A Watery Grave (22 page)

“Since the exercise with the cannon ended.”

Hours,
thought Wiki. He knew that the chant could be repeated for a while, but had never heard of it being kept up for so long. It was a strange rhythm in the night, almost like a distant drum. He felt at a loss to understand it, but then he was distracted by another flash of phosphorescence in the water. The swift glimmer faded, but another two trails appeared, farther off—and then a dozen streaks of icy radiance, moving in wide circles, but coming closer to the gun brig
Porpoise.
Then Wiki glimpsed a black triangle in the midst of one of the bursts of ghostly blue.

He whispered, “Sharks!” Now that he knew what was making the trails of cold fire, he could sense dozens of the predators circling the black mile-wide expanse between the
Porpoise
and the
Vincennes.

“Dear God,” said Erskine. His voice was shaky. He'd seen the same thing.

“Is the Kanaka frightened of them?” he asked. “Is he making a spell to cast them away?”

Wiki shook his head. “In his village the shark is an
'aitu,
a friendly spirit. All sea creatures are good, according to Rotuman lore. They don't believe that any
'atua
—devils—live in the sea.”

“So what is he doing, for God's sake?
Summoning
them?”

Was he? A ghostly shiver chilled Wiki's warm skin. A couple of years ago—on an island in the Gilberts, not Rotuma—he had witnessed a calling of sharks.

The man with the magic to do such a thing was known as the shark-dreamer. For hours, as this fellow sequestered himself in his hut to dream up his sharks, Wiki, in the company of all the grown men of the village, had waited in the shallows of the lagoon. Each islander had had a sharp knife and a small shark-fishing canoe, which was loaded with nothing more than a paddle and a special shark-fishing line. The hook was a twig of the ironwood tree that had been bent and twisted inch by inch as it grew, and then cut, and lashed with a braid made of women's hair to a long, strong sennit rope that looped around the little canoe amidships.

Meanwhile, back in the village, the women and the children had been getting the ovens ready for the feast. The islanders had known without question that the sharks would come, but Wiki himself had not believed a word of it. The air, he remembered, had been utterly still—as still as it was this day. The lagoon had been a perfect turquoise, the sea, beyond the gray bulwark of the reef, a profound and glittering aquamarine. Even the birds had been still and quiet, so that the only sounds had been the ripple of water on the sand, and the quiet conversation of the village men.

Then, with shocking suddenness, the shark-dreamer had burst out of his hut with a horrible yell, and all the men had surged forward into the water with a roar, dragging their canoes behind them. “They come!” they had cried. “They come, they come!”—but Wiki had seen nothing, just the hard glare on the water and the fleeting blue backs of a shoal of mullet.

And then his sight had focused on the gigantic shark that had arrived at the gap in the reef, with a squadron of sharks lined up behind. As he watched, they swarmed through—tigers, their striped, writhing, graceful bodies shockingly beautiful, their evil gape-mouthed heads viciously brutish—and as they invaded the lagoon, the village men, armed just with knives, had dived into the water to fight them in single combat.

There had been method in it, as Wiki remembered. The sharks had charged like bulls, with blind ferocity. Each waiting fisherman had flipped to one side at the last possible instant, shoving the knife along the shark's underside as the predator rushed past. Abruptly the water had been seething with blood and guts, and dead shark carcasses had begun to float up to the surface. Then the men had leapt into their canoes, to lower their shark-fishing lines. The sharks, which were fastened with the twisted ironwood hooks, had been forced to drag the boats along, each one with a man inside, until they had slumped, exhausted. Then the men had dropped overboard again to finish off the great tigers with their knives.

There had been a feast in the village that night, Wiki remembered now, and a great deal of shark meat had been dried for future meals. But had the shark-dreamer summoned them or had the sharks been chasing the mullet?

His mind jerked back to the present. Midshipman Erskine's hand was gripping his arm, his tight fingers bruising. The Rotuman's chant had come to a sudden end, with a long-drawn-out cry of,
“Lok pakura—Hi!”

“What does it mean?” whispered Erskine. He sounded scared.

The words echoed in Wiki's mind, and the hairs rose on the back of his neck. “It means it was a chant for death.”

The Rotuman was perfectly silent now, standing in the bows of the
Porpoise
and staring at the phosphorescent trails as they diminished, faded, and finally dissolved.

Nineteen

No one stopped George Rochester when he ordered a boat to be lowered from the
Vincennes.
No doubt, he thought, everyone expected him to steer for the
Swallow,
but the scuttlebutt was that Wiki was on the
Porpoise
with Erskine, so he ordered his boat's crew to pull that way instead.

Ernest Erskine met him at the gangway, his welcoming smile rather wry. They exchanged chat about the storm, and Rochester boasted about the prowess of his gun crew, while all the time he looked about curiously. The gun brig, while less than a hundred feet long, had a crew of sixty-five; and because the weather was so mild, most of the off-duty watch was on deck, so it was a bustling sight. The watch worked about decks and in the rigging, while the off-duty men sat about reading, sewing, or doing their laundry, while others were catching up on sleep in sheltered corners. Rochester thought that the gun brig had a good feel, the feel of a contented ship.

His old second-in-command had nothing bad to say about the
Porpoise,
either. The gun brig was a fast sailer, he told George, with a responsive helm—she was the fastest ship in the fleet. “Save for the dear
Swallow.
” Like the
Vincennes,
the
Porpoise
had had a poop cabin built for the expedition—though not as large, of course—and this had a stateroom for the sole scientific on board.

“Which scientific?” asked George. He was curious to know the name of the civilian who was thus comfortably accommodated on the
Porpoise,
while the scientifics on the
Vincennes
were so notoriously cramped for space.

“An astronomer,” said Erskine.

“Ah,” said George, remembering that Wiki had told him that Astronomer Burroughs had originally been assigned to the
Porpoise.
“But he's dead,” he objected, also remembering the horrible moment when the astronomer's door had been broken down.

“You mean Burroughs? It's his assistant that has come over in his place. Sorry-looking fellow by the name of Grimes. He's an astronomer-proper now, not an assistant anymore.”

“Great heavens!” said George, impressed with Wilkes's unusual magnanimity. “He's overwhelmed with delight, no doubt.”

“I'll hazard he was even more gratified to get away from Astronomer Stanton,” Erskine remarked unkindly. Like George, he had not enjoyed Tristram Stanton's company on the
Swallow.

“I'm sure you are right, dear fellow,” said George, and went in search of Wiki.

He found him on the fore hatch, squatting in a circle of six Polynesians, playing cards. It was an animated game, with a lot of laughter and scores being kept, but George suspected that it did not involve gambling—because in the Pacific, or so Wiki had informed him, wagers invariably were in the form of pigs, an impossible currency here.

George paused, watching the group with his head tilted and his hands lightly clasped behind his back, ruminating how un-American his friend looked right now and how well he fitted in with this gathering of natives. Wiki was sitting cross-legged, scowling down at his cards so that his fine, black, swooping eyebrows were like horizontal question marks above his flat nose. Like the other Polynesians, he had stripped off his shirt, and his snaky hair hung loose about his shoulders and his broad, smooth, hairless chest. Then Wiki looked up, sensing George's inspection, and his face went triangular with the familiar creases of his grin, crescent-shaped blue eyes sparkling with delight.

“E hoa,”
he exclaimed, and sprang to his feet, dropping his cards.

As usual, they locked forearms instead of shaking hands. “So at last you tracked me down,” Wiki said and smiled.

“I was as impatient as a dog all the time the dear
Swallow
was out of sight.” Then George nodded at the Kanakas, still squabbling happily over the cards, and jibed amiably, “Rejoined the realm of the savages, I see.”

Wiki's grin widened. These Kanakas did look more like canoe paddlers than seamen in the service of the U.S. Navy, he conceded—but that was because they were such seasoned sailors. Traditionally, when a Pacific Islander was first shipped on a big American vessel, he couldn't wait to array himself in western sailor finery, exulting in stiff canvas trousers and shoddy frock shirts. Often, he wore his new outfit to bed. Within a few weeks, though, the glamour wore off, and he would be back to bare feet—and be bare-chested, too, if the officers were prepared to turn a blind eye. It was not unknown for some to revert to draping the traditional
sulu
or
lavalava
about their loins, and it was a rare Polynesian who returned from a jaunt on shore without a wreath of bright flowers about the crown of his hat.

“Where do they come from?” asked George.

“Oh, there're a couple of Hawaiians—a Tahitian—a Samoan,” said Wiki, with a vague wave of his hand. Then he added, “One is a Rotuman,” and led the way to a place abaft of the foremast where they could hunker down against the stacked boats and chat in private.

First came the tale of the Rotuman and the sharks. Now the Rotuman was the most laughing and cheerful of the five card players—but George had learned long ago that though the Pacific Island nature might be dark and moody at times, it always bounced back to being sunny. Next, with ever-increasing alarm, he heard the story of Forsythe and the looming storm. “He left the deck without an officer on watch!” he exclaimed. “Is he mad?” he demanded, bright red in the face. “Thank God you were on board!” The account of the miraculous escape of the boatswain filled him with amazement. Then, with the description of the formal punishment of the two Samoans, at last Wiki silenced.

“He flogged them just because they were speaking Samoan?” George studied the card players again, listening to their loud chatter. They were talking in English, with some Polynesian words thrown in as a kind of punctuation—because they spoke different Polynesian dialects, he supposed, and English was their common language. However, Wiki did not give him a chance to comment, getting down to business by saying briskly, “Well, did you have that talk with Jim Powell? Did he stick to that story about giving the note to Forsythe?”

George paused and then said rather defensively, “I couldn't find him.”

“What!” Wiki frowned, looking annoyed. “But you did go to the sick bay?”

“Not for a while,” George reluctantly admitted. “The storm was looming—there was much to do, and I couldn't get away, not without being asked awkward questions. But as soon as the decks had been cleared of wreckage, rigging fixed, and so forth, I sallied there first chance—and most impolite the surgeon was, too. What a pompous ill-conditioned fellow he is! Rumbled on about the ingratitude of a man he was only trying to save. Said that Powell quit the sick bay the instant everyone's back was turned and was apparently in hiding because no one had clapped eyes on him, despite a general call. So then,” he went on, his tone becoming ingenuous, “I took a few surreptitious peeks in the officers' quarters.”

“The—
what?
But why?”

“I thought he might have sought out a soft bed in preference to a hammock in the dank confines of the orlop. When I was a junior mid, I had a running battle with the second lieutenant,” Rochester confided. “He was a stickler, I assure you! I was always finding cozy planks in quiet corners to snooze away my watch at night, and he always tracked me down and beat me. But as a kind of bet, he promised not to beat me if he ever didn't manage to find me before the end of the watch was rung. He must've been a sleepy shirker himself in his youth because he was an amazing dab hand at finding out where I'd hid myself, and so I got beating after blessed beating—but then I had a famous inspiration. He hunted here, and he hunted there, but the bell rang, and so he was forced to give up. When he went to his quarters for his watch below himself, he finally found me—curled up fast asleep on his own settee.”

“And did he beat you?” Wiki inquired, with a distinct air of fraying patience.

“Of course not, dear chap! The second lieutenant might've been a beast, but he was also a gentleman of his word.”

“Well, he should have,” said Wiki flatly. “So did you find Powell's messmates to quiz them about his whereabouts?”

“I certainly did,” Rochester assured him earnestly. “Though it was confoundedly difficult to find 'em. There are two hundred men on board that ship—sixteen messes, and he could've belonged to any one of 'em!”

Wiki frowned, reminded of how little he knew about daily life on a navy warship. All his experience had been on whalers and traders, and the only messrooms he knew were saloons like the one on the
Swallow,
which were the province of officers and passengers, the ordinary sailors eating in the forecastle or on the foredeck. He had supposed that navy men perched on their sea chests in just the same way, but now he wondered if they owned any, perhaps they had kitbags instead.