The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [65]
"A really most excellent cook," Verne said, sloshing the wine in his glass just a little. Dakkar acknowledged him with a smile. He then ordered his men to leave.
"Caliban's Island," he said then, speaking to Orphan, fixing his cold dark eyes on him. "I have often tried to find it. A place of great evil, for it is the place the lizards come from. The place where they crashed to Earth." His fist thumped the table. "They must be destroyed!"
"Really, old boy," Verne said, "you need to calm down about this. You're scaring the kid."
"India shall have its independence!" Dakkar said.
"No doubt," Verne said.
The conversation concluded soon after that. If he had learned something from it, Orphan thought, it was only that neither Dakkar nor Verne knew anything about the island. They didn't even know how to find it.
Yet Verne had instruments. A chest full of them in his cabin. He did not want to think of what they might be. They were the tools of the Bookman, just as Orphan was, a blunted tool made to strike at the Bookman's enemies.
Orphan climbed onto the deck and stood there, looking at the night. For a moment he thought he heard a whale's call in the distance. There were a lot of stars.
He swore again to himself that he would return. That he would save Lucy. And as for the Bookman…
Then he laughed, because he knew he was being absurd, and he joined a game of cards with three sailors and after an hour won a handful of coins, half of them unknown to him.
Days on the ship spent under bright clear skies… Flying fish pursued the Nautilus, silver fins flashing in the sunlight as they arced through the air. In the second week a pod of dolphins accompanied them from a distance. Occasionally, far away, he saw the disappearing hump of a giant whale.
He still had Tom Thumb's gun, and he practised shooting on the deck with some of the sailors. He played cards, and lost more than he'd won. Then, a week into the voyage, he returned to his cabin and found a book waiting for him on the bed.
He sat down and looked at it curiously. It was an old, weather-beaten notebook, bound in peeling leather. He lifted it in his hands, traced damage on the cover, opened it. Old, brittle paper. Foxed pages and water damage. Many of the pages were torn.
The handwriting inside jolted him.
Jagged and cramped, packed tight into the page. It was the handwriting of his friend.
It was Gilgamesh's.
He closed the book and held it for a long moment, his eyes staring into nothing, thinking of his dead friend. Where had this come from?
Then he noticed the note that must have fallen to the floor as he entered the cabin, and he picked it up and read it. I have tried to rely on primary sources as much as possible, it said. I found this journal fifteen years ago, in a junk shop in Marseille. Perhaps you would find it interesting. How true its account is I cannot say. The note was signed by Verne.
Orphan lifted up the journal and felt suddenly very far from home. He looked out of the porthole at the endless sea beyond, and thought back. Gilgamesh had been… a friend, and a part of his life. And now he was dead, and here was his journal, as old as a drowned ship.
He took a deep breath to calm himself, and blinked several times. Then he opened the journal – really, a small collection of leaves, incomplete and beguiling – and began to read.
A clear, calm day. The sea lies flat. We have left the Aztecs last night with a mutual exchange of many gifts, dancing and singing and drinking. I shall miss [unreadable], her smooth dark skin and her smile in the darkness… Everyone looks downcast today, despite the weather – we are all suffering last night's excess. Our course is leisurely, for now, and we plan