THE ANCIENT Read online

  Tenghis’s fears were hypocritical, since Fen knew only too well that Tenghis himself could have his moments too. They had both worried when two voyages ago the chief engineer brought his wife on the ship. Surely every sailor knew it was unlucky to have a lone woman on board. Two or three officers’ wives, well maybe that was okay. But one alone? No. And look what had happened. The cook had nearly sliced his little finger clean off during that storm south of Panama. There was no doubt amongst the lower-ranking crew who had been responsible for that. No, superstition was not always baloney and old women’s fears. But as to his wicked paganism, Tenghis was wrong too. To amuse his fellow crew members, Fen often held Saanti readings in the mess hall or his cabin, the method of prediction and revelation being an obscure Asian mixture of Tarot and ouiji. The Saanti showed him the truth of things, and he would be a fool not to pay heed. That didn’t mean he too couldn’t be a good Christian, and Tenghis’s sulk after such an evening, which would sometimes last for days, punishing his cabin mate by saying his rosary loudly in bed at random times, was a gross insult. But tonight it was not Tenghis’s irritating piety that was making him wakeful. It was thinking about the Peruvian stevedores.

  Gossip in any port spread quickly, and Fen usually liked to help it along if it was juicy enough. So when there was a rumour that the stevedores were unhappy about the cargo of trash being loaded onto the Lysicrates, Fen was the first to make himself amenable to the gang chief to try and find out why. The chief was a small suspicious man from the country and it took a lot to befriend him, but since the ship had been lying here for so long, longer than any other vessel usually did, Fen managed by persistence to make the man take him into his confidence.

  It certainly was an unusual load. The Lysicrates normally carried coal, iron ore or gravel, and even on other bulk carriers he’d sailed with he had never come across the bulk shipping of uncompacted domestic waste before.

  And apparently he was not the only one to find it irregular, since there had been some kind of negotiation being carried on between the company and the dock authorities, which had caused the trash to have been sitting in a vast rotting pile in the dock’s loading area for nearly a week while Captain Skinner sorted out a bill of lading.

  The rumours had started after two days. There were complaints about rats and roaches of course, but when a prostitute that visited the docks on a nightly basis had gone missing after servicing two of her regulars in her temporary boudoir inside an empty container, talk started that it had something to do with the trash. Fen couldn’t quite get from the man what he thought the connection was, but some names had come up, curiously none of them Spanish, but of a tongue he didn’t recognize, and there was a whispered uneasiness amongst the men about something one of them had seen in the great and stinking pile.

  In itself this was merely the normal superstitious nonsense of simple under-educated working men, of which Fen was one, but he was more intuitive than most, and could usually distinguish the nonsense from the genuine mystery. What was bothering him now was that as he had watched the trash being loaded from the vantage point of the deck, Fen could have sworn he had seen something.

  Rats probably, he reasoned, but then in fifteen years at sea, years when he’d seen just about every trick the repulsive vermin could perform in everything from grain to cocoa bags, he’d never seen rats undulate under a pile of anything in quite the way this grab-load of refuse had moved. If it had been rats, then there had been a lot of them, and working together. Because the surface of the junk had pulsated in a way that made him break out in a sweat. The thought of the rodents, however logical an explanation, was not in itself a particularly comfortable one.

  Beasts that size that could move with such ordered intent were not beasts he looked forward to sharing a voyage with. But if the movement was not caused by rats, then Fen wasn’t entirely sure how he felt. A hot sensation had overwhelmed him as he’d witnessed the swift but substantial movement, and the unpleasant notion had swept across him that it was moving, revealing itself, for his benefit only.

  Fen’s only consolation was that he had been so horror-struck by the sensation that he had made himself watch the grab drop the pile from a height into hold number two, monitoring it carefully as it fell, and could see all the individual pieces that made up the pile clearly revealed. Nothing alive and writhing had made itself visible against the bleached South American sky. No heavy rats tumbled and squirmed in the air, and neither did anything else.

  Still staring at the wall, he turned over in his mind whether that was a comfort or not. Maybe the truth was that he never really saw the movement in the first place, that the talk of the stevedores had primed him with nervous expectations that his superstitious mind obligingly furnished.

  Or maybe it was a simple trick of the sunlight and the unpredictable movements of the huge crane.

  Fen sighed and turned back over in his bunk to look reluctantly at Mary.

  This was not going to be a lucky voyage. First the girl passenger Cotton had brought aboard, and now the worry about what he thought he had seen. If sleep evaded him much longer he would get up and consult the Saanti. Then he would know.

  The holy Virgin glared at him reproachfully. He would stare at her fixedly for the remainder of his rest period, because regardless of what his logic wanted him to believe, in his heart he knew there had been something moving in that trash. And whatever it was, it was now on board.

  Adjusting the hard hat which was tipping over his eyes, Captain Skinner finished his leisurely perambulation of the long cargo deck, one hand in his pocket and the other holding the thin paper on which the details of the cargo were scrawled. He could see the second officer and the bosun leaning together on the rail, smoking and watching the dock hands mill about aimlessly on the harbour edge below them as they waited for the Lysicrates to go, and he detoured his route to join them. Instantly the bosun stamped out his cigarette and adopted a posture of readiness. The second officer made an upward nod of greeting and continued to stare down at the harbour. Skinner leant beside the officer and smiled past the two men at the lights of the port.

  “Reckon that’s us, Felix.”

  The bosun smiled, nodded and left. Renato Lhoon, the second officer, tapped some ash overboard and looked up at his captain.

  “Chief Officer Cotton?” enquired Skinner into the night air.

  “In cabin.”

  “Ah.”

  The two men watched a cat dart surreptitiously along the edge of a wooden shed, spurred faster by a piece of coal thrown by the bored stevedore waiting to untie the ship. Skinner looked at his wristwatch.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  He smiled again at nothing in particular then left Lhoon to figure out what was required. It didn’t take much figuring. The second officer sighed, flicked his cigarette over the edge, tucked an errant shirt-tail into his neat pants, and walked toward the door of the accommodation block.

  The door opened onto C-deck, the living quarters of the crew’s lower rank, and to advertise the fact, the hand rail outside each cabin sported a motley selection of garments ranging from socks to grimy T-shirts airing in the hot corridor.

  An elevator served the decks from the bridge down nine floors to the propeller shaft in the engine room, but Lhoon decided that to stand and wait for it to chug and shudder to his command from wherever it happened to be, would give every passing cadet and ABS the opportunity to bend his ear on some gripe or other, and frankly right now, with the task of waking Cotton before him, it was the last thing he needed. He climbed the metal stairs without enthusiasm two floors to the officers’ accommodation deck and walked slowly to the door of Cotton’s cabin. As usual he tried the handle first, and as usual it was locked.

  He coughed into his fist, then used it to bang the door twice. There was no reply. He banged again.

  “Matthew? Come on.”

  A groan from within gave strength to the next bout of hammering, which Lhoon kept up relentlessly until he hea
rd the groggy voice again.

  “Fuck off.”

  “We go now, Matthew. Your watch.”

  “Sail the fucker yourself, Renato.”

  Lhoon started to bang with both fists now, and kept it up until the metallic snick of the lock being thrown rewarded his efforts. The small man stopped his assault on the door, turned the handle and entered. The cabin was in darkness save for the orange-and-white light of the deck filtering through the thin porthole curtain, and he flicked the switch behind the cabin door.

  The lights of Matthew Cotton’s cabin revealed that at least tonight Lhoon would not have to dress him. He was lying back on the sofa again, fully clad, his arms across his face as a shield against the sudden glare. As far as the officers’ cabins were concerned, Cotton’s was no different in design. One room with a seating area and coffee table, a bed riveted to the wall and a half-open door leading to a shower room with WC.

  What marked his out as unusual would not be immediately apparent to a casual observer, but to any sailor it was glaringly obvious. Unlike every other cabin on board the ship Matthew Cotton’s was the only one that was completely devoid of family photos. Even the youngest cadets, barely out of school, and the filthy and objectionable donkeyman whose mother would find him hard to love, had photos, framed or otherwise, of sweethearts and family adorning every possible personal space of their quarters. Nothing in Cotton’s cabin revealed anything about who might occupy his most intimate thoughts or longings. Apart from a few piles of clothes and shoes that cluttered the floor, more than a few empty beer cans that filled the wastepaper bin or sat redundantly on the table top, nothing suggested there was any sign of a man living here, that this was a private space in which a man could recreate part of his shore world on board.

  Lhoon stood with his hands on his hips above the recumbent figure and waited. “You want to puke first?”

  Matthew’s voice was muffled behind his arm. “Yeah.”

  Lhoon waited some more, knowing that even the suggestion would spur his senior officer’s guts into action. A moment later Matthew raised himself up from the sofa, stumbled slowly through to the shower room and bent to his work over the sink. The noise made the second officer catch the back of his throat and he swallowed and looked away.

  “I wait or you done?”

  “Done.”

  Matthew ran the tap and stuck his head under it, and after a moment of recovery walked through to join his colleague for the routine escort up to the bridge, and for the duration of the short walk Lhoon let Matthew walk in front, a guard escorting his prisoner to the gallows.

  Apart from the fax machine behind Matthew, droning as the weather report rolled through, and the ghostly, muffled voices on the radio that he had turned down to a dream-like volume, the bridge of the ship was quiet.

  Before him, the hold deck looked almost glamorous, illuminated as it was by pinpricks of white light, and framed by glimpses of the white ocean foam the stern was pushing aside.

  Matthew ran a rough hand over his face and sat down heavily on a chrome stool that wouldn’t have been out of place in a New York bar. They were well clear of port now, and there was nothing to do for the next four hours except stare at the darkness ahead, and drink neat vodka from a china mug that declared “Swinging London” on the side beneath a garish Union Jack.

  He’d planned to be asleep again before the end of the watch, but that didn’t matter, since Renato would come and check on him every twenty minutes and do anything that needed done. But nothing would. He’d pointed the tub for home and that was it.

  This was the worst watch for him, the long hours of darkness, with nothing, no distractions, no human company, no chores or excuses to think, to keep him safe from his own black interior.

  He’d tried reading at first, but his mind wandered after the first two paragraphs, his eyes scanning the meaningless words as other images replaced the ones conjured by the invariably bad authors, and with considerably more impact. So now he just sat and stared. And of course, drank.

  Tonight the vodka bottle was behind the row of chilli pepper plants that Renato grew in plastic pots along the starboard bridge window. It was only habit that made him hide it. Skinner didn’t care and there was little need for deception, but it was an important part of the alcoholic’s ritual to conceal, and ritual was all he had left. He drained his mug, walked to the plants, retrieved the bottle and poured another big one.

  Matthew fingered one of the swelling fruits and smiled at Renato’s dedication. A storeroom below groaning with fruit and vegetables, and yet the man lavished attention on these scrappy plants as though all their lives depended on it. The nurturing instinct. As strong in some men as it is in women. With the thought, a black ulcer threatened to burst in his heart and he turned quickly from the fruits, swallowing his vodka as he walked quickly back to the desk.

  With a shaking hand he fumbled through the folder of paperwork. Something to do was what he needed. He’d pretend to be a first officer. At least until the demons receded. Read about the cargo. That would work. The part of him that was still alive had been intrigued that loose trash was being loaded. It was a cargo he’d never come across. Compacted metal, industrial waste, sure. But domestic loose trash from some city site? Never. It would be interesting to see where it came from and more importantly where it was going.

  Matthew skimmed through the piles of paper recording every on-board banality from crew lists to duplicate galley receipts, but there was nothing. No bill of lading, no sheaves of inspection certificates from the port authorities, no formal company documents with tedious instructions and warnings.

  He found some dog-eared cost and revenue sheets that had been used practically unchanged on the last three trips. They told the company, the shipping federation, the world, that the Lysicrates was going home empty as planned. The ship contained nothing but ballast water. He blinked down at the paper and then stupidly out the window to the silent deck.

  Presumably Skinner hadn’t finished doing whatever he did so privately in his office with all that paper before entering it in the log and the document folder, but it was unusual, and unlike the captain’s usual form, very sloppy.

  You could load anything from custard to cows at Callao if you greased the right palms, and from the eleven voyages he’d made so far with this company, Matthew had decided they were perhaps not amongst the most honourable of traders. Forever trying to dodge regulations they’d even lost a vessel five years ago with all hands, and had despicably argued about compensation to the families of the deceased for as long as they could, even though the insurance company had paid up in full. Shysters and crooks, and naturally the only ones who would employ someone like Cotton after his fall from grace, although Skinner, he admitted reluctantly to himself, had had more to do with his second chance than the avaricious gangsters who owned the ship. But if the company was pulling some kind of a fast one, what in God’s name were they planning to do with the trash when they got to Port Arthur? For a few moments the slow, drunken brain of Matthew Cotton thought about it. He let himself think like a captain again, think about the nature of loose trash, of how it would sit in the hold, how it might shift in weather. Gradually, as his brain cleared more thinking-space, he thought of methane gas building up like a bomb in the sealed holds, and the consequences of that when the hot South American sun hit the deck from dawn and started to bake it like a desert stone. A tiny sliver of rage started to build in his chest. Tiny but insistent. If he could die he’d be dead a thousand times by now. Dying was too desirable, too good for Matthew Cotton. It was a release he didn’t deserve. It wasn’t up to the slimy suited bastards in the Hong Kong offices of a shipping company to change that.

  He glanced at the weather fax again, which he’d already registered indicated nothing but fine weather. Then he picked up the phone and called down to B-deck.

  A deck cadet answered in Filipino.

  “Rapadas. Open all the hatch covers fifteen feet.”

  The m
an didn’t even reply, but several minutes later two men walked lazily into the white light of the deck and started working the hydraulics that would wind open the huge metal doors, slapping each other on the shoulder and continuing some animated conversation as they worked their way along. For a moment Matthew almost felt like an officer in charge. Someone who’d taken a responsible and intelligent action to prevent disaster.

  But the moment was brief. Reality hit him and reminded him he was nothing higher than pond scum. He sank down again and drained his mug. The holds wouldn’t blow. The ship and the crew would be safer now than they were twenty minutes ago.

  Big fucking deal.

  The sun would come up and go down. The earth would turn. Stars in space would die and be born. And nothing he ever did, good or bad for the rest of his life would make him anything other than a piece of shit. Swinging London tipped up and Matthew Cotton’s eyes closed. His free hand made a tight claw on his thigh.

  5

  The fantasies of most ancient cultures almost always included one of walking on water. From Christianity through Mayan domestic legend, even into modern obsessions with surface-bound sports, the defiant, burnished skin of the ocean presents a challenge to man that is considerably deeper than the mere domination of nature.

  As the early morning sun gave the Pacific a pale cream solidity, Esther felt she could run straight off the deck and onto that glittering rugged surface without puncturing it. However, a dull but well-meaning officer on the journey down to Callao had regularly and unbidden furnished Esther with sea-going statistics, and the revelation that the sea along the coast of Peru concealed a trench that was over twenty thousand feet deep had induced in her an immediate vertigo as she thought of the blackness yawning beneath her feet. Gazing out now at the innocent shining surface, she felt that same mix of fear and thrill again at the ocean’s secret.