Island of Icarus (7 page)

I woke to the soft light of dawn and a sense that something was amiss. Rain still pattered lightly against the roof. Marcus’s familiar warmth was gone from behind me. I rolled over and found no sign of him save a disturbance in the linens where his body had been.

As I took my clothing from the chair and donned it, I noted that Marcus’s boots were missing from their usual spot under the bench. Marcus himself was neither in the room, nor the living space, nor his study. I knew, inexplicably, that I would not find him in his workshop, either. A brief trip into the rain confirmed my suspicion. The wings remained folded on the workshop table as they had been for days, untouched.

As I stood hunched under the roof of the open workshop, a flurry of rain gusted in with the wind. It was a pushing, snatching wind that battered the roof and shook the trees. Of last night’s storm, it alone persisted in strength. The thunder had abandoned it and the rain had slackened to a tired drizzle. But the wind was enough to tumble a grown man to the ground, and was without question responsible for the felled branches, scattered brush, and toppled trees that littered the ground. It was just the sort of wind, no doubt, that had swept me onto this island to begin with.

I knew with certainty where I would find Marcus—on the beach, searching for salvage carried in by the storm. I staggered through the wind and rain toward the beach, driven by an unsettled feeling that gripped my stomach and pulled me on.

The sunlight that glowed through the clouds was diffuse and grey, lighting the beach like gaslight. Monstrous waves crashed over the surf, pounded onto the beach, and spread hungrily over the sand. Debris littered the beach. Much of it was windswept foliage from the island. I traced my way through a scattered maze of leaf bunches and tree limbs, scanning the coast for Marcus.

I spied a large, dark shape heaving at the edge of the surf. As I approached, it resolved itself into a wooden board, apparently splintered from a ship. That was not all there was. I saw hand-sized chunks of wood, whole planks, and—farther down the shore—large, dark structures that may have been the remains of the ship itself.

Fear clenched my belly, for certainly, Marcus was among these, searching for loot. My feet began to move quicker all on their own, leading me toward the broken shapes. I called Marcus’s name as I went.

I came upon one of the ship’s masts, which leaned dangerously and was still attached to a broken piece of decking. A scattering of white barnacles freckled the base and the deck wood, which was dark—darker than it should have been, even under the dismal grey light of the morning. Distracted as I was with finding Marcus, I could not put my finger on why this struck me as odd.

“Marcus!” I called, and barely had time to dance back as a breaker crashed against the shore, setting the mast to bobbing. I heard the crack of wet wood, and I knew the thing would not remain upright much longer. Suppose I walked up to it at the wrong moment, and a sudden wave swept it down over me? Or, more likely, what if it had happened to Marcus?

I jogged along the shore, glancing through the wreckage, urgent now with worry. There, yards out from the surf, bobbed what seemed to be a section of the ship. Without a thought, I doffed my clothing and waded into dark water. The light rain fell upon my naked shoulders. Underneath my feet, the sandy bottom shifted with every swell of the ocean water.

Perhaps I was just touched in the head, but I would like to think that it was some deep and urgent intuition that drove me to swim to that section of ship in the water, risking the violent waves and the immersion of my clockwork arm.

“Marcus!” I cried as I reached the piece of wreckage, paddling to keep abreast of a wave. At first, I heard nothing save the sounds of the ocean, but then I heard what could have been a voice, muffled and strained.

The next wave carried me right up to the floating wreck, and I clung to it. The cry of a human, though brief, was unmistakable now. I heaved upward at the edge of the structure with both arms—with no leverage save my treading legs—until it lifted from the surface.

Through the grey and the shadows and the roil of moving water, I almost missed him at first: Marcus, trapped underneath a cage of rotting wood, coughing and sucking at the air. I called his name, in fear and in relief. Then, the next wave swept me sidewise, and the wreck came rolling down over him again. Ocean water swelled over me and filled my mouth and nostrils.

I resurfaced with a gasp to find the wreck almost atop me. I caught its edge with my hands only a moment before it overwhelmed me, and was dragged along with it. I believe that only the mechanical strength of my prosthetic arm saved me from being sucked underneath as Marcus had. When the next wave pulled the wreck in the opposite direction, I kicked my legs and pushed at it with a surge of force. It toppled over, and then there was Marcus, thrashing in the water.

I hooked my left arm around his and pulled him through the waves to the shore, then dragged him high onto the beach where the spreading water did not reach. We left a trail of blood behind us, a dark and snaking thing through the sand. I fell onto my knees beside him and held him up as he coughed spastically in my arms. There was so much blood pouring down his left side that I could not tell where it came from, his arm or his side. He choked, doubled over, and wretched into the sand. He cried out like a wounded thing and rocked back, clutching his bloodied arm.

He looked down at his arm and held it out at an angle, clutching the fist. Rain dropped onto the blood, diluting it and also revealing the long gash on the forearm. He touched his hand to his left collarbone. “Clavicle…broken,” he said in a strained voice, and from the way he blanched, I worried that he would pass out there on the sand. The rain fell across us in rippling sheets, heavier now. My wet clothes clung to me, and the wind dashed right through them. I did not fancy carrying him back to the cabin.

“You’ll have to stand. I can help you walk, but we can’t stay here,” I said. I pulled my shirt off and bound it around the arm tightly.

“Yes,” he agreed, teeth clattering. “Hypothermia…in tropics. Who…would have…thought?” He attempted a smile, but it twisted into a grimace.

Thankfully it was his clavicle that was broken, not his legs. With my arms supporting him, he stood and began to walk, haltingly. We went slowly, while I braced us against the changing wind and navigated through the beach debris. It was easier to walk once we had reached the trees, for they buffered the worst of the wind.

“And now we are even,” he said once we had reached the cabin, gracing me with a wan smile before collapsing onto the ground near the stove.

I swiftly loaded wood into the stove and began a fire. As it warmed the room, I stripped Marcus there on the floor. He was pale and shivering, but conscious. Though blood had soaked through the makeshift bandage, it seemed to have stopped flowing. I dared not move him from the stove’s heat until he had dried and was warm, but I was otherwise unsure of what to do with him, as I hadn’t an ounce of medical knowledge.

He stirred, looked down at his arm, and touched his fingertips to his left collarbone. He looked at me and said, “You’ve immersed your arm.”

“A good thing I did,” I said.

One corner of his mouth twitched upward. He said, “Fill that bucket by the stove and bring it here. There is a rain barrel outside. While you are there, dip your arm into the barrel to wash the salt from it.”

I hesitated, then did as he said. When I returned, he directed me to place the water in a kettle on the stove, gather clean rags, and find a bottle of brandy. He also had me fetch a small patent leather bag and bring it to his side. The water was boiling by that time, and warmth had suffused the room. Color returned to Marcus’s face. He had picked the bandage from his arm and was regarding the angry gash that ran from his wrist to his elbow. He said, “It will need stitches. Have you any experience with a needle and thread?”

I said, “No. I’ve a housekeeper for that sort of thing. You don’t mean for me to…” I swallowed and could not finish the sentence, for the thought of sewing his flesh made me green.

He gave me a look of wry humor. He said, “It’s easy, really. I will talk you through it. First, take the needle and the catgut from the bag.”

Swallowing back a wave of nausea, I took the needle and thread as he said and laid them on a clean rag on the floor beside him. He then directed me to boil the needle, wet a rag with water from the kettle, and uncork the brandy. When the rag had cooled but was still steaming, I washed the gore from his arm, then tipped a generous splash of brandy over the laceration.

“Good,” he said, grimacing, and took a shot from the brandy bottle for himself. “Now, thread the catgut through the needle.”

I held the end of the thread awkwardly between one mechanical thumb and forefinger. My hands trembled so fiercely that I could not fit the catgut thread through the eyehole. Marcus looked at me with dry humor and said, “Go on, you’ll never get anywhere like that. Take a drink of this.” He offered me the brandy, and I took a burning gulp of it. Its warmth spread through my limbs and steadied me. Soon, I’d threaded the needle. I looked on with dread, waiting for his next directions.

He eyed me and asked, “Are you ready?”

“Never.”

This teased a genuine smile from him. He took the last of the clean rags and placed one of its rolled edges between his molars. Then, at the far end of the laceration, he pinched the two edges together. He said, “Here now. Pull the needle and thread clean through one edge before you pierce the other.”

My mouth had gone dry. “I am not sure I can do this with the prosthetic,” I said. “I haven’t really done any detailed tasks like this since the accident…”

He shook his head. “You can.
I
have faith in my own work.” There was an edge of teasing in his voice. “Go on, then. Start with one edge.”

I did. Piercing the skin was beastly business. Marcus clenched his jaw around the rag and breathed roughly as I worked. When I had both edges of the wound on the thread, I pulled them tight until they were puckered together. Cold beads of sweat pimpled my forehead, and the color had drained from Marcus’s face once again. We repeated the pinch-pierce-pull-pierce-pull process at least a dozen more times, until the entire length of the wound was closed. After the last stitch, I sat back heavily, light-headed from drink or queasiness, though I was not certain which.

“You did well,” he said, removing the rag from his mouth. He took another drink of the brandy. “Unfortunately, there is more.”

Thankfully, “more” did not involve any further stitching. We dressed his wound with honey and a linen bandage, and then he explored his left collarbone with careful fingers. “It’s fractured, but not broken,” he concluded with gruff relief. “You’ll have to bind it for me and fashion a sling for this arm.”

I wrapped his shoulder tightly, arranged his arm in a loop of linen, then helped him to the bed. Salt still filmed our skin, but we hardly cared. I detached my prosthetic and left it near the stove to dry, then sat on the floor with my back against the bed. Marcus rested his good hand in my hair. At length, I asked, “What were you doing out there?”

He paused long enough before responding that I thought he had fallen asleep. He said, “Being foolish.”

“Hm.” I shook my head. A sudden thought struck me. “Were there no bodies?”

“No. It wasn’t a fresh shipwreck. From the looks of it, it must have been something the storm tore up from the bottom. It may have sitting in the reef for months or years.” He combed his fingers through my hair idly. He asked, “What would I have done without you?”

I could find no words to describe the depth of the terror that had seized me when I thought I might lose him, so I simply took his hand and kissed it tenderly.

The next morning, I found Marcus fixing tea at the stove. A freshly-drawn bucket of water sat at his heel.

“Just what do you think you are doing?” I asked. “You need to be in bed!”

“What I am doing is fixing tea. You were asleep and I was up. Good morning to you, too,” he responded mildly. And then he cracked an egg over a skillet on the stove.

“Where did you get those?” I asked, noticing the basket of eggs. He did not say anything, only met my eyes over his shoulder briefly with an unapologetic grin on his lips. I frowned. “You belong in Bedlam.”

“First it’s bed, then it’s Bedlam?” he asked, his back to me as he attended his sizzling egg. “In which do I belong?”

“Both!” I cried. “In bed, in Bedlam! But since we haven’t a way to get you to Bedlam, you ought to simply be in bed.”

“In bed, like an infirm!” He waved me off with his good hand, and in doing so, he jostled his injured arm. He winced.

“See!” I said. “You belong in bed so that collarbone heals correctly!”

“Nonsense,” he said, giving the egg one last stir before setting aside the fork and depositing it on a plate. “I’m a doctor. I know my limits.” He smiled at me. “Come on, then. Have some breakfast.” Then, he kissed my lips—a simple but effective way to quiet me.

The next week was a nerve-wracking one, for Marcus found every excuse and opportunity to remain active, and I was kept busy following him. I barely had time for my own thoughts, much less thoughts of London. Foraging, rabbit hunting, hiking, cooking, moving stacks of books—I could hardly keep up. However, in all of his puttering, I noticed that Marcus did not care to touch or discuss his wings. It was almost as if the project simply had never existed.

Finally one night I could take Marcus’s fidgeting no longer. He had spent the last three hours reorganizing and reshelving the entire book collection in his study, and had just begun to pull the books of one shelf out again. I said, “Why don’t you spend some of that energy on your wings? You haven’t touched them for an eternity!”

He winced and sat back, placing aside the book he had just pulled out. He said, “I wish it was that easy, but I am stuck. I haven’t a clue what I should do next. The wings will not fly yet, but I don’t know why. I’m missing something, but I don’t know what.”

“Wait,” I said. “Have you tried flying the things?”

“Well, no. How can I fly them if they can’t fly?”

“That’s lunacy!” I cried. “How do you know it can’t fly if you have never tested it?”

“Because they simply won’t be able to. They haven’t the proper structural integrity. The wings would collapse in the air.”

“Show me,” I said, sure that the only cure for his endless fidgeting was work on his project.

He seemed as if he would protest, but then got to his feet and led me to the workshop. We stood staring at the complicated leather, wood, and metal apparatus in silence. I hadn’t the faintest clue what was what or what did what, and I began to wonder what I had planned to accomplish by directing us out here in the first place. So, with nowhere else to start, I asked, “How does it work?”

“Well,” he began. “The struts here are like the bones of a bird’s wings. They’re jointed here, and unfold quite like real pinions. The feathers here are adjustable. Remember what I told you about air speed. There’s a tail back there to steer. The harness, to hold the wings to the body. It’s supported by a brace that fits to the back. The controls are here. These for the hands control the wings. Those for the foot control the tail.”

“Have you decided how to power it?” I asked. “Is that what you mean when you say it won’t fly?”

“No, I’ve solved that problem. I’ve finished the clockwork motor, the design of which is similar to your arm. I believe it will work well. It will rewind itself as the body moves naturally, so if piloted correctly, the wings can theoretically stay aloft…well, indefinitely.”

I was confused. “So, what is the issue, then?”

“Here,” he said, lifting at part of the harness. “The wings themselves are quite heavy. Given that they are fully jointed, they aren’t well supported when extended. They would collapse in the air.” In attempting to extend one of the wings as illustration, he upset the entire machine’s balance and it tipped over on the table. The wing slipped from his grasp, sending a jolt to his injured arm. He winced and placed his hand over his shoulder.

I sighed. “Do you see? Your arm doesn’t have the support of your clavicle. You shouldn’t be lifting things, even with your good arm.”

He paused, then looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What did you just say?”

“Your clavicle is broken, so you haven’t the full support of your shoulder girdle. You’re a doctor. You should be familiar with this.”

He stared at me for a very long moment, then looked back at the wings and ran a hand over the length of one brass strut. “Of course,” he said, almost absently. “You’re right, I should have thought of this myself…” He looked up at me with bright eyes and said, “Jon, you are a genius.”

“Forgive me, but I’m confused,” I said.

“Birds. Remember, birds have the support of fused clavicles—called a furcula, or wishbone—to help support their wings in flight. That is the thing I am missing. A furcula. A proper shoulder girdle for the wings. So very, very simple!” In his excitement, he grabbed me by the back of the neck and planted a hard, fast kiss on my mouth that left me reeling. “You’re a genius!”

“Pace yourself, now,” I said, wondering suddenly if this had been a good idea at all. “You can’t go building anything now because of that arm.”

“Oh, I need to design the thing first, so you needn’t worry. Besides, I have other things to occupy me while I wait.”

“Oh?” I asked, heart sinking somewhat at the prospect of Marcus spending another week of long days and late nights flipping through books and rendering plans.

“Quite,” said Marcus, approaching me with a sly grin. “I still have
one
good hand, after all, and there are a variety of terrible, wonderful things I can do with it. Like,” he said, unbuttoning my trousers with one hand and slipping his hand down to cup me, “this.”

My cock responded instantly. I swallowed and said, “I feel morally obligated to object.”

“Then don’t,” he said against my lips.