The Mermaid's Child (17 page)

But the sight that met my eyes, once my vision had come clear, was not the brig of the
Sally Ann
, nor even steerage, and now I came to think about it why would I be dry, and covered, and, I noticed, wearing someone else's (someone much bigger than me's) shirt, if I was back on the slave ship and in danger of my life? McMichaels was hardly going to make sure I was warm and comfortable before he had me flayed to ribbons,
before he had me keel-hauled. And of course, I remembered, he was in no position to come looking for me: there wouldn't be anyone on board the
Sally Ann
who would have the slightest interest in coming after me by now. Either they'd have far more pressing concerns of their own, or they'd be dead.

I had been lying on a table. My head had been pillowed on a book, and around me on the tabletop were towers and ziggurats of books, marking out the space where I had lain. I pushed back the coverlet and eased aside an unsteady stack of volumes to swing my legs round over the edge. Every muscle ached, was stiff with exhaustion. I was at once nauseous, hungry and desperately thirsty. Where was I, I wondered; what was this place?

The room was high and long and dim; it bellied outwards at the sides, tapered into shadow at the ends. I noticed that there were doors let into the end walls, and narrow windows let into the sides, but apart from these slight interruptions, every inch of the place was covered with books. Bookshelves lined the walls. There were books piled on the floor, books heaped onto the seats of chairs; books had been shifted aside for me to lie down, by the looks of it more must have been placed around me as I'd slept.

And I was below the waterline. Blue-green brine pressed against the portholes, supplying a gentle underwater light; from higher up sunlight shafted through the windows, catching the aimless drift of dustmotes, marking out trapezoids on the floor. A pair of wheeled ladders rolled gently to and fro along the shelves with the motion of the ship.

I slid off the table and landed barefoot on something soft. There was a carpet beneath my feet, patterned with a faded intricate design in red and green and blue. I had never trodden on a carpet before. I spread my hard-skinned toes into
the pile. I couldn't feel much at all. The shirt hung around me in loose folds. It was thin with age. The cuffs hung down long over my hands; they were frayed at the edges and none too clean. I reached behind me for the coverlet and wrapped it round my shoulders. The movement released a miasma of dust which caught in my throat, making me cough. And once I'd started coughing I found I couldn't stop. I must have inhaled a bucketload, a bathful of seawater; it now came ratcheting back up from my lungs. I crumpled in on myself, spluttering, one hand to the table for support, the other cupped over my mouth.

“Ssssshhhht.”

There were hands underneath my arms. I was guided across the room, books were shifted and I was seated on a chair. The coughing subsided, leaving me feeling breathless and raw. I wiped my face with a sleeve, blinked away the wetness from my eyes, looked up.

The man seemed very old. His face was on a level with mine: underneath bristling grey brows his eyes were pale; his mouth looked blurred around the edges. There were crumbs of eggyolk and clots of what looked like gravy clinging to his moustache and beard, and streals of something similar down the front of his long garment. His sleeves hung low over coldlooking, freckled hands. Not a sailor, manifestly. But not like anyone I'd known in the dry either. I blinked, opened my mouth. He brought a long and dusty finger to his lips.

“Ssssshhhht,” he said again.

I was about to ask why, but as my lips parted there was another, more furious repeat of the shushing, accompanied this time by a shower of spit. He turned and moved away, but didn't straighten up. His back was so bent that his neck and shoulders were almost parallel to the floor, though he held his
head up to peer ahead. That's why, though I was seated, we'd been face to face. I watched as he picked his way across the book-strewn floor. Like a heron, I thought; hunched, wild-eyebrowed, intent.

I sat there, wiping away the spray of spit from my face with a knuckle, tugging the coverlet tighter round me. I was itching to call out after him, to ask him his name, how I'd ended up here, and what kind of ship this was, but it would obviously get me nowhere. I watched him reach the far end of the room and dissolve into the shadows. It seemed to be his natural habitat: camouflaged as a peppered moth against a lichened tree, his dark vestments and straggling hair faded entirely out of sight.

I swung my legs, glanced round the room again, then looked back towards him. Though the room had seemed empty when I'd woken, he must have been there all the time. I spent a moment or two half-heartedly trying to pick him out, but soon lost patience. He was invisible, uncommunicative, and apparently busy, and as I was patently not going to be getting any information from that quarter, and could not sit there swinging my legs indefinitely, I slid off the chair and walked over to the bookshelves. The books were obviously significant: after all, from the shape of the room it was clear that it took up the majority of the vessel's tonnage. They must be the ship's main cargo.

They were of many different colours, rich and soft and deep. Burgundies, purples, blues, browns and greens. I ran my fingertips down their spines, traced the letters embossed there in gold and black: I recognized the individual marks, and here or there could put them together to make up a word, occasionally a phrase:
the book of
something, I read, and
the life of
somebody, and someone else's
thoughts
. I found myself
wondering if I was still contained within the schoolroom map, bobbing around on the green waves near the corner of the frame, or if I had by now slipped underneath the wooden rim and was off somewhere across the bulging plaster of the schoolroom wall.

A sigh issued from the far end of the shelves. I turned to watch the old man shuffle from the shadows. He came to one of the stepladders and hitched his skirts up for the climb. I caught a glimpse of thin and hairy ankles, of greying canvas slippers. There were three or four books tucked beneath his arm. As he climbed, the ladder rolled along the shelves with the motion of the ship. Unperturbed, he slotted the books into their places as he rolled past. The ladder stopped, then slid back towards its original position, and he climbed carefully down to alight just at the point he had got on. He shambled back into his corner, leaving the stepladder to roll back and forth on its own. He didn't even glance my way. I was obviously not of any particular interest to him: he wouldn't notice if I left. And I had to find out what was going on. I headed aft, towards the door set into the bulkhead. As I moved, every joint, from neck to ankle, seemed to grate as if it had been dusted with fine sand.

I pushed my way through the door. It fell shut behind me. In front of me there was another door, to my right a steep staircase. What little light there was came from above, spilling itself down over the stair-treads like milk. An opening onto deck, I thought: otherwise, the stairwell was quite windowless. I was in no rush to climb the stairs. Instead I tried the doorhandle.

A little light came in through a porthole, alternately white and green as the vessel pitched. The cabin was plain and spare: a slung cot, a trunk, two or three piles of books, some crates
and boxes piled up in the corner. One of the boxes had been opened: scrolled manuscripts and sheaves of paper strayed across the floor, slithering and rolling with the ocean swell. I stooped, picked up a sheet, held it to the light. Line upon line of tiny spidery writing crossing the page without a break. The same hand filled the margins at right angles to the main text, the writing even more crabbed and compressed. I released my hold upon the paper, watched as it descended, in abbreviated arcs, towards the floor. It landed near the others, immediately rejoined their drift back and forth across the boards. I went back out into the stairwell, pulled the door shut behind me, and began the climb.

Daylight and a cool fresh breeze, the blood singing in my ears, my breath harsh in my throat. We must be way past the tropic. How long then, I wondered, had I been unconscious? How far, for that matter, had I swam? I glanced up, my neck stiff and creaking: the sun was to my right, and it felt like afternoon, so perhaps we were headed south, but I couldn't be sure. I felt the wind tugging at my coverlet. My legs bristled with goosepimples, hair blew into my eyes. I wrapped the cover tighter round me. That deep, flesh-shifting shiver rippled through me again. I looked the length and breadth of the ship. She wasn't big: nothing like the size of the
Sally Ann
. A lightweight, shorthaul, coastal vessel. For day-tripping, I thought, for summer jaunts: I wondered where we were headed.

I leaned upon the railing, scanned the horizon for other ships, for land. Nothing. Just the cool slate-grey ocean stretching as far as I could see. So if we were heading south, we were cruising at some distance from the coast. The major trade, if I remembered right, was a kind of leaf, sometimes dried, sometimes refined to powder. Useful stuff to a captain
with an exhausted crew. Crumbled into a sailor's tobacco, it could keep him up and awake and working for days, have him scrambling up the main topgallant shroud in a hurricane without a moment's misgiving. Which was why, when bad weather was approaching, sailors would sniff suspiciously at their tobacco, watch each other for the first signs. It was dangerous to feel invincible on board ship. Sometimes the only thing that kept you alive was a keen sense of your mortality.

No bad weather approaching for the time being, though, as far as I could tell. A following wind, no squalls, no storm-clouds massing. The common creak and strain of shipsounds, but otherwise silence. No calls or shouted orders. No human sounds at all, I realized. I looked round: no one at the helm. I turned to glance up, caught sight of the bare rigging, of ropes flapping loose and untrained in the wind, of tattered shreds of rotten canvas, and I knew that we were drifting.

I had a sailor's instinctive horror of being left adrift. It went against everything I had become. I was on the verge of running down to him and demanding that he tell me what was going on, when a noise caught my attention, a soft burbling coming from somewhere nearby. A familiar backyard sound that brought with it instantly the smell of blackcurrant bushes and the texture of dried earth between my fingertips.

The ship's boat was just beside me. Inside, a dozen bantam hens were nesting, crooning, tucked into straw between the boat's ribs. The cockerel flapped his wings at me and clambered onto a rowlock. I realized suddenly that I was ravenous. I had no idea when it was that I'd last eaten. I decided I would reach under one of the broodier-looking birds and tug out a still-warm egg to suck. I stretched out a hand; the chickens began to caw and flutter, the cockerel cocked his head and glared at me with a button eye. I dropped my arm back to my
side, turned and walked away, leaving the bantams to settle back to their contemplative maternity.

I could not, I realized, go below and accost him, could not demand to know why we were drifting, just to satisfy another, less vital, impulse on my part. Having been rescued, it was not my place to question the manner of my rescue. I would find out what was going on soon enough, I told myself. In the meantime, I went looking for the galley.

Dark came slowly, creeping up on the ship like a child playing tin-can-lurky. I descended the stairs carrying a platter of cheese, sausage, greyish bread and a handful of soft pickles. On the edge of the platter I had balanced a jug and two cups. In the galley I'd found a strange contraption of pipes and vessels that bubbled and hissed, heated by a little flame. A jug stood underneath, filling slowly as water dripped from the mouth of a canister. I'd lifted the jug, sniffed it, then held it to my lips and drank. Clean, unbrackish water, about a pint of it, but not nearly enough to still my thirst. I found a cask of beer that had been broached and drew off about a quart, then gulped it down without thinking twice. The beer went straight to my head, giving everything a pleasant fuzz. I decided then that I would take supper down to the old man. We'd eat together, we'd have a few cups of beer, we'd get to know each other, and then I'd ask him what the hell was going on.

Platter in hand, I came to the bottom of the stairs, knocked the door open with a foot, and stepped over the threshold.

The old man was sitting at the table. He had been reading. Hearing me come in, he looked up, frowned, closed over the book and pushed back his chair.

“No food or drink,” he hissed, stalking over towards me.
His voice rose as he came nearer the door. “Rule number two. No food or drink.” He took the platter from my hands, swept past me and out through the door. “No respect these days,” I heard him mutter, “No respect for the rules.”

I followed him into the stairwell: he was flying up the stairs, his skirts flapping. I climbed after him, back onto the deck. He was heading forward, to the galley. I was surprised to find he could move so fast. When I came to the galley door, he'd placed the platter on the table, crossed over to the water-purifier and was peering into the empty jug. He glanced up at me. I looked straight back.

He sat down at the table and began to eat. I pulled back a bench and sat down opposite him. He looked up at me through his eyebrows, continued chewing. I reached out and took a piece of bread, peeled off the crust, and was just formulating my first question, when he spoke.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

What am
I
doing here? I wanted to say. What are
you
doing here, and where is here, and what the hell is going on? But when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I'd forgotten. Somehow it had slipped my mind that I could no longer talk. I hadn't needed to, for so long. The last words I'd said were “I loved you,” and it seemed that it was someone else who had spoken them.