Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [98]
“Dead,” he said.
It didn’t mean anything. We just lolled there a while with Yan lying dead, then Simon said, “So what now?”
The captain sighed.
“We can use his belt,” Wilson Pride said. “Come in useful.”
Another long silence.
“The custom of the sea,” said Simon expressionlessly.
“No.” That was Gabriel.
“Supposing,” Tim said, “we could—”
“No,” said Gabriel.
“I don’t mean—”
“No.”
“I mean bait. Bait for sharks, then we could catch—”
“No.”
“What sharks?” said Skip.
It was true, the waters were empty.
“We could …”
The captain stirred himself. “Let’s prepare him for the sea,” he said gruffly.
So Simon and Wilson took his belt for boiling up tomorrow and sewed him up in his clothes like we sewed up Mr. Rainey, and we buried him in the sea. We’d miss Yan, but there was no spare water for tears and all of us were blank. None of us had any idea what kind of a service you should say for his Oriental soul. No one knew how they did things in his country. So it was just a bit of a mumble from the captain again, and the bowing of heads and the closing of eyes, and I fell half asleep and scarcely noticed as they slid him into the sea. That night when prayers came, it was: “Oh Lord, we are ten souls afloat …” and I nearly laughed. We are twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight souls afloat …
At some stage this grisly countdown must stop.
Dag went back over their side so we were five apiece again. John Copper was coming down bad now, he kept getting the runs, and Gabriel wasn’t looking too good. A light breeze blew up two or three days down the line, cheering us all up. Simon took up his fiddle and scratched away for a while, then we all started singing. Not that we really could sing, not that the fiddle could do more than croak these days, but we did our best. It turned into something, a great wake perhaps, a joyful wake. We were bobbing along together on a moonlit ocean and the world was beautiful. Tim and I held hands and sang as we could. Nothing like a song to bind the world together and bring on the best sort of tears. We sang, and Dan growled along with us, and so did Dag, in a voice still surprisingly pure. Gabriel laid his head against the pillow of a sucked leather oar and his eyes stared bright with weeping. We sang “Oh, say was you ever in Rio Grande,” and “Reuben Ranzo” and “Round the Corner Sally,” and when our voices ran out we hummed on into the darkness of silence. Tim held on to my arm as he slept, gripping so hard it hurt. His mouth fell open and his head tilted back. He made me think of home. Me and him in the yard mucking about, insulting each other. Cold in the early morning, a grumble in the belly. Clumps of hair falling out. No, that’s now. I’m glad Ma can’t see this. She’d hate it, poor old Ma. She’d cry. What could I do about it? It was too big, it filled me up. So I put her away, not too far, not so I couldn’t call her back anytime I wanted. I went to Ishbel instead. The last I saw was cloud coming over, directly above, blackness coming over. Drifting black sleep, soft as cloud, warm in my bed boasting at the rain. I opened my eyes in darkness so complete it was like being blind. Some gigantic thing was beating the ocean out there, not far away, a great plunging and cascading and thrashing. Tim’s hand was still on my arm, clutching. A voice chanted “please God please God please God please God” endlessly.
“Tim,” I said, “what is it?”
An arm came round me. “I don’t know.”
“Lie still,” Dan said, “it’ll go by.”
It sounded like mountains crashing into the sea. Not like a whale. Not anything I knew. Some monster come up from the deep, the dark deep underlying, some fearful malicious thing. It’s true there are places of horror on the earth,