Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [101]
Having eaten well, we slept well, a boatload of us snoring away, and in the morning I woke with his face still in my eyes and a snake in my belly, coiling. Bile in my throat. Still hungry as ever.
“Here,” said Dan, “drink.”
The sun was already high. Simon was lighting a fire with a few bits of thin stick and some tightly coiled strips of rag. Had to cook what was left fast, he said, or it’d go off. Some already had. The captain was hovering over a pail of offal that was turning green.
“What do you think?” he said.
“Chuck it over,” said Simon.
Over it went.
“How long can you keep that going?” The captain nodded at the fire.
Simon made a wry face. “Ten minutes. Longer but …”
“Hm?”
“Depends how many days.”
Wilson was feeling seedy and was lying down with a cold rag on his head, his dark brown face shiny with sweat. Dag, sitting up groggily in the stern of the boat, picked constantly at his swollen eyelids. His face was as gawkily skull-like as ever, but his legs and arms had turned into fat pink hams, and were spotted here and there with angry red boils. I had boils too, big flaming things that raged—one behind my knee, one inside my thigh and the worst one on the back of my neck.
“You know, it’s funny,” said Tim. “I feel hungrier than ever now.”
“Me too,” I said.
“That’s the way of it,” said Dan. “Don’t fret, we’ve plenty for a good ten days.”
We got a strip of meat for breakfast, along with our tack. I made mine last a long time. Dan hummed a tune, lolling back against the prow, arms slung across the wood. When I caught his eye he winked. “All’s well, Jaf,” he said. “All’s fine and dandy.”
Sometimes still the captain and Dan would put their heads together and conference, as if there was anything to be done, but very little was going on anymore in the way of navigation. Skip grinned and mumbled, sometimes laughed in a weary way. Tim cursed and swore. Gabriel muttered prayers, a wistful, rhythmic humming in my ears. Simon simply wasn’t there. His body was, of course, but he never played his fiddle anymore and hardly spoke or bothered to move unless he had to. He hardly looked up to see when a shark stalked us for a time, or when a crack of thunder sounded in the west, or when silent lightning clamoured in an empty sky. Dag chewed his nails though there was nothing left of them. I thought of Ishbel’s awful hands. Poor Ishbel. What hunger she must have had to eat herself like that. Very painful it must have been. I saw her clear then, and another huge kick of home got me, the Highway, the Docks, me and she and Tim, street Arabs running about.
“Do you remember?” I asked Tim.
“Of course,” he said as if he could read my mind. Then he leaned forward and grinned and ruffled my hair. “Little Lascar, is it?” he said.
Heat pressed down, making it hard to think.
“Hear that?” said Skip.
“What is it?”
Gabriel laughed shortly. “Now we’re all mad,” he said, and went back to praying.
“Listen.”
It wasn’t really a sound. More the vibration in your ears when a thousand miles of emptiness presses on them. More a sense of the elements putting us in our place.
“Look out there,” said Dan. He put his arms round me and Tim. “My boys,” he said, and tears ran from the brown corners of his small, sad eyes. “My boys, I’ll take you home safe. One way or another. Didn’t I promise old Jamrach I’d bring his boys safe home?”
Something’s happening. The sea is changing. Strangeness, like twilight or weather, falls upon the earth.
“Children,” Dan Rymer said, tears in the wrinkles of his face.
“How old are you, Dan?” I asked.
He grinned. “Sixty-two,” he said, “last time I looked.”
“You’re very old,” Tim said.
Dan laughed. “The old man of the sea!”
The sea didn’t care. We were nothing.
“What is it?” asked Dag.
“Shh!” The captain covered his eyes.
“Hold hands, boys.” Dan said. “We face this thing together.” He was wings, we huddled under. I heard sound above the clouds, one voice or many, impossible to