• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2448 0

Five muck-plagued years, twenty? Christ Jesus, you said yourself all these shit-heads’re at war now!” Vinck’s mind snapped. “They’re going to chop off our heads and stick them like those there and the birds’ll eat us….” A paroxysm of insane laughter shook him and he reached into his ragged shirt. Blackthorne saw the pistol butt and it would have been easy to smash Vinck to the ground and take the pistol but he did nothing to defend himself. Vinck waved the pistol in his face, dancing around him with drooling, lunatic glee. Blackthorne waited unafraid, hoping for the bullet, then Vinck took to his heels down the beach, the seabirds scudding into the air, mewing and cawing out of his path. Vinck ran for a frantic hundred paces or more, then collapsed, ending up on his back, his legs still moving, arms waving, mouthing obscenities. After a moment he turned on his belly with a last shriek, facing Blackthorne, and froze. There was a silence.

When Blackthorne came up to Vinck the pistol was leveled at him, the eyes staring with demented antagonism, the lips pulled back from his teeth. Vinck was dead.

Blackthorne closed the eyes and picked him up and slung him over his shoulder and walked back. Samurai were running toward him, Naga and Yabu at their head.

“What happened, Anjin-san?”

“He went mad.”

“Is that so? Is he dead?”

“Yes. First burial, then Yedo. All right?”

“Hai.”

Blackthorne sent for a shovel and asked them to leave him for a while and he buried Vinck above the water line on a crest that overlooked the wreck. He said a service over the grave and planted a cross in the grave that he fashioned out of two pieces of driftwood. It was so easy to say the service. He had spoken it too many times. On this voyage alone over a hundred times for his own crew since they’d left Holland. Only Baccus van Nekk and the boy Croocq survived now; the others had come from other ships—Salamon the mute, Jan Roper, Sonk the cook, Ginsel the sailmaker. Five ships and four hundred and ninety-six men. And now Vinck. All gone now except the seven of us. And for what?

To circumnavigate the globe? To be the first?

“I don’t know,” he said to the grave. “But that won’t happen now.”

He made everything tidy. “Sayonara, Johann.” Then he walked down to the sea and swam naked to the wreck to purify himself. He had told Naga and Yabu that this was their custom after burying one of their men on land. The captain had to do it in private if there was no one else and the sea was the purifier before their God, which was the Christian God but not quite the same as the Jesuit Christian God.

He hung on to one of the ship’s ribs and saw that barnacles were already clustering, sand already silting over the keel plate, three fathoms below. Soon the sea would claim her and she would vanish. He looked around aimlessly. Nothing to salvage, he told himself, expecting nothing.

He swam ashore. Some of his vassals waited with fresh clothes. He dressed and put his swords in his sash and walked back. Near the wharf one of his vassals pointed. “Anjin-san!”

A carrier pigeon, pursued by a hawk, was clattering wildly for the safety of the home coop in the village. The coop was in the attic of the tallest building, set back from the seashore on a slight rise. With a hundred yards to go, the hawk on station, high above its prey, closed its wings and plummeted. The stoop hit with a burst of feathers but it was not perfect. The pigeon fell screeching as though mortally wounded, then, near the ground, recovered and fled for home. She scrambled through a hole in the coop to safety, the hawk ek-ek-ek-ing with rage a few paces behind, and everyone cheered, except Blackthorne. Even the pigeon’s cleverness and bravery did not touch him. Nothing touched anymore.

“Good, neh?” one of his vassals said, embarrassed by his master’s dourness.

“Yes.” Blackthorne went back to the galley. Yabu was there and the Lady Sazuko, Kiri and the captain. Everything was ready. “Yabu-san. Ima Yedo ka?” he asked.

But Yabu did not answer and no one noticed him. All eyes were on Naga, who was hurrying