“I think they do,” Sabine said. “I think they’re important in ways we cannot understand. We should remember that.”
“So what happened?”
“Death’s crew was becoming restless, and Death announced that it was the end of his brother’s suffering. He slit Ghost’s throat with a sword, buried a silver blade in his chest, and threw him overboard.
“Ghost watched his brother’s ship sailing away, and he could see the wolves gathered at the railing, watching him sinking in their wake. Ghost fell unconscious, and when he woke, he’d been washed onto a beach.”
“How long was he out there, in the water?”
“I asked him the same question,” Sabine said. “He shrugged and said perhaps five days, perhaps seven. The sun had burned most of the skin from his face and arms, and the salt water had softened his flesh so it was almost sloughing from his bones. The knife was still in his chest, and the first thing he did upon waking was to pull it out. This was the most miraculous aspect of his survival—the days and nights floating in the ocean, the interest of sharks evident in his torn clothing and flesh, the baking sun, drowning, life leaking from his slashed throat. All these were nothing to the silver blade he’d had in his chest all that time.”
“It’s … a story,” Jack said. “Fiction. That silver will kill a werewolf.”
“And isn’t the werewolf a part of that fiction?” She turned to Jack and stared at him, and she was only inches away. He could have leaned forward and kissed her again. But this moment felt loaded, and unsuitable for such displays of affection. Our love is clean and pure, he thought, and looked away lest his eyes betray his thoughts.
“So what was the miracle?”
“The knife’s tip caught in a knot of threads and stitches in Ghost’s leather tunic. The blade itself never touched his flesh or kissed his blood, because it dragged the leather into the wound with it. It was Death’s great strength that drove the blade home, not its keenness.
“So Ghost spent a day on that beach believing himself dead. And when he stood and walked inland, he found … food.” Sabine trailed off, and Jack felt her terror.
“Who were they?” he asked softly. He put his arm around her and pulled her close, taking as much comfort from the contact as he hoped to give.
“He didn’t say. Perhaps he did not know or care. But there were a dozen of them, moored at the island with their ship. He told me…”
“It’s okay.” Jack kissed Sabine’s temple, and she pulled away, standing from the cot and leaning back against the chart table.
“He told me they fed him for eight weeks. And after he took the last of them and locked them in their ship’s hold, he managed to set sail himself. And he has spent the years since then building his crew and planning his revenge upon Death Nilsson.”
“It was the Larsen moored at that island,” Jack said.
“It was. And sometime during his stay on the island, he named himself Ghost.”
“Such a man must relish a name like that.”
Sabine actually smiled. “When I asked him why, he told me that after the first full moon, he heard them talking in their camp as he circled them. They were terrified, and one of them said, ‘What do we name a man who can best four of our own, and then do that to them?’ And Ghost whispered his new name in the darkness and spent the time between then and their horrible deaths giving them cause to fear it.”
“He believed he should have died,” Jack said, thinking about how that might affect even a man like Ghost. Rejected by his pack, tortured by his brother, going through experiences that would have killed a normal man a hundred times over…
“It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him looking even remotely vulnerable,” Sabine said. “He was quiet and contemplative when he told me this. I know Ghost better than anyone now, and I’m sure he is genuinely tortured by his memories. He said to me, ‘I am merely the ghost of what I once was.’”
“He thinks his brother stole something from him.”
“And he seeks to steal it back, and more. Because of course Death heard of his brother’s survival, and when they next meet on land or sea, one or both will die. One day Ghost will use me to locate his brother’s ship, but not until he has pronounced himself ready to face Death again.”
“Does the crew know about all this?” Jack asked.
Sabine nodded slowly. “Do they know about Death Nilsson, the wolf of the seas? They could not pirate these waters without knowing his legend. And Ghost has never hidden his past. The pack knows the story of how he and his brother last parted. But if you’re asking me whether they know they are all merely pawns, that Ghost is using them to his own ends and cares little for gold or for hunting himself … no. I do not imagine so.”
Jack pondered that a moment, wondering what the crew would do when they learned their pack had been created as little more than cannon fodder for Ghost’s eventual showdown with his brother.
“When will Ghost be ready to meet Death again?” Jack asked.
“Not until he has built a pack he feels can destroy his brother’s band of wolves. And, more importantly, not until he knows in his heart that he is a better pirate and a better wolf than Death, and that day will not come until Ghost is certain he has stripped the last remnants of human emotion from his own soul and left only the beast behind. That’s why you intrigue him so, why he studies you, and why he has not yet turned you into a wolf.
“I think he sees you as a potential asset in the future, that he admires you and believes you will be useful as a member of the pack. But for now, he uses your humanity as a measure against himself. Yes, he values your mind, the intellectual discourse you provide, but it is your empathy and humanity he studies.”
Jack shook his head. “It will never work. He can never rid himself of the last vestiges of the man he once was. I can’t call what he feels for you ‘love,’ but he feels something. He is prey to jealousy and disappointment and hurt. I’ve seen it.”
“And yet he is closer every day,” Sabine said. “In any case, one day he will believe he is ready to exact revenge on his brother and his pack, and regain what was his.”
“His pride?” Jack asked, and Sabine shook her head, coming to sit next to him again. She placed her hand on his leg, and he felt the warmth through his clothing.
“I think it’s something much deeper than that,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s something we can ever understand. Ghost really is unique.”
“It sounds like he impresses you,” Jack said, hating the petulance he could not keep from his voice.
“Oh, Jack,” Sabine said softly, “he fascinates me.” She leaned in to kiss him, and he was taken away again. They parted reluctantly, and Jack knew instantly that there was still more to tell.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Sabine. There are things about me you can’t quite know. I’ve seen and done things beyond your imagining, and perhaps one day I’ll tell you.” She looked haunted, and he was sorry for upsetting her. But he also believed she deserved to know that he had encountered the supernatural before, and that he had expanded his own senses to the point where he bore a touch of the supernatural himself. “I know there’s something else bothering you right now, because I can sense it.”
“Death,” she said. For a moment Jack wasn’t sure quite what she meant, and then she explained. “Death Nilsson is coming for Ghost. His ship is two days away.”
Jack stared at her, his heart thundering into a gallop. “So the confrontation is coming at last. And soon.” He ran a hand over his scruff of beard. One ship of monsters was perilous enough, but in a fight between the two brothers and their packs, he and Sabine would surely die. “Ghost is planning his revenge?”
Sabine stood and rifled through the charts on the table, choosing one and placing her hand just above it, fingers splayed.
“He would be, if I’d told him Death was coming. I’ve decided not to wait until Ghost is ready for their reunion. I’m
going to give him what he wants, but ahead of schedule.” She moved her hand slowly left and right, humming so softly that it was barely audible, then moved around the table to do it again from several other angles. She touched the map with the small finger of her left hand. “Here. Death’s ship is here.”
Jack looked, then asked her where they were now. She passed her hand across that chart and pointed to another spot.
“When will Ghost know?”
“Unless I tell him, not until the ship is spied on the horizon.”
Jack understood then. Sabine had sensed Death’s ship but had purposefully kept it from Ghost, so that the Larsen would be taken by surprise. She might die, but she was willing to risk it so that Ghost might also be destroyed.
“And then?”
“Death’s ship is bigger and faster, and his crew is twice the size of the Larsen’s.”
Jack thought about it, then began to nod.
“All right. This can work. It forces us to move quickly, but all the better, I think. Sometime just before the attack is when we make our escape. There’ll be confusion as Ghost and his wolves react. But…” Jack frowned, trying to think of how they could flee across the sea without dying in its depths, how they might distract Ghost and his crew for long enough to jump ship.
“This crew is already unsettled,” Sabine said. “Your arrival here has upset the balance more than I’ve ever seen. Everyone’s balance.” She kept her gaze on him, frank and confident.
“A distraction,” Jack said.
“Foment unrest in the crew, and when the time comes, they’ll be less than prepared. Off their guard.”
“They’re already upset at Ghost appointing me mate,” Jack said.
“Another of his games. But our greatest weapon lies in the hold.”
“Their loot.”
The chart room was cool and quiet, and all theirs, and the temptation to remain there together was great. Jack looked up at the ceiling and half closed his eyes, and he sensed Sabine watching him with the same expression he’d worn while watching her divining with the charts—fascination, and respect.
“Ghost is still on deck,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.” Sabine came close, and her presence was everywhere—he could smell her faint perfume, feel the heat of her, hear her soft breathing and the exquisite rustle of her clothing as she moved. She looked Jack in the eye, her pupils dilated in the murky room. “We can’t risk anything right now.”
“Your powers,” Jack said. “What else do you know?” She was so alluring, and there was knowledge in her eyes that threatened to haunt him. Sometimes her expression exuded such age, and yet her skin was smooth and soft, and she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Jack loved an enigma.
“Other things,” Sabine said uncertainly. Bad things? Jack wondered. But she clasped his hands in hers and pulled him even closer. “We shouldn’t risk staying here any longer.”
“You’re right,” Jack said, and her mystery beguiled him. “The hold. Tell me what we need, and why.”
Sabine leaned in to whisper in his ear, told him, and Jack smiled as he began to understand.
Jack returned to his new cabin before making for the hold, pausing five steps away from the galley doorway and listening for Finn. He heard uneven snoring and incoherent, sleepy mumbling, and contented himself that the man was still asleep. He’s dreaming of his imminent death, Jack thought, and a pang of pity for Finn surprised him. He had been a normal man once. A man like Jack, living and breathing, concerned about his family and contemplating what fate the future might bring, good or bad. He’d gone wherever the work was, doing his best to survive, struggling against the obstacles life put in his way as best he could, living as well as life let him. And then he had been brought onto the Larsen and made a monster. All hope and aspiration had been ripped away from him, leaving only a need to eat.
“The hold. Tell me what we need, and why.”
Or perhaps he had always been a murderer.
Thinking of family troubled Jack—by now the Umatilla would have arrived back in Oakland, and his friend Merritt would have tracked down Jack’s mother and sister to tell them of his fate. Everyone beyond this boat now considered him dead, and the Larsen had become his whole world. But to consider their grief would form a weakness within him. It was survival that must drive him on.
In the cabin Jack rooted through Johansen’s belongings, pocketing a sheathed stiletto, a ring of keys, and a bent eating fork—rare among pirates—that was rusting away beneath the cot. He paused for a moment by the closed door and listened, breathing softly as he tried to probe his senses outward in the way of the wild. But he was being drawn back toward the chart room, where something warm, soft, and loving awaited him with bated breath. She’s still awake, he thought, and he knew that Sabine was thinking of him, hoping that he might be the chance she had been awaiting for a long time.
How long, she had not told him. Those mysterious aspects of Sabine intrigued him, though they did not unsettle. There was an honesty about her that he had never sensed in that twisted tree spirit Lesya, far to the north in the wastes of the Yukon. She had been a monster in woman’s clothing, but Sabine was a woman who had suffered monstrously. Jack was her chance, and he would not let her down.
He closed his door and moved past the galley into the mess. It was filled with shadows, but nothing else. Two sets of footsteps moved on the deck above, casual and calm. Huginn and Muninn, perhaps, which meant that Ghost was also still up there. Through the mess and into the gangway, he paused at the foot of the staircase, finding himself drawn strangely upward. That’s not the way, he thought, but there was something about Ghost’s monstrous presence that lured him. Perhaps it was something to do with pride, because he knew that Ghost valued his conversation and intellect. Or maybe it was fascination, because Jack could not deny that while he found the captain repellent, he, like Sabine, also found him mesmerizing. As a child Jack had picked at scabs on his knees, poked angry cats with sticks, balanced on the dock’s edge looking down at the waters below. Danger was alluring, horror compulsive.
He shook the urge and moved on, opening the forbidden door and entering the gangway that ran the length of the hold. He passed the secure room’s heavy door and thought of the long night he’d spent in there with Sabine, and how Ghost had tried shielding his anger when he’d opened the door to find them huddled together on the cot. He paused at the middle doorway and peered through the crack between door and frame. It was pitch-black, but he could smell the faint aroma of rotting fruit and vegetables, and hear the few chickens’ clucking.
It took him several minutes to open the lock. He’d assumed it would be easy—he’d learned how to pick locks from Flowery Bob, a hoodlum from the Oakland docks who’d made a living preying off other people—but in practice it took a level of calm and subtlety that Jack was rapidly losing as the minutes passed. Each failed attempt set him more on edge, and eventually he had to lean back against the bulkhead and take a breath. He expected one of the doors at either end of the gangway to open at any moment. It would not matter who stood silhouetted there; discovery by anyone would put him in peril. With most of the pirates, he’d expect a good beating at least. A few would probably kill him.
One more time, he thought, moving slowly, breathing deeply. He put the bent fork tine into the padlock, then one of the smaller keys from the ring, jiggling and twisting it. The padlock clicked open, and Jack was so surprised that he fumbled it as it fell. It struck the floor with a heavy thump, and he ducked down, trying to reduce the shadow he’d throw when one of the doors opened. He was thirty feet from the forecastle, where most of the pirates slept. If one of them had heard the noise and decided to investigate, he’d be rising from his cot now, climbing the short ladder from the quarters, passing the steep steps leading to the deck, reaching for the door handle, pausing with his head to one side as he listened, and then…
The gangway door remained closed. Jack gasped in relief, pushin
g the hold door open and entering without checking inside. He closed the door behind him and placed the padlock on the floor beside it, then felt around for a lamp. He found one hanging on a hook, and as he lit it, he tried not to imagine things hunkered down in the heavy darkness, watching.
The light fought back the night and showed him that he was alone.
Baskets of hardtack lay piled against one bulkhead. Crates of cured meats were stacked elsewhere, and he tried not to consider that which had been salted and packed by his own hand. Jars of dried fruit sat tied on a rough shelf, tobacco hung from ceiling supports, several large crabs rotted slowly in one corner, and there were other containers whose contents he could not discern. Three crates held the ship’s chickens, ragged, thin things that sometimes laid, sometimes did not. When the time came to kill and eat them, their meat would be tough and stringy.
It came as no surprise to see at least five different ships’ names on the baskets, crates, and sacks.
But what he sought was not immediately visible. He had no real wish to go rooting through the piles of foodstuffs—he was afraid he might disturb some of the stacks and send them tumbling. If the dropped padlock had not woken anyone, a ruckus from the food store surely would.
I could poison every part of it, he thought. But even if he’d carried a vial of poison, he was not sure he could have gone through with it. They were werewolves and men, killers and, like Louis, perhaps once unwilling victims. Descending to their murderous level might save lives in the future, but to kill them in secret instead of in combat would damn Jack’s own.
He turned in a slow circle, wondering where the true hold might be. What if Sabine was wrong, and all their loot was kept in Ghost’s cabin? If that was the case, then their plan could never work, and they’d have to find another way to do what was required.
“Damn it, it’s got to be here!” he whispered, and then he saw the line in the floor. Jointed boards were generally staggered to give strength, but stretching between a pile of bulging sacks and a stack of crates was a cut directly across the floor, and it could mean only one thing. He moved bags, ignored the clucking chickens as he shifted their crates aside as quietly as he could, and revealed the hatch, just wide enough for a man to lower himself into.
The Secret Journeys of Jack London, Book Two: The Sea Wolves Page 14