Torn-missing 4 (14 page)

He realized that he’d heard kids asking those same questions in social studies class practically since kindergarten.

Er, did we have social studies in kindergarten?
he asked himself.
First or second grade, anyway.

Every year, sometimes even before the first week of school was over, somebody would complain, “This is boring! Why do we have to learn about old, dead people, anyhow?”

And that was always the cue for some long, boring lecture from the teacher, who, in the first week of school, still had starry-eyed dreams about Imparting Important Lessons and Opening Minds and Making Kids Care. (By the end of the year the teachers would mostly just grunt, “Because it’s going to be on the test. That’s why.”)

Jonah had never actually paid attention to any of those boring lectures. Now he wished he had.

What if the teachers actually told us exactly how the world would be different if Henry Hudson found the Northwest Passage?
Jonah wondered.

Over by the railing the sailors around Hudson and Prickett were pulling a rope out of the water.

“I told ye it would be deep enough!” Hudson said, with such excitement that his voice carried across the whole deck.

Jonah realized that they were entering the passageway he’d seen from the crow’s nest. Flat, featureless land lay on two sides of the ship.

“Didn’t you say that that river you discovered when you were sailing the
Half Moon
seemed deep enough at the beginning too?” Wydowse asked him.

“This is different,” Hudson said. He put his hand over his heart, as if preparing to swear an oath.

Or maybe he was just holding on to the map in his pocket.

“This time it’s certain,” Prickett agreed. “I believe a toast is in order?”

He and Hudson and King and a few others went back toward Hudson’s cabin.

None of them even glanced at Jonah as they walked by.

“I should follow them,” Katherine said. “I have to hear what they’re saying.”

“Ye-es,” Jonah agreed unhappily.

But what if something happened to her while he was trapped in the stocks and couldn’t do a thing to help?

Jonah watched the door of Hudson’s cabin. He watched the sailors creeping around the deck. He watched the flat land slide by.

Nothing happened.

Maybe shame isn’t the worst part of being punished in the stocks,
he thought.
Maybe you’re just supposed to get so bored that you start saying, “Please! I’ll do anything you want! Just let me out of here!”

But maybe the stocks wouldn’t have seemed so boring to the real John Hudson. Maybe he was used to boredom. Adults in the twenty-first century were always complaining about how Jonah’s generation expected to be entertained all the time, constantly watching TV or hanging out online or listening to iPods.

An iPod would really help right now,
Jonah thought irritably.
All I’ve got is an Elucidator that hasn’t worked since … since …

When was the last time the Elucidator had worked?
Had
that really been JB’s ghostly voice saying
Good job
in the shallop, or had Jonah just imagined it?

Somehow it seemed to matter. What if the last moment that the Elucidator worked was also the last moment that they’d had a chance to get time back on track?

Don’t think like that,
Jonah told himself.

“JB,” he whispered urgently. “Please! Start talking to me again! Tell me what we’re supposed to do!”

No answer. Thinking about the Elucidator had just made Jonah realize that a corner of it was poking into his chest. He tried to shift positions a little, but it was impossible to get comfortable with his neck and wrists trapped in the stocks.

“JB, please!” he whispered again. “If you can get us out of here, now would be a great time for it! Please!”

Too late Jonah realized that Staffe had come to stand nearby. How was Jonah supposed to explain what he’d just said?

“Oh, uh—,” Jonah began.

Staffe cast an anxious glance toward the door of Hudson’s cabin.

“It is good that you be praying,” Staffe said.

“Er—yes,” Jonah said, relieved that Staffe had misunderstood.
Of course he would think of praying before he thought of talking to futuristic time-travel devices.

“God does forgive those who truly repent,” Staffe said.

“I haven’t done anything to repent
for
,” Jonah protested. “I’m being punished unfairly! Falsely accused!”

Staffe regarded him levelly.

“You stole that page from your father’s book,” he said.

“No, I didn’t!” Jonah insisted. “I just … Well, I can’t explain, but—trust me on this one!”

Staffe kept looking directly into Jonah’s eyes.

“I am trying to trust you,” he finally said. “But as you know, this ship is a hard place to see what is right and what is wrong.”

The door of Hudson’s cabin cracked open, and Staffe nervously walked on. A burst of raucous laughter came from the cabin, as the door opened wider. A few more sailors stepped inside, and the door closed again.

Jonah was relieved to see that Katherine had stepped out of the cabin while the door was open. She stomped toward him, shaking her head.

“Remember how I always complained about walking past the boys’ locker room at school, because you guys all stink so bad?” she said. “That’s
nothing
compared with sitting in a tiny room with a bunch of sailors who probably haven’t taken a bath in fourteen months.
And
they’re all
drinking something called aquavit, that makes them belch a lot. Ew, ew, ew!”

She pretended to gag.

“But did you find out anything?” Jonah asked.

“Yeah—Henry Hudson’s got the biggest ego on the planet,” Katherine said. “‘My name shall be written on the tablets of the sea. … My name shall be written on the tablets of the sea’—he must have said that, like, fifty times. And Abacuk Prickett just kept encouraging him: ‘Yes, master, you shall be the most famous sea captain of all time.’ Made me want to turn visible just so I could say, ‘Guess what? Four hundred years from now, schoolkids are just going to get you mixed up with Vasco da Gama on tests. The really stupid ones aren’t going to remember your name even when the question is, ‘Who discovered the Hudson River and the Hudson Bay?’”

Jonah thought maybe he’d done that once.

“But what if that isn’t the question on tests four hundred years from now?” Jonah asked. “What if Second messing up time makes it so the question is always, ‘Which discoverer found the Hudson Passage and changed history forever?’ What if Henry Hudson becomes the explorer that everyone remembers, the way Christopher Columbus is now?”

Katherine stopped her rant.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I—I’m going to go look for
more secret messages and see if we can do anything.”

Before Jonah had a chance to answer, she rushed down the stairs into the hold below.

Maybe Jonah wouldn’t have noticed if he had been able to walk around too. But he could see what Katherine was doing: She was trying to keep moving, trying to keep busy, so she didn’t have time to think about what a mess they were in.

Jonah had nothing but time to think.

I am trying to trust you,
Staffe had said.

My name shall be written on the tablets of the sea,
Hudson had said.

We didn’t know what we were doing,
JB had said. And then, later on,
We made even more mistakes than I thought.

“But you still thought Katherine and I could fix everything, didn’t you?” Jonah muttered. “Don’t you still think that?”

It did no good to talk to JB, when Jonah knew he wasn’t going to answer. Jonah would be better off actually praying, the way Staffe thought he was.

Just then some of the sailors over by the railing let out a shout. One of them scurried toward Hudson’s cabin.

“Sir! Sir! We’ve spotted a savage in one of their odd little vessels—a kayak? What should we do?”

The native came onto the ship.

Jonah thought this was incredibly brave of him—there was only one of him, and more than twenty Englishmen. And surely the native had never seen anything as immense as the ship before.

But the man climbed calmly onto the deck and watched expressionlessly as Hudson advanced toward him.

“I am Henry Hudson, the great sea captain,” Hudson said, tapping his chest.

“Ikau,” the man said, pointing to his own chest, which was covered in a loose-fitting shirt of some sort of lightweight animal skin—seal, perhaps? He also wore matching pants and moccasins.

“Mayhap he’ll have food to trade with us!” one of the sailors near Jonah whispered, a little too loudly. “Fresh-caught fowl or deer or …”

Hudson silenced the whispering sailor with just a glance.

“Know you where this river leads?” Hudson asked. “Does it go all the way to the great sea to the west?”

Ikau said nothing.

“The
river
,” Hudson said, pointing out toward the water, and then moving his hands in a swimming motion, imitating the current.

“Yes, tell me about the river,” Ikau said.

Jonah jerked back, hitting his head against the stocks yet again. He’d understood Ikau! How? How could Ikau possibly be speaking English?

Jonah realized that Hudson and all the other sailors were looking blankly at Ikau. They hadn’t understood a word he’d said.

“Oo-oo-uh-nu-oo,” one of the sailors muttered, imitating the sounds Ikau had made.

Ooooh,
Jonah realized.
He’s not speaking English. He’s speaking whatever language he normally speaks. I just understand because JB gave Katherine and me those translation vaccines. It’s like the way I could understand Algonquin back in 1600. And medieval English back in 1485.

Should he volunteer to translate? How in the world would he possibly explain knowing Ikau’s language?

“We are from England,” Hudson said, speaking distinctly.

Whoa,
Jonah thought.
Even in 1611 people think that if they just speak loud enough and slow enough, foreigners will understand them.

Except, here, the English speakers were the foreigners.

“We are a strong and powerful people, and if you don’t tell us what we want to know, we could kill you, just like that,” Hudson said, snapping his finger.

Ikau blinked at the sudden sound. But when John King pointed a gun at him, he only looked at it with a mildly curious air, the same way he was regarding everything else on the ship.

So he’s never seen a gun before?
Jonah thought.
Should I translate, after all, just so he knows he’s got to be careful?

In a sudden, fluid movement Ikau pulled out a harpoon that he’d been hiding somewhere in his clothes. He pointed it straight at Henry Hudson and looked defiantly at everyone else around him.

Okay, he gets it,
Jonah thought.
No translation needed.

“You will tell me about the river!” Ikau thundered insistently.

Now, that was weird. Ikau lived here, didn’t he? Wouldn’t he already know about the river? Wouldn’t he want the Englishmen to tell him about England, or their ship, or the gun, or stuff like that?

Ikau pulled his harpoon back a bit, as if he thought
the Englishmen might be too frightened of him to reply. Jonah realized suddenly why Ikau wasn’t worried that there was just one of him and more than twenty Englishmen.

He sees how sickly everyone is. He probably thinks he could fight the entire crew and win,
Jonah thought.
And maybe he could, if there wasn’t a gun involved.

“This river was not here!” Ikau said. “It was not here in my father’s time or my father’s father’s time or my father’s father’s father’s time. It was not here the last time I came this way! Who brought it? You? You, with your floating mountain of wood? Or did you just find it this way, like me? Who can carry away rocks and dirt and ice and trees and leave only a crater behind, for the water to fill?”

“What?” Jonah exploded. “What do you mean, the river wasn’t here before?”

Everyone looked at him.

Uh-oh,
Jonah thought.
Did I somehow manage to speak in Ikau’s language by mistake?