We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [282]
***
"This is your big chance," Markussen had told her, when they said goodbye for the last time. He'd been referring to the wars in Spain and Asia. Thousands of people killing one another was good news. The freight market would go up, and his ships would be busier than ever.
Unlike her steamers. They lay still, their boilers cold.
Now was the time to act. Here was the moment to seize. But she wouldn't be sending them out to take part in orgies of profit while drowned men floated in their wake.
She went to her office and inquired about the prices of ships. And she heard what she expected to hear: it was time to sell. She'd bought the steamers from the widows ten years ago when the freight market was in a slump and everyone was suffering losses. Now that the freight prices had increased, she could resell at a huge profit. She knew what the town's businessmen would say.
"Damn it to hell," one would exclaim. The others would nod in agreement. They'd be reluctant to acknowledge her good move with anything more than a curse. But that at least would be a tribute to her skill. They'd thought her female brain was short-circuited when it came to profit, and that her ships were laid up simply because she couldn't make up her mind what to do with them. Now they'd realize that every step she'd taken, or failed to take, had a basis in cold calculation.
Others would take a different view. They'd think that she'd sold off not just the ships, but Marstal's livelihood. They'd be closer to the truth.
Was she taking more than she was giving?
What would be left of Marstal once she'd sold off her steamers? A tiny fleet of schooners with auxiliary engines, many of them rigged down to ketches and reduced to plying the local Baltic routes, with perhaps an occasional venture into the North Sea. The circle was complete. The town would end up where it had begun more than a hundred years before.
The sea would be the loser, because there'd be no more human sacrifices to His Merciless Majesty. And the winner? That would be the women.
Or would things go the way Markussen had hinted? Would the men sign on elsewhere and settle at the ends of the earth?
Would the flood never end?
IV
THE END OF THE WORLD
IT WAS THE END of the world.
He was on an alien planet or somewhere in the future. Whatever it was, it was heading for destruction. Convinced he was about to die, Knud Erik closed his eyes. Then suddenly he realized where he was.
He was in the middle of a dream. But it wasn't his own.
He was seven years old, sitting on the thwart of Albert Madsen's boat as they rowed through Marstal's harbor. The old man's voice came back to him, talking about a phantom ship painted gray all over, huge tubular buildings on fire, a night sky lit by a blinding phosphorescent white light, and air that quivered from the pressure of exploding bombs and collapsing houses.
Yes, that's where he was: in a dream that had visited the old man more than twenty years before. He opened his eyes and saw what Albert had seen, and for the first time he understood that the old man's dreams had been prophetic. What he'd presented to a child as tales of adventure had actually been his own visions of horror.
"That's the best story you've ever told me," Knud Erik had said back then. And now here he was, right in the middle of it. He'd never heard the ending. But it was on its way, and he sensed it would involve his own death.
Just then, a Stuka dived toward the ship and dropped a bomb. As he watched the missile falling, time stood still: he realized it would plummet right through the gray-painted funnel and detonate in the engine room, with devastating consequences. Preparing himself for death, he tensed his muscles.
Now!
The bomb disappeared with a splash into the water a few meters from the side of the ship. He'd mistaken its trajectory. His muscles were still locked rigid. He waited for the column of water and the sudden keeling of the ship, for the water pressure to burst her steel plates and come flooding in. But nothing happened.