Polaris

by Michael Northrop

  Grasping the rail with sore, wet hands as another wave threatened to carry her away, Emma stared up at the sails once more, and this time she saw the problem. The topmost royals had already been reefed, but it wasn’t enough. They were still wearing too much sail—and in the wrong places. “It’s burying us!” she called back to Owen. “It’s driving us under!”

  But Owen was being tossed around by the wheel like a rag doll. It was all he could do to try to keep hold of the thing and keep the ship pointed forward. If they turned crossways to these seas, they would be finished.

  Emma peeled one hand off the rail and grabbed her sister’s arm. “This rig is all wrong,” she shouted, slapping her hand back onto the rail. “Too front heavy!”

  Maria’s eyes grew wide as she looked up. With the mainsail stripped bare amidships, the foremast was carrying most of the sail. Now the strong storm winds were filling those forward sails and driving the bow down into the sea. And that was slowing them down, allowing the worst of the storm to catch up.

  Emma was sure it would sink them. As if to confirm her fears, she heard a shout from Owen and looked back to see that he’d lost control of the wheel, which was spinning wildly to the side.

  When she looked back, Maria was staring at her, shaking her head. “Don’t do it! You can’t lay aloft in this!”

  “I have to!” she called. “I have to take in some of the sail up high!”

  As the boat began to turn sideways to the swells, a huge wave smashed against the hull, spraying seawater across the deck. As the rest of the wave passed beneath the ship and the port side rose high in the air, Emma heard a sickening crack. It sounded like breaking bone but was as loud as a gunshot. Wet wood giving way.

  One of the port-side cannons had broken free.

  Larger ships, she knew, kept their cannons below deck, and a loose cannon could easily sink them. But the Polaris was too small for that. Her cannons were kept on deck—and now one of them had broken free of its moorings. Emma watched it careen across the tilted deck. It smacked into its opposite number on the starboard side with a deafening metallic CLACK. Both cannons—and much of the railing around them—plunged overboard into the roiling sea.

  The ship was tearing herself apart. Emma had to act now. Without so much as a glance back at her sister, she began making her way, hand over hand, along the railing.

  “Don’t!” called her sister, but Emma didn’t look back. She looked up. The high-flying royals had already been furled on both masts, but it wasn’t enough. More needed to be taken in.

  She skirted past Thacher on the rail. “We need to take in the fore topgallants, at least, and reef the topsail!” she called to him.

  He looked up at the heavy, wet canvas whipping and snapping in the wind. “That is no job for a girl,” he shouted back.

  “No job for a boy, neither!” Aaron called over from his spot, hugging the mainmast.

  And sure enough, neither of them took so much as one soggy step forward. Emma shook her head in annoyance and resumed her spider-walk along the pitching rail. Thacher reached out and grabbed her arm. “If we go down,” he bellowed, a maniacal smile spreading across his face, “we take that thing down with us!”

  Not willing to take his other hand off the rail, he nodded down toward the dark space below deck. She had heard something like this before, this idea of mutual destruction as a sort of victory, and she wondered once again why it held such allure for the males of her species. She shook free of his grasp.

  “We are not sinking!” she shouted. “Not if I can help it.”

  The boat began to swing back around, and she realized without looking back that Owen had regained control of the wheel.

  “Keep ’er straight, Owen!” she called. She doubted he could hear her through all of this, but lightning flashed and she was sure he could see her as she took a deep breath and hoisted herself up into the rain-slicked ratlines of the foremast.

  The wind whipped around her as she climbed, and the driving rain slammed and slapped against her skin. Many times, one foot slipped or one hand was tugged nearly free. If both happened at once, she knew she would be flung to the deck or sea below—a crushing death or a watery one.

  The higher up she went, the worse it got. The wind grew harder and louder, and the motion of the ship was amplified by the lever of the mast. But what could she do? She kept climbing. The sheer familiarity of the motion calmed her some. She had always been good at this.

  Soon the shrouds narrowed and she reached the topgallant yard. Without hesitating, she slid along the treacherous wooden spit, her calloused feet gripping the footrope beneath her as surely as any monkey had ever gripped a vine.

  And then, the tempest swirling all about her and the lightning flashing above, she began gathering in heavy, wet canvas. At first, it was too much, but she’d learned a thing or two recently. She removed her knife from its sheath. Then she reached down, much as Owen had done, and gashed the taut canvas. The wind instantly pushed through the wounds, turning them into flapping, snapping mouths. She leaned out and all but filleted the upper reaches of the sail. And as the wind pushed through, she heard the canvas began to tear further.

  A bit of the pressure relieved, she began to haul in the wounded sail, timing her tugs to the little lulls in between gusts. She tied off her gains when she could, creating what looked like belt loops in the canvas. It was a nearly superhuman feat, one girl against all that sail in the teeth of a gale. But even small bodies are capable of great strength in times of crisis. Emmanuelle Iglesias understood what needed to be done, and grabbing fistfuls of wet canvas and dodging its snapping edges, she did it. Soon, though she could not say how soon, her aching arms and bleeding hands were tying knots she knew by heart, securing the topgallant sail tight to the yard.

  She was already nearly spent when she descended to the forward topsail. It was lower down and the yards a bit thicker, but the sail itself was larger and heavier. She was sure it would be impossible by herself. But this one, she would not have to battle alone. As she was climbing down, she saw her sister, her long black hair whipping wildly about her, climbing up to join her. And just a few steps behind Maria, Thacher appeared, his wiry frame hunched like a baboon, his face grim as the death he thought he was climbing toward. And behind him, Aaron too had joined their mad bid to save the ship.

  It still wasn’t much—four undersized sailors in a tempest—but they were used to working these sails together now. Even under these extreme conditions, they moved in unison. They held on for dear life during the worst of the dips and gusts and jolts, but a moment later they’d be hauling as one once again. At times they achieved a perilous sort of leverage by pulling as the ship climbed the steep waves, adding their own body weight to what their muscles could manage. Working as a team, they took in as much of the topsail’s canvas as they dared, tied it off, and descended back to the pitching deck.

  Emma looked back toward the helm, where Owen was gripping the wheel with everything he had, and then up at the canvas. Have we taken in enough? But already she could see that the ship’s bow was riding higher, skipping over the worst of the waves rather than diving down into them.

  Behind them, the stout little trysail was doing more of the work. Even without its mainsail, the mainmast was still catching plenty of wind—and in the teeth of a storm there was plenty of wind to catch. Above them, the foremast was doing its share, and no more.

  Thank God, Emma thought.

  Her knees felt ready to buckle and her eyes ready to close. Every last bit of her strength had been spent. But as tired as she was, she still had one more thing to do. She waited for Thacher to slink past her and then reached out and grabbed him hard by the shirt.

  “If you tell me one more time what is or is not a job for a girl, I will do to you what I did to that topgallant,” she said flatly. “Do you understand me?”

  Thacher’s eyes grew wide. His mouth dropped open but no words came out. Instead, he nodded slowly, once, twice, three time
s. On the third, Emma released his shirt and went to find someplace to sit down.

  The Polaris and her young crew rode the edge of the storm for another two hours before the worst of it passed them by off their port side. They all but flew over the waves, making grand time. By and by, the sky lightened, and just before dusk, the sun broke through, winking at them from low on the horizon before sinking away.

  They spent the next few days patching the ship up as best they could. The first priority: the hatches. The heavy junk they’d layered on top had been washed away by the storm, but there was plenty of broken wood around now to nail them tight.

  “And stay down there!” Aaron said after driving home the last nail in the forward hatch.

  They got to work mending the topgallant sail Emma had gutted, and beyond that, they improvised. By the time they were done, the sail was patched up like a penniless giant’s socks; there was stout rope where the railing had been, and there was more scrap wood covering the spots where the cannons had torn loose from the deck.

  Not very handy, Henry had helped out where he could. Mostly that had involved fetching tools. He was at least well qualified for that, having taken inglorious shelter in the little toolshed for most of the storm. It was only later, after being battered by buckets and hammers, that he learned the loose cannon had missed the little shed by mere feet.

  And then, of course, there were the endless turns on the chain pump. After all that, he was as tired as any of them when he finally crawled into his hammock that night. And yet, sleep took its time finding him. It wasn’t his uselessness during the storm that was bothering him. He’d gotten a bit better on board, but even the cannons hadn’t been able to stay on deck during that storm.

  No, what was haunting him—what was haunting all of them—was the bizarre creature they had seen below deck. Or was it creatures, two beings in one? On this topic, he was no longer the least qualified person on board. And now, tired but sleepless, he bent his scientific mind toward the question.

  What had he seen?

  A creature with the body of a large insect, the face of a boy, and the scent of something else entirely. He remembered the sickeningly sweet odor that had emanated from the creature’s human mouth and the quick sight of a fuzzy white tongue glowing in the light from above. Could it be not two species in one but three?

  He wanted to dismiss the idea. Surely, such a thing was impossible? But he could not dismiss his own eyes, his own nose. How many times had the old doctor told him, “You are a scientist now, and a scientist’s senses are his first and best instruments”? And so he allowed himself to trust his own observations.

  What might those three creatures be?

  Six legs, all ending in hooked claws; an exoskeleton; antennas … An insect, certainly. All the hallmarks of order Hymenoptera, but perhaps he could be more specific? The physical resemblance was too strong to ignore: family Formicidae … The ants. Without allowing time to second-guess himself, he moved on quickly. What else?

  The face of a boy—a face he’d seen before, even if only in passing. Human, plainly enough. Or it once had been, at least. He shuddered and moved on.

  This last one seemed trickier, but once again he found that he already knew the answer. He retraced familiar ground. There was much in nature that sweetened its stink: overripe fruit or rotting flowers, carnivorous pitcher plants, or nearly anything rotting away in the right damp and lightless conditions. But this was his area of expertise: He was a botanist’s assistant, after all. He had stuck his nose into just about anything he had ever encountered that had even thought of blooming. In everything from botanical gardens to vegetable plots, from pristine labs to primeval forests. Some of those specimens had even fought back. He’d received several bee stings, had nasty bouts of both poison oak and ivy, and even had one Venus flytrap close quite firmly on his nose.

  And so, in his expert opinion, he had his third culprit: fungus. He’d thought so the first time he smelled it, and now he felt more certain. Mold could also be a sweet little stinker. But there was the yeastiness of the scent to consider, and he had new evidence: a flash of white fuzz. He’d seen such a thing before—a pale, fibrous sort of fungus. He’d seen it growing on fish, mostly, but a tongue seemed a close enough cousin to that wet flesh. He made up his mind: a fungus, then.

  But now a much larger question grew in his sleep-fogged brain: How? How could three separate species be reconciled into the shambling monstrosity he had seen? Certainly a fungus could infect a living host. He followed that thought. Hadn’t he read something, in his preparation for the trip, little more than a rumor based on the field notes of a French botanist?

  He chased the thought through the darkness as his hammock swayed with the ocean’s motion beneath him. He was so sleepy. Yes, he thought, no longer struggling to get to sleep but rather to stay awake, to complete the thought.

  It had been a young botanist, just out of the Sorbonne University in Paris, looking to make his name with a trip deep into the wild Amazon. There he claimed to have observed a fungus infecting ants in a most disturbing way. The fungus already growing within them, the ants had stumbled homeward, where the fungal spores had blossomed and wiped out the entire colony.

  But with all that moisture and sun and shade and rot, the rain forest had plumped up the Frenchman’s notebooks with dozens of exciting discoveries. The fanciful tale of a predatory fungus had earned but a few lines amid the loving descriptions of towering trees and exotic flowers, each more impressive and magnificent than the last.

  In fact, it had been those tales that Henry had hoped to hear more of. “And where is this Frenchman now?” he had asked Dr. Wetherby. “Will he come to Boston, do you think, perhaps to Cambridge?”

  Wetherby had looked up from his own reading on the Amazon—always a book or three ahead of his apprentice. “Not likely,” he’d said. “That man is quite dead.”

  It had surprised Henry then, because the man had been so young. It did not surprise him now. He tried to remember those few, cryptic lines. This fungus had preyed on ants, but just regular ants—the kind that were a threat to picnics, perhaps, but not to people. And it had killed them quite efficiently, if he remembered correctly. He wasn’t sure and couldn’t reconcile any of it with what he’d seen. But then, there were so many varieties of funguses—an entire world unto themselves, really, down there among the dirt and leaves. And there was so very much that science still didn’t know.

  He felt sleep taking him. His eyes refused to stay open, and his limbs were weightless and numb. And what of the creature’s coating—a strange and glistening substance, like a jelly or the clear white of an egg? And what of those two half-formed limbs, waving ineffectually from its midsection?

  There were so many questions. Henry felt adrift and overwhelmed as he realized he’d only been concentrating on one section of a larger puzzle. The other pieces floated just beyond his grasp, scattered and out of place. An expedition to the jungle, the boat returning half empty; a violent mutiny, and a ship abandoned; a boy’s strange disappearance—and far stranger reappearance …

  Sleep came and took him. There would be no more answers tonight. Nightmares replaced reason, and he was far from alone in that. All around him, the others indulged their own dark imaginings in the dead of night, conjuring phantoms that could hardly be more terrible than the very real transformation that was taking place between decks.

  The day had barely dawned and the crew was once again churning away furiously on the chain pump. The ship had taken on a dangerous amount of water and first light found the Polaris riding low over the waves. With a full crew, they would have been pumping right through the storm.

  The heavy old machine was operated by a pump brake, one handle rising up as the other was pushed down in a seesaw motion. With each pump another cupful of filthy bilge water would sputter up from the bottom of the hold below—and there seemed to be an endless supply. Working shoulder to shoulder, two of them could fit on each handle, four in all. T
here being only six of them, and one needed for the wheel, that worked well enough. The work was grueling, though, and it allowed only one of their number to rest at a time.

  But almost as soon as Henry finished his first turn, collapsing onto the deck to rest, the others were already shouting at him.

  “Get up,” called Maria. “It’s my turn to rest!”

  “No, it’s mine!” called Aaron.

  “You are both wrong—I’ve been pumping the longest,” insisted Thacher.

  The claim made no sense. It was a four-person operation and they’d all started at the same time, except for Emma, who’d arrived late after mending something aloft.

  Henry didn’t waste his strength arguing, just sat against the bulwark sucking in as much air as he could. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, in time with the pumping of the others. And then, as a fresh round of grumbling was directed his way, he rose too. He could have lingered a little longer—it wasn’t as if the others could come and get him. But he wanted to do his part, and unlike sailing, this was the sort of unskilled labor to which he could actually contribute.

  “All right,” he wheezed. “I’m up.”

  He suddenly realized that he could choose who got the next break merely by sliding in to take their place. He savored his moment of power and then quickly slid into Aaron’s spot.

  Thacher howled in protest, allowing Maria to outmaneuver him. “I’m next!” she chirped triumphantly.

  “That’s not fair!” snarled Thacher.

  “And I’m after her!” called Emma.

  Henry’s spot was next to Maria and across from Emma and Thacher. Not that it mattered. They kept their eyes down and did their best to settle into a smooth rhythm—up and down, up and down. Henry’s muscles ached so badly that he wasn’t sure if it was the old pump that was creaking, groaning, and sputtering, or his own body.

  Even worse was the filthy brownish-gray water splashing out at their feet. Some of the cartons of food that had been stored in the hold had clearly broken down in the dampness. Little bits of spoiled food came up now and then on the round cups of the pump chain. At one point, a rat—or most of it anyway—plopped right down at Henry’s feet.