The Apprentices (29 page)

“I told you not to follow me,” Benjamin said.

“I know,” his father said.

He wanted to sink in relief onto the deck. “I’m glad you did.”

There were explanations and introductions. Tessel boldly shook hands with everyone, though Efa shied away. Benjamin’s father and Jin Lo had been to their island.

“Your powder,” Jin Lo said. “Is brilliant.”

“Are they angry about the children?”

She nodded. “Also about John Frum.”

“Now, who wants a cold drink?” Charlotte said. “Your nice dad made us plenty of ice, out of nowhere. I wish I knew how he does it!”

Benjamin looked at his father, who shrugged. They didn’t usually do party tricks like making ice. Maybe his father was planning to give Charlotte and Harry the wine of Lethe and make them forget everything. Benjamin decided that was true. Otherwise it would be impossible to talk about anything. The boat was too small for secrets. “I’ll have a ginger ale,” he said. “And I’d like to see your charts.”

They all leaned together over the chart table. The skipper put his finger on a spot of blue on the map. “I took a noon sighting with the sextant, and I think we’re here.”

Tessel frowned. He squinted at the sun, which was setting in that sudden equatorial way, and at Venus, which had just become visible in the twilight. He pointed to a spot on the chart just east of the skipper’s finger. “Here,” he said.

Charlotte burst out laughing. “I trust the kid,” she said. “Harry never gets the same sextant reading twice.”

“It’s a good thing I don’t,” her husband said, indignant. “That would mean the earth had stopped moving. I’m a perfectly capable navigator.”

“Yes, and I’m Shirley Temple.”

Benjamin pointed to an island that formed the top of a triangle with two others. “This is where Janie is,” he said. “I think there’s a mine there.”

“Wait, hang on,” Harry said. “I have a guidebook.”

“I’ll get the drinks,” Charlotte said.

When they had both gone below, Benjamin said, “Did you bring the little packet of powder?”

His father shook his head.

“I think Janie’s trapped underground,” Benjamin said. “The powder’s worn off almost completely, but I get tiny flashes. I just wish we had
anything
useful!”

Charlotte brought drinks up from below, her charm bracelet clinking against a glass. Benjamin eyed the bracelet. “Are those charms real gold?” he asked.

“Of course!” she said. She set down the drinks and turned each charm over, baring the inside of her sun-browned wrist. “The racquet is from the tennis team at Farmington. The pair
of dice is from Monaco. The elephant is from India. The gold anchor was supposed to make me better at setting our anchor—but it didn’t work. The shoe is kind of silly because I never wear shoes anymore.”

Benjamin nodded, as if that was all important information. “Could we borrow a few of the sillier ones?” he asked.

J
in Lo had been trained early in the
Pao zhi
of Chinese medicine. At twelve, the master to whom she had been apprenticed told her that she would not always have a laboratory with everything she needed arranged in neat glass bottles. To teach her to work with scarce resources, he sent her out on scavenger hunts, giving her assignments for which she had to scrounge weeds and bits of rock and metal, and improvise:
Make your hand turn blue, then change it back. Trap a whisper in a jar of oil, and release it later. Move a book across a table without touching it. Paralyze a cricket, and then set it free.

Luckily, their hosts on the
Payday
were scavengers themselves. They were not clever people, Charlotte and Harry. But they had been all over the world, living a lonely, nomadic existence. Like those greedy, lucky black-and-white birds called magpies, they had taken bright things that pleased them and tucked them away in their floating nest. Jin Lo scoured the boat for these souvenirs, then sat at the table in the yacht’s saloon with Benjamin and the apothecary, considering the impressive array:

—An intricately carved red box made of what she knew in China as
jindan,
which Charlotte called cinnabar, and the apothecary called mercuric sulfide. It could be roasted to make quicksilver, which might not bestow eternal life when mixed into the Golden Elixir, as the early Chinese alchemists believed, but was extraordinarily useful anyway.

—Three charms that Charlotte was willing to give up from her bracelet: the shoe, the dice, and the skull. “The skull is to remind you that you’ll die someday,” Charlotte had said. “And I don’t need to be reminded of that.”

—A small jade carving of a frog.

—A piece of purple quartz.

—A jar of very high quality ylang-ylang oil from the Philippines, which Charlotte had bought as a perfume.

—A set of six silver teaspoons.

—A healthy aloe vera plant growing in a terra-cotta pot.

—A sickly fern in another pot.

—Aspirin, quinine, rubbing alcohol, mineral oil, and a bottle of iodine from the medicine cabinet. Also a
decongestant called Dristan, Pepto-Bismol, calamine lotion, smelling salts, and Unguentine First Aid Spray for sunburn, which Charlotte had tried to use on the back of Benjamin’s neck. He had waved her away.

—A small amount of high-grade opium, which Harry insisted was for toothaches.

—A bottle of powdered talc with a gardenia scent.

—Several graphite pencils and one grease pencil.

—A smooth yellow stone, surely sulfur, which gave off the stink of rotten eggs.

—Three hen’s eggs, still reasonably fresh.

—A vase covered in a bright purplish blue glaze, which Jin Lo believed to be
gu,
or cobalt, though she would need to grind it up and burn it to be certain.

—The guide to the islands that Harry had promised: a mimeographed booklet written by a sailor he had met in Manila. It was called
Captain Marty’s Sailing Guide to Malaya.

—A mortar and pestle, a decent cooking knife, and a hammer.

All in all, it wasn’t bad. Jin Lo had worked with less. She could hear her old master’s solemn, gravelly voice.
Consider the properties of each substance, but do not be limited by what you already know. It is the union of opposites that is important: hot and cold, wet and dry, acid and alkali, solar and lunar. They are separated, they join together. The work is a flowing river from which you divert a stream.

So it was time to divert a stream. She picked up the pretty carved box, placed it on a wooden cutting board, and hit it hard with the hammer. It broke into several pieces, and she took the smallest piece and hit it again, crushing it.

“Oh!” Charlotte cried. “I’m not going to watch this.”

Jin Lo had forgotten the woman was there. Charlotte’s long legs disappeared up the hatch. She would distract herself by teasing and tormenting her husband, who was sailing the boat with the help of the two island children.

The magpie,
xi que
in Chinese, was the bird of married happiness, but not for its own sake. It was because the magpies in an old legend made a magical bridge to unite two separated lovers. If Charlotte and Harry could bring Benjamin and Janie together, maybe that would be their contribution to the world’s happiness, since they had so little happiness of their own.

“You said you figured out how to talk to animals, right?” Benjamin asked.

“Perhaps,” Jin Lo said. It was possible that she had been losing her mind, and only
thought
the cat was talking to her. But she was fairly sure about the crocodile.

“Maybe we could get some dolphins to help us sneak onto the island,” he said.

Jin Lo looked up at Benjamin. He was not so many years younger than she was, but he was a romantic, which made him more of a child than she had ever been. He could imagine himself riding a heroic pod of dolphins to rescue his princess. “Animal with less intelligence is better,” she said. “Does not have so much own mind, own plan.”

Benjamin frowned, thinking. “Sea turtles?”

“Giant squid is better,” she said, and she was rewarded with a look of disgust and horror.

“Squid?”
Benjamin said.

“Squid has complex brain. This is good. But does not have
plans.
”

“Don’t they eat people?” Benjamin asked. “Like the kraken?”

“Sometimes.”

“And they’re slimy?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I want to ride on a giant squid.”

“The
Aidos Kyneê
is our best option,” the apothecary said, turning a page in the sailing guide. “We have the necessary gold, and invisibility is the safest, surest thing.”

“Invisible solution will stay on body?” she asked. “In water?”

The apothecary looked thoughtful. “That’s a good question. It might not.”

“And does not work on clothes. We want to be naked and visible, on island?”

“No,”
Benjamin said.

“So no animals, no invisibility,” she said. “Too complicated.”

The apothecary was reading the sailing guide. “I found Janie’s island,” he said. “Listen to this.”

He looked up from his reading.

“If we can get through that tunnel,” Benjamin said, “we can get close to the villa, and no one will see us!”

“I believe that’s so,” his father said. Then his brow furrowed with concern. “You do know how to swim, Benjamin?”

“In school, we went to the public baths every Wednesday.”

“Ah,” his father said. “Well, that’s a relief.”

“That might be a thing a father would know,” Benjamin said.

His father pushed his spectacles up onto his nose. “I realize that I was too distracted by my work, in those years.”

“Too distracted to know if your son could swim?”

Jin Lo was impatient with the same old argument. She wanted to remind Benjamin that he
had
a father, a very good one, better than most. “So we swim through tunnel,” she said. “We breathe underwater.”

“But we have to consider the unfortunate side effect,” the apothecary said. “The language centers of the brain are affected.”

“We talk funny,” Jin Lo said. “This is okay. Better than naked. Agree?”

“Yes,” father and son said together.

“Okay,” she said. “So we begin.”

H
arry and Tessel brought the
Payday
as close to the island as they dared, in the moonless dark of early morning. The skipper had grown dependent on Tessel as a first mate. They whispered a word or two, but barely needed to speak. The plan was to pretend to tack badly, slowing the boat, while Benjamin and his father and Jin Lo went into the water on the far side, away from the island. That way, if a lookout saw the white sail, it wouldn’t seem threatening. Charlotte said they had lots of practice tacking badly.

“You’re not abandoning us with your stolen children?” she whispered to Benjamin.

“No,” he said. He spoke in one-word sentences so they wouldn’t become scrambled, but also because he was nervous about swimming underwater without breathing.

“I fear we’re a bad influence on them,” Charlotte said. “So don’t run off for good.” She smiled, and ruffled Benjamin’s hair. “Good luck.”

“Good luck, Benjonfrum,” Efa whispered.

If there had been sun, the water might have seemed
inviting, but in the dark it was inky and forbidding. Benjamin wore Harry’s swimming trunks, and a diving mask and fins they had pulled from a locker of gear. On his back was a knapsack containing their jars of provisions, wrapped carefully in his clothes and his father’s.

“Ready about,” Harry said in a normal voice, at the wheel. “Hard alee.” They began to stage their failure. The boat turned into the wind, slowed, and stalled.

Jin Lo went into the water first. She had made an underwater light, some kind of phosphorescent glow, and she had wrapped it in oilcloth to shield it from sight. She also wore a knapsack and mask and fins. But even so, she entered the water without a sound, dropping in like a knife blade.

Benjamin rolled in next, feeling the water swallow his arms and legs, trying not to think about sharks—their bumping noses, their many teeth.

His father climbed awkwardly down the swimming ladder in his mask and fins. His spectacles were in Benjamin’s knapsack, and he couldn’t see well without them.

They swam at the surface, keeping their bearings by watching the dark silhouette of the land. When they reached the island’s southern point, Jin Lo nodded and dived beneath the water. Benjamin and his father dived down after her.