lay dead around us.
And even now, while I write this, the old man is showing more fortitude than I thought he possessed. He has brought the remains of the Mate and the native inside the ship.
“The rest of them, Cap’n? What shall we do with the rest of them?”
There are bodies, mostly charred and unrecognizable, strewn all across the dock. The Mate’s pitch and powder concoction did for them all in the end.
“By rights, these people deserve a Christian burial,” I said.
“Nay, Cap’n,” Old Stumpy said. “Whatever part of them belonged to the Lord has already gone. And neither you nor I have the strength, or the heart, to waste in spending another night near this place.”
I reluctantly had to agree with him.
We will scuttle the Havenhome here, on this dock. I will leave my journal in my chest, wrapped in oilskins. In that manner, if anyone should chance on the drowned boat, they may, if the Lord is with them, find this journal first, and stop before they unleash what Jack and I have left at the bottom of the hold.
We have gathered our provisions. We will leave tonight. The only other thing I take with me from my cabin is my bible, in the hope it will give me solace in the nights to come. But I fear I will ne’er find hope again in the words of the Lord, for I know the pastor’s white eyes will ever accuse me, even in the deepest depths of slumber. If the Lord did not see fit to save such a holy and devout man as the pastor, what hope is there for the likes of me, who has done so many things that require repentance?
Forgive me Lizzie, for I know now you will never read this. But if the Lord gives me strength, I intend to head down the coast, for warmer climes and friendly company. Mayhap I shall return yet to home port, and your soft arms.
You will fill my dreams until I am once more at your side. Be well, my love. Be well for both of us.
Your loving husband, John.
THE YULE LOG
John took the best part of a week in choosing the right tree and another day deciding which branch would be sacrificed. After a further day he had the sawn-off log cleared of particularly resistant lichen that had taken hold in the crook of a branch. Only then was he ready. He clamped the log tight to his workbench, made sure the chisel was sharp, and began.
He cried as he carved; the memory of her singing always brought tears, her pure soprano climbing above his ponderous chord changes on the wheezing harmonium.
Jacqueline.
It took a longish time to get her name engraved in the log. The cold didn’t help, biting deep into old bones despite the furnace in the corner of the workshop. After the name was done he had to work fast, for it was already dusk and the log needed to be in the grate before midnight, otherwise it would all have been for naught.
He quickly chiselled out the second line; words long since etched on his memory.
Ae fond kiss.
He carried the log through to the main cottage and took care preparing a fire, using just the right mixture of paper and coal to ensure that the log would not burn too quickly when placed in the front of the grate. That done he went to the dresser and carefully retrieved a charred piece of wood from where it had been wrapped in a handkerchief. He thrust it deep into the bowels of the coal and lit the dry paper with a match.
Once he was satisfied the fire woul
dn’t go out, he prepared the next part of the ritual—three fingers of single malt in a glass by his chair, and enough tobacco to see him through the night. The log cracked and spat as he filled his first pipe. Almost immediately he was lost in reverie.
It will take time.
She has gone to a better place.
For most of the year he managed to believe, helped by mindless toil in the fields, hard liquor at night, and the crumbs of comfort that came from faith. But on this, the anniversary of the day she was taken from him, faith proved harder to come by. Everywhere he looked he saw her traces; from the mirror above the mantel they’d got as a wedding present from her father to the walnut pipe in his hand that the same old man had smoked all his adult life.
John did not notice the tears that ran down his cheeks until he was brought back to the present by the church bells calling the faithful to midnight mass.
There was a time when he would have walked the snowy lane to the church, arm in arm with Jackie, stars twinkling in her eyes. Those walks had stopped all too suddenly, the end coming as they got ready for Mass that fateful night. First came a headache, then a fit, and then she was gone. A doctor, a policeman and the vicar, three wise men, ushered her off to the great beyond.
Now John sat, with the log burning, waiting for a sign that another year was worth the effort. Carols whispered in the night across the cold air between his cottage and the church. Snow pattered on the window in an accompanying beat. Fresh tears came, and suddenly John was weeping uncontrollably. The old harmonium in the corner moaned in sympathy.
He looked up from the fire to where a quick movement in the mirror caught his eye.
Jackie?
Cold lips brushed at his cheek, tears freezing in his whiskers.
A high, soprano voice carried through the room, just audible above the moan of the instrument.
Ae fond kiss.
John sat upright in his chair, and in the process knocked the whisky glass over. It clattered on the floorboards. The harmonium stilled. Outside the snow died to a mere rustle. Over at the church the congregation was between carols. Silence fell.
Samurai and Other Stories Page 11