The Apprentices (28 page)

“But they will come?”

“I don’t think so,” Benjamin said. “Some people say their god is coming back, but a lot of people don’t.”

Efa studied Benjamin’s face. He could see her trying to imagine this far-off place with many clothes, many gods, and no
waiting,
no endless anticipation of the return. “People pray?” she finally asked.

“They do.”

“For cargo?”

Benjamin thought of Father Christmas with his bag of loot over his shoulder. “They do pray for cargo, sometimes,” he said. “For things they want. They pray for other things, too. For safety, for peace, for good weather. For people who are sick to get better. For love.”

“It comes?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Efa,” Benjamin said. “Sometimes the things we want come. Sometimes they don’t.”

Efa nodded, absorbing that.

Tessel complained that he couldn’t see over the sunshade, and when they lifted it, the sky behind them was bruise-colored and ominous. Another cyclone, or at least a really nasty storm.

“Oh, not again,” Benjamin moaned.

Tessel said something with dread in his voice, and set about reefing the sail. Efa deftly rigged the sunshade as a sluice to collect water in their emptying casks.

“What should I do?” Benjamin asked. “To help?”

Tessel clambered over him with furious concentration and said, “
Pray,
Benjonfrum.”

W
hen morning came, the work of the mine began. Janie sat in the padlocked elevator cage in her pajamas, where Magnusson had left her. The miners looked at her when they passed by, and she looked out at them. They were all Malay, all coated with sweat and dust. The older men were leaner, their faces more hollow. She thought she had never seen any group of people work so hard. Her father had sometimes said of certain writers, with admiration, that they worked like hard-rock miners. If she ever saw her father again, she would tell him he was
wrong.
But would she see her father again? It was looking doubtful. She had studied the heavy padlock and yanked on it, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

She wished she had some of the apothecary’s sweet-smelling Quintessence to absorb the radiation from the air. She leaned back against the bars of her cage and thought about that lovely smell, the smell of hope and sunlight.

It was impossible to tell what time it was, underground, but it might have been the middle of the day when Osman,
the young cook, brought her a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a bottle of lemonade.

She scrambled to her feet when she saw him. “Osman!” she said. “Can you get me out of here?”

He glanced back up the tunnel. Janie saw one of the green-uniformed guards waiting there. Osman passed the sandwich and the bottle through the bars of her cage. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Have you seen Magnusson?” she asked. “Is he going to leave me down here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Listen,” she whispered. “My friend Benjamin is going to be looking for me. But it’s dangerous for him here. Maybe you can help him.”

The guard barked, “No talking!”

“Wait!” she said. “Osman, please!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing away.

When he was gone, she felt lonelier than ever. She opened the waxed-paper parcel and found a chicken salad sandwich inside, cut diagonally in half, the lettuce crisp and fresh. Her stomach grumbled in anticipation, and she took a bite. It was delicious and mustardy, with chopped-up bits of some crunchy vegetable from his kitchen garden. It made her think that Osman really was her friend.

A little later, Magnusson came and looked into her cage. “Did you get the sandwich?” he asked.

“What, are you expecting
thanks
?”

“Yes, in fact I was,” he said mildly. “Danby wants to see you, but I’ve told him he can’t. I don’t trust him.”

“You think he’ll kill me?”

“He might, in anger. He bears a grudge. And I need you alive, to summon your friends.”

“They won’t come.”

“We’ll see about that,” Magnusson said, smiling. And he left her alone.

As soon as he was gone, she spread out the waxed paper that had been wrapped around her sandwich. With the last of the lemonade, she made a little mud with dirt from the mine’s floor. There was a tiny chance that Benjamin could see where she was. Painstakingly, with her finger dipped in the sticky mud, she wrote a message on the paper:

BENJAMIN—DON’T COME.

J
in Lo and the apothecary, arms bandaged with strips torn from their clothes, waded silently along the island’s swampy northern coastline, keeping an eye out for venom-spined rockfish and angry islanders. They were looking for one of the island’s boats to borrow. Marcus Burrows was usually opposed to stealing, but he seemed to relax his moral stance with people who had tried to roast him on a spit.

Jin Lo’s biceps ached. Her arm was bruised, the skin broken. The crocodile might have had good intentions, but even the gentlest crocodile bite left a mark. He could have taken the arm right off, if he’d wanted to.

They made their way through tide pools. Little fish darted away from their feet.

“Is it possible to become fish?” she asked. “Like birds?” They could talk normally now, which was a relief.

“No,” Marcus Burrows said. “There’s a note in the Pharmacopoeia from a previous owner. I don’t know the handwriting, but it certainly predates my grandfather. The writer
believes it is
possible
to become a fish, but unadvisable, as fish are so often eaten. So he provides no instructions.”

“I see.”

“There’s also the question of freshwater or saltwater fish—it’s very complicated.”

“Yes.”

“But I now believe that part is manageable.”

They had rounded a rocky point and saw a trim, elegant yacht, about sixty feet long, anchored off the island. Two white people were visible on the yacht: a man struggling with a dinghy on the stern, and a woman in a black bikini shielding her eyes. They hadn’t seen the castaways yet.

“Can you swim, with your arm?” the apothecary asked.

Jin Lo nodded. But it was a longer swim than it seemed, and difficult with their wounded arms and the need to breathe air. When they came alongside the boat, treading water, the skipper jumped and swore with surprise. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“The island,” Marcus Burrows said.

“Do they have ice there?” the woman in the bikini asked. “And rum, and bananas? And maybe some nice bacon? We’re running low on provisions.”

“I don’t think you should go to the island,” Marcus Burrows said.

“Not even for
ice
?”

“If you help us aboard, we’ll explain.”

“How do we know you aren’t pirates?” the man asked. He had silver in his hair.

“Do we look like pirates?”

“Yes, in fact, you do.”

“We’re wounded,” Marcus Burrows said. “We have been attacked by the islanders. I assure you that we mean you no harm.”

The woman looked at her husband. “Oh, perfect,” she said. “Hostile natives. And you have no idea where we are.”

“Well, we wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been too
bored
to stay where we were!” he said. “In a perfectly safe harbor! In cyclone season!”

An arrow whistled through the air. It splashed into the water behind Jin Lo. Two archers in loincloths stood at the edge of the shore.

“They’re firing at us,” Marcus Burrows said.
“Please.”

The man hurried to the stern of the boat and lowered the swimming ladder. “Get in!” he said. “Quick! Charlotte, the anchor!”

“Oh, God, I hate the anchor!” Charlotte said. With her long limbs, she reminded Jin Lo of a stalking waterbird as she moved toward the bow.

Jin Lo climbed the ladder first. Her arm ached. An arrow splashed closer. She heard the boat’s engine start, and the grinding rattle of the anchor chain. The man and the woman were shouting at each other, half in fear and half in anger. Jin Lo hauled herself dripping onto the hot teak deck, then reached to help Marcus Burrows with her good arm. He pulled the swimming ladder up after him just as the couple
brought in the anchor. An arrow passed so close to Jin Lo’s head that she felt the air displaced by its flight against her ear.

The woman in the bikini swore colorfully about those rude and unwelcoming savages, and the fact that they
still
didn’t have any ice.

Jin Lo sat in a salty puddle in the cockpit, her arm throbbing. She kept her head down, to avoid both the arrows and the couple’s shouting.

The skipper turned the boat, showing the archers its stern, and they motored away, as fast as the sleek hull would go.

1. the process of damaging or destroying metal, stone, or other materials by chemical action

2. damage or weakening caused gradually, as to ideals or morals

B
enjamin sat at the tiller of the little boat, sunburned and windburned, his lips so chapped that bits of them were flaking off. The mast had broken, and the squall had left him hopelessly confused about where they were. Tessel had worked out a new course, and they had rigged up the mast again, laying the two parts over each other and lashing their sunshade around them, but it could hardly take any sail. Benjamin was trying to stay on the course that Tessel had set for him, but the wind had gone, and they barely had steerageway. He remembered reading that sailors whistled to make the wind come up, and he tried, through parched lips.

The children were asleep like two puppies in the bottom of the boat, exhausted by the storm. Efa laid her head on Tessel’s arm and tucked her knees up against the boy’s rib cage. Their lips were as chapped as Benjamin’s, and their hands, like his, were raw from working the salt-roughened lines. They had run dangerously low on drinking water, in spite of refilling their casks in the squall, and their last meal had been the
raw flesh of a flying fish that had landed mistakenly in their boat. It was bony and unsatisfying.

Tessel was a preternaturally good navigator, but he hadn’t seen the charts Benjamin had seen. Were they really on course? They might be run over by a cargo ship, or taken by pirates. They might drift along forever. And even if they
could
find the island where Janie was, what then? Benjamin would be taking the children from the dangerous sea to a dangerous island.

He saw a dark ship on the horizon and stood and waved his shirt, but the ship was miles away, and grew smaller as he watched. Birds overhead eyed him. He waved his shirt some more to show that he wasn’t wounded, wasn’t even close to dead. And neither were the children.

The birds flew on, and Benjamin fought sleep, his eyes drifting closed and then snapping open as he shook himself awake. The sun was relentless. The sky was an endless blue. He wondered if he had imagined everything else in his life, if he had always been here, drifting, baking in the sun.

Then something hard and swift jostled the side of the boat beneath the water.

Benjamin grabbed the gunwales, awake, looking into the fathomless blue.

A fin broke the surface of the water, a little farther off, and was gone again, ghostlike. Tessel had made a spear by tying a short-bladed knife to the end of a long pole with a strip of bamboo. They had tried fishing with it, without much success. Benjamin picked up the spear now and waited.

Another bump, harder than the first, rocked the boat, too fast for Benjamin to react with the spear. The thing was trying to knock them into the water. Tessel stirred, blinking.

“A shark,” Benjamin said. He said it again in Tessel and Efa’s language. They had seen other sharks, though not so close, and it was a word he felt confident about.

Tessel was alert, kneeling in the bow and peering out. He held out his hand for the spear like a surgeon awaiting his instrument, then cocked his arm and waited, scanning the water, but nothing surfaced.

They were so preoccupied that they didn’t see the sailboat until it was almost upon them. A woman’s voice called, “Hullo, you! What’re you spearing? Dinner?”

It was a wooden sloop, steering toward them. There were two women perched on the bow. One was Charlotte from Manila, deeply tanned in a black bikini, shielding her eyes with one hand.

The other was waving wildly and grinning. She wore loose cotton clothes, and had a bandaged arm and a black braid snaking over her shoulder. Benjamin nearly fell into the bottom of the boat with surprise when he recognized Jin Lo.

A third figure came to the bow, also with a bandaged arm: Benjamin’s father. He was grinning, too, and didn’t look distracted, or preoccupied, or deep in thought. He looked like he had never been happier, although his eyes were full of tears. Benjamin felt his own wind-chapped face cracking in an enormous smile of gratitude.

When the battered little boat was tied behind the
Payday
and the three fugitives had clambered aboard, Benjamin’s father hugged him so tightly, he thought his weakened bones might break. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had hugged him.