Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [86]
“Mouthy little brat, Bill Stock, wasn’t he?” said Tim to no one in particular.
“Yeah,” I said after a while, “he was, wasn’t he?”
Sometime in a high-tossed dawn, one by one we arose drenched, yawning and groaning from the belly of the boat. The wind had blown all night, and the hog had shat. We got our hardtack and a drop of water and sailed on. Thank God these boats did not sail easy, for it kept us on our toes. Better to be occupied than idle. Someone had to man the steering oar. Someone had to fix and hammer and bale. Someone had to keep watch. We were overladen and low in the water, and the sea slopped in all day. We tried to catch fish, but had no means. We had wood from the ship. Gabriel set to whittling a spear.
Thirst and hunger came on sharp. The world can divide, can double like vision. So could I. I was here, wide eyed, mad-silenced, staring at the sky and the dim, grey sea, the bruised and laden smudges of cloud, the waves. The rest of my life was a dream. Things went on still, sane, reasonable. The captain and Mr. Rainey kept on at us all the time to keep up appearances, making us shave with the edge of a knife and rub our teeth and comb our hair, and say our prayers night and morning. The prayers were Dan’s job. He was good at it too.
“Sweet Jesus Christ who died for us,” a calm but ringing voice that carried between the boats, “have mercy on us in this troubling time. We are twelve souls afloat on your great ocean asking for help. Send us, Lord, a sail. Amen. We will now say the Lord’s Prayer …”
Twelve murmuring men, hands together, heads bowed.
Days passed.
Meaningless to speak of a tally. A long time ago Skip said time’s gone funny, and it had. It was a dream in the blink of an eye and it was a lifetime. When I think of it now, it’s as if I lived another whole life a long time ago, was born into it, lived it and died in it.
“Wake up there, Jaf.”
Dan had a shaky hand, missing his booze.
“You were dreaming,” he said. “What was it? Something chasing you?”
I shook my head. A bag of water in my chest. A dam of tears.
Dreams. The dragon, bigger than before, walking down Lysander’s deck on its hind legs like a man. I jerked and blinked the wet from my eyelashes. First thing I saw was Mr. Rainey, eyes ablaze, spitting a glob of grey into his hand. His face was yellow-green, rotten. I looked about, couldn’t see the captain’s boat.
“They’ve gone!” I cried.
“No no no.” Gabriel, steady at the steering oar. “They are there.”
The waves rolled in deep valleys. The captain’s boat appeared and disappeared, sometimes for long minutes at a time. When we saw them they were baling like us. Never less than three of us at it and still all things in the boat were afloat, including the poor hog. I was sorry for the hog. God knows what he made of life, a peculiar thing it must have seemed to him. The hogs and us were all well salted by now. The salt put a rime about our dry lips and red eyes, made patterns on our dirty clothes, intricate as patterns in rock. Things of water, all of us. Made no difference if it rained on and off, except that it filled the boat quicker and had us all a-baling at once, muscles burning, every man in rhythm. We baled until it was our turn to sleep, slept in the water, woke and baled again. Cried, stupid. In my mind always, a warm bed and a fire. The smell of ale and sweat and ladies’ powder. We got our hardtack, got our water. Tim’s face always there, stolid, unreadable, even smiling sometimes, and the seas and skies rising and falling. Every day the same. We blew on and on. Our faces seeing only our other faces, day after day, till no one knew who was who, we were all one: a peculiar, striving creature, licking its parched lips, goggling its sore eyes at the horizon.
One day the sky changed and we had clear weather come mid-afternoon. Our boats came together.
“Jesus Christ,