The Buccaneers (2 page)

“Perhaps he hasn't been,” I said.

Abbey grunted. “But his boat has.”

I wouldn't admit it to Abbey, but I'd had the same
thought. The boat had grown weak, but the man was still strong.

“Try it,” said Abbey. “Get into a boat and drift out there. In a matter of days, the sun turns you into a cinder. In a fortnight it makes a mummy of you, dry as old leather.” He spat into the sea. “A man outlive his boat? Not a chance!”

His one good eye was closed, yet he stared straight at me with the reflected sunset glaring in his glass marble. It was a most disturbing thing, as though he could actually see with some kind of fiery vision.

“Look in his sea chest,” said Abbey. “If he's a Jonah, he'll carry his curses in there.”

“That's enough!” I said.

Abbey cackled. He turned his head and looked down at the sea. The water seethed below us, and the
Dragon
churned on toward the west. She rushed down a wave, rose on the face of the next. The sun flared once more and disappeared. And Mr. Abbey gasped.

He reached out and clutched my arm. “Did you see that?” he cried.

“What?” I asked.

“Right there!” he shouted. “You must have seen it.” He stretched over the rail, staring straight down at the sea, then aft along the hull. He squeezed shivers of pain into my arm. “Tell me you did.”

“See what?” I asked again.

“A coffin,” he cried. “It looked like a coffin all nailed together, the lid swinging open.” He stared at me with utter horror. “Tell me you saw it.”

I tried to shake him off, but his fingers held me like talons. “I saw no such thing,” I said.

“Then I'm doomed!” He let me go and slumped at the rail. “I'm finished. We all are, maybe.”

“No one's doomed,” said I.

His glass eye burned. “Oh, we are, young Mr. Spencer. There's a Jonah come aboard.”

I
t was near the end of my watch—my turn at the wheel—“when the captain came up from below, still in his nightclothes”. He “wore a purple robe that fluttered and billowed around him, baring legs as knobby and“ white as those of a poorly built table.

He stood behind me at the “wheel”. “Should we reef?” he asked. “Should we strike the topsail? Are we driving her too hard?”

“Oh, she can carry her sails,” I said.

He laughed, delighted, and clapped his hand upon my shoulder. “Fancy this,” he said. “Did you ever think we “would play our game on a schooner's deck?”

“No, sir,” said I.

The “wind pulled at his robe and pushed at his nightshirt, and he took his hand away to draw his sash more tightly. When your ”watch is over, fetch that stranger and bring him down below,” he said. “I “would like to hear his tale.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir. So “would I. And Mr. Abbey, too.”

“Abbey?”

“Yes,” I said. “He told me the man's a Jonah. He saw a coffin in the sea, and now he thinks “we're doomed.”

Butterfield snorted. “Doomed to listen to rubbish.”

“He was quite distraught,” I said.

“Well, can't say I'm surprised. Gunners are mad, you know. The whole lot of them.” Butterfield snatched at his robe as it flapped open again. “I think all the noise—of their cannons and their infernal banging about—must knock something loose in their skulls.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Now let her have her head.” He was already going below. “I'm afraid we'll drive her under.”

I turned the wheel, smiling at the memories he'd raised of my childhood, of the hours we'd spent crouched on the floor, pushing my little wooden boats across a carpet bunched into monstrous waves. He was my father's closest friend, Uncle Stanley to me, though we weren't related by blood. He would come to the house, in those days, straight from the sea, smelling of salt and wind. “Should we reef?” I would ask. “Are we driving her too hard?” And Uncle Stanley would say, “Oh, she can carry her sails.” I'd thought him absolutely fearless; it never occurred to me that he might have only wished to fetch the edge of the carpet as soon as he could, and end our game more quickly.

I nudged the wheel and sent the
Dragon
back on her wilder course. She flew along toward fading stars as the sun came up behind her. Then poor Dana Mudge emerged from the fo'c's'le and patrolled once around the deck, as he did every day at dawn. Here and there—between the guns, against the fo'c's'le break—he stooped and straightened, then waddled to the rail. It was a ritual for him to collect the
flying fish that had come aboard during the night and return them to the sea.

As always, he made a report when he came to take the wheel. “Ten of the brutes this morning,” he said.

“Very good,” I told him.

Then he blinked and squinted, and put his hands on the spokes. He was the son of a farmer, with a plowman's strength. But Mudge always stood to the helm like a man to a battle, wrestling the
Dragon
through the waves as though he hoped to knock her flat as soon as he could.

I went forward to wake the stranger, but found him instead at the foot of the foremast. He had his clasp knife out, and was whittling at a piece of wood. “The captain would like to see you,” I said.

We went below, to a cabin lit only by the skylight. The broad windows across the stern were covered with heavy curtains, which Butterfield had fixed in place the day we'd left the land behind and hadn't opened since. He sat at his table, before a chart of the North Atlantic, under a lamp that swung wildly on its hook. His head tilted back as he took in all of the stranger's height. “What's your name?” he asked.

“Horn,” said the stranger. He stepped under the skylight, the only place where he could stand erect. There, with his shoulders above the deck beams, the lamp swinging at the height of his elbows, he seemed as massive as a giant.

The
Dragon
staggered along, though the seas weren't big at all. A wooden box with Butterfield's pipe and tobacco slid down the length of the table. He watched it, then looked at me. “Mudge?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Confound him.” He shook his head, then smiled at Horn. “Well, it's fortunate we found you.”

“Why?” asked Horn.

“Well, come on, man,” said Butterfield, perplexed. “I'm not asking you to thank me, but you were lost. A thousand miles from land.”

“A little more than that, I think,” said Horn. “But I wasn't lost at all. I was making for the Ivory Coast.”

Butterfield looked down at his chart. He frowned at what he saw. “Do you have a sextant?”

“No.”

“A log? A compass?”

Horn shook his head.

“Do you have charts?”

“No,” said Horn. “But I know where I was going. I know where I started from.”

“And where was that?” asked Butterfield.

Horn named a position in degrees and minutes. The captain touched his chart, his finger running west across it, nearly to the Indies. He said, “You could have fetched the Indies in a week.”

“Yes, more or less,” said Horn.

I frowned. “Then why sail east?”

Horn looked at me with a quick turn of his head, a gesture like a hawk's. “I wanted to go to Africa,” he said.

“But why?” His eyes never blinked, and I found it easier to stare at the chart than at them.

“Well,” he said. “I took a fancy to see the Ivory Coast.”

Butterfield rubbed his forehead. The tobacco box hurtled
down the table and thumped against his elbow. I steadied myself, and Butterfield clutched his chair. Only Horn stood easily, so straight that he might have been nailed to the deck.

“Blast that Mudge,” said Butterfield. Then, to Horn, “What ship are you from?”

“Does it matter?” asked Horn.

“It matters to me,” said the captain. “Look, this isn't a court of inquiry, man. We only ask what brings you here.”

“Very well.” Horn stared fixedly ahead. “There was a packet bound for England. The
Meridian Passage. “

“What happened to her?”

“I believe she perished.”

Butterfield's eyebrows arched. “You
believe
she perished?”

“It's safe to say she did,” said Horn.

“When was that?” asked the captain.

“Twenty-six days ago.”

My jaw dropped open. We'd still been tied to our London dock twenty-six days ago. In all the gales we'd weathered, in all the sunsets and the dawns we'd seen, Horn had been sailing east in his little boat. It was a feat I could never do myself, nor ever
want
to do.

“What did you eat?” I asked.

“The sea is full of fish,” said Horn. “And the fish are full of water, so don't ask me what I drank. I squeezed them like lemons.”

“Amazing.” Captain Butterfield shook his head. “No matter what you say, this is fortunate indeed. For me, if not for you.”

“Why is that?” asked Horn.

“I'll sign you aboard, of course.” The
Dragon
tipped; the tobacco box clouted the captain's wrist. He picked it up and pitched it onto his bunk. “You can work the ship through the islands and home to England.”

Horn nodded. “As you wish. I suppose there's little choice.”

The captain brought out his log, and a quill that he dipped in ink. He offered them to Horn, who bent almost double to reach the table. The book slid away; Butterfield pushed it back. Horn took the pen and made his mark, an elegant little albatross that he sketched with three quick strokes.

Then the captain dismissed him. “I imagine you could sleep for days,” he said.

“No,” said Horn. “I've had my watch below, and I'd rather stand for a while.”

“Then you can stand a trick at the wheel.”

Horn touched his forehead—a funny little quick salute. He ducked under the beams and went out through the door.

As it latched behind him, Captain Butterfield said to me, “It's a rather strange story, John.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “But I think it's true.”

“So why is he so mysterious?”

I couldn't answer that. The captain's chair tipped sideways as the
Dragon
rolled. The hanging lamp jangled against its lanyard, and a locker flew open, its contents tumbling out. I tightened my shoulders, waiting for a crash of water above me. But it never came; Mudge could steer in a calm and make it feel like a gale.

Butterfield rolled his eyes at the skylight. He glanced at
the rubble in the corner, then back at his chart. With his finger, he drew Horn's passage across the ocean. “Against the wind,” he said. “Why?”

For pleasure, I thought. From a fancy, just as he'd said. But I didn't tell Butterfield that, for I realized then that the lamp was no longer moving, that the curtains were hanging as straight as boards at the windows. And I looked up through the skylight to see that Horn had taken the wheel.

Feet apart, hands on the spokes, he worked the helm so easily that it seemed the ship worked
him
, that the movements of her rudder came up through the wheel to drive his arms like cranks and cams. Handsome as a god, perfect in every way, he was
born
to steer a ship.

Butterfield got up and started putting in order what Mudge's clumsy steering had thrown into disarray. It amused me to think how many times he must have done that in all the years they'd sailed together in the ships my father owned. He hung his double-barreled flintlock pistol back on its peg and returned his Bible to its place. I smiled when he plucked his socks from the locker's upper shelf and told me that he'd left them on a lower one. And when he cried out, “Oh, my poor sextant,” I laughed.

“You find it funny?” he asked, whirling on me. “I'm surprised at you, John.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“He's bent the arm, I think. He's given it a good whack, at any rate.” Butterfield cradled the sextant like an injured child. “Don't you see what this means?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, chagrined. I only dimly understood the process that let him aim the thing at the sun or the stars and
determine our position anywhere on earth. Yet I saw quite clearly that a damaged instrument was no good at all. If we couldn't trust it, we were lost in every way there was.

“If I didn't know better,” said Butterfield, “I'd say there
is
a Jonah with us now.”

H
orn made a place for himself in the crew, fitting in with the men like a stray dog who'd found a home. He “went at every task with a will, with the strength of three men. And he was always at the wheel when the sun went down, for he loved to steer us from the day to the night, toward the first of the stars that we saw.

The spot at the foot of the foremast became his, and his alone. There he sat by day and by night, working away with his knife and his bits of wood, as though set to a lonely task of the most pressing importance. But whenever a hand was needed, Horn was the first on his feet.

Not one of the crew was really his friend, but only Mr. Abbey hated him. The gunner whispered rumors through the ship that it was a Jonah's job Horn was doing at the foot of the mast. He told stories of the enormous sea chest and the contents that shifted sometimes—-when the
Dragon
rolled—-with a sound that carried to the deck.

I felt almost sorry for Abbey. The
Dragon
raced along in the sunshine and the spray, but the gunner lived in a gloom cast by his vision of a coffin. He spent hours standing at the rail, either staring at the sea or glaring daggers at Horn.

Then there came an afternoon when we'd been at sea for thirty days or so. I passed the helm to Horn, and for once he started to talk about idle things in a way that any shipmate might, but in a way he'd never done himself.

“Have you ever been to the Indies, Mr. Spencer?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“But you've been to sea.” He held the wheel lightly, and I felt the
Dragon
surge along. “It's written all over you, Mr. Spencer. She's in your blood, the sea.”

This was the highest praise of all, coming from Horn. “I've been to the Mediterranean,” I said. “And once across the Channel, that's all.”