Son of Fortune (4 page)

“Push it out!” Aiden yelled, groping at the carcass. His hand sank into the pulpy flesh. Then the shark rushed in again, mouth peeled back, showing a thousand savage teeth. As if tired of their nonsense, it clamped hard on both the seal and the boat. Aiden felt the boards splinter beneath him. Without thinking, he kicked at the monstrous head and felt the crunch of a tooth breaking beneath his boot sole. Then he raised the hatchet and slammed it onto the shark's head. The shark merely twisted away and vanished into the depths with half the seal in its mouth, the hatchet still stuck in its skull. A trail of blood swirled up like ink from an artist's brush dipped in water after painting sunsets. Aiden wiped the stinging salt water from his eyes. The sea was eerily calm.

“Where's Fish?” Aiden shouted.

The side of the dinghy had been ripped open and water was rushing in fast. Aiden's palm tingled from the impact of the hatchet. His brain felt dull as moss. For some reason, he couldn't hear anything but a roaring sound. Then one of the Swedes pointed a trembling hand. Aiden saw Fish flailing at the surface about twenty feet away. It wasn't far to swim, but it was clear that Fish could not swim. Then sound returned. Aiden heard a strangled cry and saw Fish's head sink, his heavy clothing dragging him down. The sun broke through the fog and dappled the water. The clang of the ship's bell rang out again and the men turned hopefully. They could see the ship steaming toward them, but it still looked miles away. It hadn't been five minutes, Aiden realized, since Fish had first whistled for pickup. The man was now floating motionless, just beneath the surface. How long before he sank completely? How long until the shark finished its meal and returned for more?

Aiden pulled off his jacket, wrenched off his boots and dove into the water. Although he had already been soaked through, the cold of total immersion was shocking. He gasped for breath. It felt like a giant icicle had been driven up through his chest and into the center of his brain. Aiden reached the drowning man in half a minute, but his limbs were already so numb he could barely grab hold of him. He managed to turn Fish over and get his face above the water, but Fish did not gasp at the sudden air. His head just flopped to the side. Aiden tried to tow him by the jacket, but his fingers would not hold. The freezing water made his hand little more than a club, unable to grasp. Well, he thought with an odd tranquillity, I've learned another stupid thing not to do in life. Desperately, he managed to thrust his arm down the back of Fish's jacket, hooking it with his elbow. Aiden kicked and pulled with his free arm, but it was like towing a log. His heart was made of leather. He stopped trying to swim and focused on simply keeping both their heads above water. He had almost drowned once before, but he felt none of that panic now, only a sense of awe at the power of cold that now owned him. It was strangely peaceful. Then, just before he surrendered completely to the peace, he felt something hard bump against his back.

iden woke gasping for breath, hot and crushed. In his brain fog, he was certain there was a polar bear lying on top of him, but when he shoved against the suffocating weight, he found that it slipped off easily, spilling only a pile of blankets. He leaned up on his elbows and cautiously tested reality. Dim gray light came in through a small, round window, casting shadows on strange cupboards and foreign boots. He was in a narrow bed in a tiny cabin. On a boat. He sat up all the way. Sense and memory flashed like lightning through his brain, tumbling the dramas of the past few days together. He raked his fingers through his greasy hair. Slow facts began to assemble in his brain.

A polar bear was starving and he shot a seal and a shark ate half their boat. The ocean was cold and Fish was terribly heavy while drowning. The hard jab against his back had not been the huge shark returning but the jagged gunwale of the sinking rowboat. He remembered hands grabbing hold of him, then a rope digging under his arms and pulling him up through the air. He remembered feeling amazed to be back on the ship, separated from the evil ocean. He remembered Fish's blond hair swinging back and forth as the other men rolled him across a barrel, and the magnificent gasp as his lungs came back to air. Then he remembered the warmth of the polished deck against his cheek, and nothing else.

Aiden tried standing and found it possible. He felt his way through the narrow passageway toward faint daylight. All five of the Swedes were on deck, with Captain Neils at the helm. A watery gray light made everything flat and slightly unreal. The men looked at him, and Aiden couldn't tell what anyone was thinking. He had worked with Swedes in the lumber camp and knew them as a mostly taciturn bunch, so this didn't surprise him.

“Is it evening time?” he asked.

“Morning,” Captain Neils replied. “Morning of tomorrow. You slept a long time.”

“Sorry,” Aiden said.

“It's fine.” The captain smiled. “Have some coffee.” He said something to Sven the Ancient, and the old man went below and returned with a coffeepot, mug and plate full of food. Aiden devoured the breakfast: fried apples and onions, some kind of pickled fish, fatty bacon and biscuits with jam.

“You should have seen the mama bear eat!” Captain Neils said.

“Eat what?” Aiden asked, puzzled.

“Too many knots!” Captain Neils yelped his strange burst of laughter. “Too many knots!”

“The shark bit through the seal's body just as you cut the rope,” Fish explained. “The cut end of the rope snagged on the broken boards, still tied to a good chunk of meat.” He held his hands out to show the size. “Maybe thirty pounds.”

Aiden felt himself suddenly gagging at the image of the torn seal flesh, guts swirling around his feet, weird prehistoric flipper scrabbling at his knee.

“So she ate it?” He tried to picture the little cubs instead.

“Oh
ja
!” Captain Neils nodded happily. “She has milk now for the little ones!”

“That's great.”

“But I am sorry to say your bow and arrows are gone,” Captain Neils went on. “Everything in the boat was lost. Except for one oar and all the men.”

“Oh,” Aiden said dumbly. “Yes. I don't suppose they would have floated.” The news hit him like a punch. He had had the bow since he was ten years old. It was the last bit of anything left from his old life. He looked out over the low swells and worked to make his voice sound normal. “Is this the real ocean now? Are we out of Puget Sound?”

“Ja,”
Captain Neils said. He waved a gnarled hand toward the western horizon. “China is just over there.” He laughed and nudged the wheel.

Sven the Ancient began clattering loudly in the little galley, washing up the breakfast dishes, while the other men went about their ordinary tasks. In the sanctuary of day, on a sturdy ship with a fair wind filling the sails and genial dolphins escorting them along, they had little work to do, yet there is never time for real idleness at sea. The sailors passed the morning splicing ropes and patching up the dinghy. The sight of the torn wood made Aiden shudder. He could clearly see tooth marks in the wood, as if an expert carpenter had cleanly struck his sharpest chisel there. The men talked in Swedish as they fitted new planks across the gap. When they saw Aiden and Fish, they began to laugh and talk with more animation.

“When a bad time is over and we tell the story afterward, everything changes,” Fish explained. “Now you are the warrior king who has split open the head of the sea monster with one stroke of a magical axe,” he translated. “Our little boat was tossed twenty feet into the air, but a great school of fish leaped up and whirled around it like a waterspout and brought us gently back down. By evening, they will have goddesses coming down from Valhalla to pluck us from the waves and feed you goblets of mead.”

“Well, I wouldn't turn any goddesses away,” Aiden said.

The sailors made some comments that, even in Swedish, sounded ribald.

“They all understand English just fine,” Fish said. “Except Sven the Ancient. But they aren't good at speaking it. They all grew up on Swedish ships. They don't spend much time on land, and when they do, it is among other Swedes.”

“How come you speak it so well?”

“I lived on land with my mother and little sisters until I was twelve.”

“In San Francisco?”

“Yes. My mother was a cook in a dining house. She wanted to keep me from the sea, but as you see, that didn't work. My family all have salt water for our blood.”

“Are all these men your kin?”

“The captain is my brother. Though he is ten years older and more like a father. His name is Magnus. Our own father died when I was five. A storm put his ship on the rocks. Sven the Ancient is my uncle.” Fish pointed at the two men fixing the dinghy. “Jonas, there with the hammer, is his son; Gustav is another cousin. His father also died with mine.” Fish looked up at the sails, which were taut with the wind. “You have never been on a ship?”

“I've never even seen a ship before, except in books. My family has dirt, I suppose, for our blood.”

Fish laughed. “Well, come then, I will show you a ship.”

They spent the morning looking at ropes and winches, pumps and sounding lines, sails and the steam engine—still only half of the hundred things that made a ship work. In one way everything was very foreign, but in another way it was also somehow familiar. It was all solid and functional and quietly ingenious. Fish took Aiden below and spread out charts with wavy lines and striped shades of blue and cryptic numbers sprinkled all over like tiny seeds.

“These lines mean deeper water,” Fish explained. He tapped a few spots along the coast. “This indicates shoals, and these are visible rocks.” He traced his finger across the thick paper with casual command. To Aiden, it was all strange and exotic. He had always loved maps and could have looked at the chart for hours, but Fish rolled it up with an abrupt dismissal.

“But we've sailed here so long we almost never need the charts,” he said. “Back and forth, back and forth, with the lumber. I am twenty-one—it's nearly half my life! But someday I'll sail blue water.”

“What is blue water?” Aiden asked.

Fish waved his hand toward the horizon. “Out there—open ocean—where you see no land for weeks or months. Where there is nothing familiar—nothing to depend on but what you have learned and what you feel and knowing the stars. Just the soundness of your ship and your crew and your own decisions. Hawaii, Tahiti, China, Europe, maybe Australia!” He put the chart back in its niche, then opened the top of the chart desk and took out a wooden box. “For blue water—real sailing—you need this.” Inside, cushioned well in a nest of red velvet, was a complicated brass instrument with gears and wheels, tiny mirrors, a lens like a miniature telescope and numbers etched along the arc of the bottom.

“It's a sextant?” Aiden guessed.

“Yes!” Fish lifted the instrument out of the box like it was the crown jewels. “With celestial navigation, you can go anywhere! With the sextant, the whole world belongs to you!” He traced one finger longingly over the smooth brass. He sighed and looked away, out the tiny porthole, where the shoreline was always visible. “Come, it's almost noon—I'll show you how to shoot the sun.”

Since they didn't really need an accurate reading, Fish let Aiden take the sight. It was a tricky business, balancing on the moving boat while staring through the eyepiece, trying to keep the horizon level and the sun in view just exactly as it turned noon. Fish grabbed a handful of Aiden's sweater to steady him, but shooting the sun was only the beginning. After that there were pages of calculations to do. Aiden had never been really good with math and was soon lost in azimuths and angles. He realized that if his fate were ever in fact to take him to sea, it would certainly not be as a navigator.

“Well, according to your reading, we should be seeing Japan any minute now!” Fish said. “That's the thing with navigation—one small error changes the course of the whole voyage.”

So navigation was just like real life, Aiden thought. Errors went back forever, each one building into the next—a deadly daisy chain of fate. The wind was steady and the sails well set, so Fish let Aiden try his hand at the helm. He was nervous and zigzagged at first, turning the wheel too hard one way, then the other.

“Don't think,” Fish said. “Just feel.” He spread his legs slightly and bounced, sweeping his hands up with surprising grace, like a dancer. “The ocean is a live thing. The ship is a live thing. They are like lovers who love but sometimes want to kill each other. You must keep them both on the loving side.”

“You're kind of poetical for a Swede, aren't you?”

“A sailor spends a lot of time inside his own head,” Fish said.

They sailed along in companionable silence until the clouds came in and the wind turned gusty enough to require Fish's more experienced hand at the helm. Aiden went below to check on the polar bears. The mother bear seemed in much better health. Her eyes were bright and her breathing was steady. Aiden sat quietly for a while just watching them, until the mother bear's wariness ebbed and the cubs' curiosity overflowed. Then he eased the cage door open just enough to sneak the two babies out. Soon they were romping and tumbling all over. Aiden wrestled them, rolled them about and tossed them into the straw. They chirped gleefully, galloped gracelessly back and flung themselves upon him with furry vigor. The mother bear watched nervously at first, woofing and huffing, but eventually she seemed to understand that he was not going to hurt them and settled down. Once the cubs were tired out, he raked the dirty straw from the cage, shook in a fresh bale, then squeaked open the door and pushed them back in. The mother bear scooped them into her arms, sniffed them suspiciously and started licking them free of every dreadful human scent. Aiden leaned back against a bale of straw and watched the little cubs suckle contentedly. Despite his previous twenty-four-hour sleep, he was still deeply tired and dozed off himself. It was a fitful sleep, full of violence, and he woke with tiny scratches all over his arms from thrashing in the straw.