Airborn (24 page)

More and more men and women were filing into the lodge, and there were a good many celebratory whoops and clinking of mugs. It seemed a merry time was going to be had tonight, which suited me just fine. It would be all the easier to sneak away from pirates sunk in a drunken sleep.

Just then Szpirglas returned, jogging into the village amid a general cheer from his men.

“Another successful mission for the Sky Guard, ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted grandly, to more applause. “And look, we’ve just discovered these two castaways who had the courage to make it ashore after their ship was wrecked.”

He leaped up the steps to join us, as if he’d long been anticipating this meeting with the utmost glee.

“There you are,” he said, sitting down. “Mr. Crumlin, have you offered them some refreshments?”

Crumlin forced that grimace onto his face. “Where are my manners,” he muttered. “What shall I get for you?”

“Fresh mango juice, I think,” said Szpirglas. “To wet their parched tongues,” he added, and I thought I saw Crumlin suppress a smirk.

“Very good, sir,” he said and went off inside the lodge.

“Now, tell me everything,” said Szpirglas.

“We’d given up hope, hadn’t we?” I said to Kate. “And right here on the island, a Sky Guard station!”

Szpirglas smiled, but it was just a mouth smile. His eyes were cold and concentrated, and I knew my storytelling powers were about to be sorely tested.

“What was your vessel?” he asked.

“
Pegasus
, sir. She was an eighty-footer, twin engine, G class. She was mostly for cargo and private charter. Eight crew under Captain Blackrock, and only two passengers. We were two nights out of Van Diemen’s Land, heading northeasterly for Honolulu.”

I did not know how carefully these pirates monitored air traffic over Oceanica. For all I knew they could have flight plans of every ship within a thousand miles—how else how could they pinpoint their prey so accurately? But a small vessel could more easily slip through the cracks. It would not raise any suspicion, or so I hoped. My answer seemed to satisfy him.

“And you say the typhoon brought you down.”

I watched him as I spoke, alive to every movement of his face, every blink, every lift of his eyebrows and twitch of his mouth. The typhoon was unquestionable; it had been real and would have posed a grievous threat to any small vessel caught in its bellows.

“The winds must have damaged one of our props. We were having engine trouble, sir, and losing altitude. We were leveled off at ninety feet only, but we might have been all right if it hadn’t been for the wave. It was one of them rogues, sir, a big cliff of water from nowhere, working against the wind, and it came and clipped us as it crested. Knocked off our engines, our fins, and sent us spinning down.”

“God in heaven,” said Szpirglas, all amazement and sympathy. “It is surely an airshipman’s worst nightmare. I’m amazed anyone survived. Did you have time to make a distress call?”

“I was not on the bridge, sir. I don’t know. But I would doubt it. It all happened so quickly.”

I knew what he wanted to discover. If we’d sent a distress call, and it had been heard, there might be a search under way. And a search might come close to his island kingdom. I didn’t want him to think we were bringing danger to him.

Crumlin returned and put two mugs of mango juice before us. For Szpirglas there was a crystal glass of ruby wine. I drank, for I was truly thirsty. It was a sweet concoction, but cool and refreshing. I drained the mug nearly to the bottom in one breath and broke away, panting more than I needed to.

“You must be parched,” said Szpirglas. “Poor lad.”

He did not recognize us, of that I was quite certain now. I’d been watching him as he watched me, and could see no flicker in his face. A huge relief it was, for if he remembered us, all was instantly lost.

“Are you sure you were the only two to survive?” Szpirglas asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We were all tumbled around terribly. It seemed to happen all in a trice.”

Like any game of pretend, you had to half-believe it to play properly. All I had to do was remember my fears as the
Aurora
had come close to crashing in the sea. “We hit the water, and I must have lost consciousness for a few moments. The ship was already starting to fill. It was only by chance I came across Miss Simpkins here.”

It was not a good choice of name, but it just fluttered into my head, and I seized it. Kate did not even flicker. Through all my talking she’d dutifully hung her head, and her face had a crumpled look—which was not hard to fake right now. Kate was born to this kind of playacting, probably came from all her reading and fanciful stories. I could have handed the whole thing over to her and had a nap.

“We got out only just in time,” I said.

“If it weren’t for Mr. Cruse here, I’d surely have perished,” said Kate. She said it with such gratitude and conviction that I wasn’t angry she’d spoken out. I’d wanted to do all the talking, so we didn’t start contradicting each other, but I’d doubted she’d be able to stay quiet so long and let me hog all the story spinning. I supposed it didn’t matter she’d used my real name. It meant nothing to the pirates.

“You had a lifeboat of some kind, surely,” Szpirglas asked.

“No, sir, there wasn’t any time to deploy them. We just cracked into the drink and scrambled up onto a bit of busted hull that was like a kind of raft, and we clung to that. We didn’t see anyone else.”

At this Kate covered her face with her hands. She didn’t sob; she just shivered and made a kind of whimpering sound.

“Her mother was aboard too,” I explained to Szpirglas. “She was our other passenger.”

“You poor thing,” said Szpirglas. “Well, it’s too early to give up hope, Miss Simpkins.”

“Do you think?” Kate asked, staring at the table and lifting her big eyes slowly. “Might she still be alive?”

“We will do all we can to find out,” said Szpirglas in soothing tones. “This region isn’t very well charted, but there are countless little coral atolls dotting the ocean. It’s possible, yes, that she might be safe and sound somewhere else, just awaiting rescue. As soon as our ship is refueled and my men fed and rested, and we have a day’s light ahead of us, we will set a search in motion.”

Kate beamed at him with such sincerity that I was momentarily confused.

“Thank you,” she said.

It took me a moment to puzzle it out, why Szpirglas was being so kind to us. Why did he bother wasting his time on this game? Then I understood. He wanted us to relax; he wanted us to feel safe and content; he wanted to know everything we knew, in the hopes of gaining something from us. It wasn’t simply a matter of him finding out if there would be others searching for us. Maybe he also wanted to know what our ship was carrying, if there was any precious wreckage that might have washed ashore.

“You have no idea where you are, then?”

I knew I must be very careful here. I did not want Szpirglas to think the secrecy of his base was at risk. He would surely never release anyone who could give its coordinates away.

“No, sir, we were tumbled around so much I haven’t a clue.”

“But your bearing before the typhoon?”

“I don’t much take an interest in that,” I said, trying to look sheepish. “Captain says I’d get lost on the ship if I weren’t told where to go. I’ve got no sense of direction.”

“No matter, no matter,” said Szpirglas. “You’re safe with us.”

Another pirate came and put some new mugs of mango juice before Kate and me.

“There’s food coming, don’t fear,” said Szpirglas merrily. “I can smell a feast cooking, and it won’t be long before it’s served, eh, Mr. Crumlin?”

“That’s for certain, Captain,” said the bearish mate. “Pork.”

“Excellent,” Szpirglas winked at me. “I can’t abide anything that swims, I’m afraid. Rather awkward on an island, don’t you think?”

Kate and I both made ourselves chuckle. There was a brief silence, and it seemed Szpirglas had lost interest in us, but I knew our interrogation was far from over.

“A long flight for a small vessel, Van Diemen’s Land to the Hawaiis,” Szpirglas mused. “Your captain must’ve been an experienced one.”

“Yes he was.”

“Strange, then, he didn’t see the warnings of the typhoon.”

“It seemed to come out of nowhere,” I said and almost felt defensive, for I had missed it too, weather watcher that I was.

“It did come on sudden, I’ll grant you that. We caught just the tail end of it, and it gave us a shake, did it not, Mr. Crumlin?”

The mate gave a curt nod. “I’ll see what’s what with dinner,” he said and went inside the lodge.

“Weather does come on quickly in these parts, you are right,” Szpirglas said. “Well, you two are lucky you survived, and we must be hopeful there will be others. Whereabouts did you two wash up, then?”

He was watching me carefully, and for the first time I felt myself falter. He would want to see if there was wreckage there to confirm our story.

I sighed and tried to look abashed. “I’m not quite sure. We’ve walked about quite a lot, looking for inhabitants, and I’ve got turned around. It was a rocky stretch, not shallow, and we had to swim for it. We’re lucky the seas were calmer then, for we could easily have been dashed against the rocks. As it was, our bit of raft floated off and we were left to scramble up onto the rocks. I think it was somewhere off that way.” I pointed, making sure to point in the opposite direction to the
Aurora.

Szpirglas nodded without so much as a flicker in his eye. “And that’s where you’ve made your camp?”

“Well, we didn’t really bother with a proper camp or anything.” I didn’t want him checking for signs. “Couldn’t even make a fire.”

“We tried with some sticks,” Kate offered, “but neither of us had any luck.”

Szpirglas gave a hearty laugh. “It is a deucedly hard business, making fire without matches, I agree.”

“We slept there the first night and waited the next day, hoping we’d see some others. But”—I looked over at Kate, in consideration of her missing mother—“then we moved on, hoping we’d find someone, or get to higher ground where we’d have a view of something or other.”

They would check the coast, and would find nothing. But that was why I’d been careful to mention the raft had floated off. I wanted to make sure I left no loose ends to my story.

“Ah, there he is!” cried Szpirglas, and I looked over my shoulder to see a striking, tall, raven-haired woman walking toward us. But it was not the woman Szpirglas beheld with such pleasure; it was the small boy she led by the hand. Not more than four, this boy, I’d say, and pulling free from the woman’s grasp now so he could charge headlong up the verandah steps and into Szpirglas’s waiting arms.

“I’ve missed you, lad!” Szpirglas said, lifting the boy onto his lap. “Thank you, Delilah,” he said to the woman, and she nodded obediently and departed. “This,” he said proudly to me and Kate, “is my son, Theodore.”

I could feel my surprise, like an earthquake’s tremor, about to ripple across my face, but hoped I managed to stop it in time. It seemed impossible that a cold-hearted thief and murderer like Szpirglas should have a son. And a handsomer little fellow I’d never seen, with huge brown eyes and a perfect bowed mouth, wavy hair that would become curly like his father’s one day, and eyebrows that made his whole face seem intent.

“Hello, Theodore,” Kate and I said, in almost perfect unison, with the same forced jollity.

“Did you have good adventures?” Theodore asked his father.

“The things I saw!” Szpirglas exclaimed.

“Well, go on and tell me,” the boy said with studied patience, as though this were a game they were both used to playing.

“Well, there’s a great deal to tell. Do you know what I saw, though?”

“What?”

“A night rainbow. I did, I swear.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like a normal rainbow, only cast by the moon’s glow it was, all across the midnight sky. All the colors you can imagine. It spanned one horizon to another.”

“I want to see one!” the boy said indignantly.

“You will. When you’re older and we’re flying together, we’ll stay up late on the perfect night of a full moon and wait for one.”

“What else?”

“I saw the seahorse again.”

“The giant one?”

“And he wasn’t by himself anymore. We were sailing low over the ocean and that water was clear as crystal, and I could see them all below surface. There was a whole herd of them this time. Brilliant orange, each as big as a dolphin, flying through the water.”

I listened, momentarily swept up in the beauty of his tales. Szpirglas’s face and voice were completely altered as he talked to his son, with none of the sharp, mocking humor I’d seen in him aboard the
Aurora
, none of the danger. His eyes were as wide and guileless as those of his boy. Theodore listened, rapt. My father had once told me such stories.

It made me angry that a man like him should have a son. This boy did not know who his father was, the things he’d done—and if he did, would it even have mattered? What did any of that have to do with him? Here was his father, the man who had adventures, who told glorious stories and held him on his lap and kissed his head. There was nothing else of importance.

“I brought you something,” Szpirglas said, “and then it’s off to bed with you.”

“What is it?” the boy asked, sitting bolt upright.

“I hope I didn’t forget it…”

“Papa!”

“No, no, here it is.” Szpirglas riffled through his breast pocket and brought out a small gold astrolabe. I recognized it at once, for it used to rest in the display case of the
Aurora
’s A-Deck reception lounge. An artifact from airship days of old.

The boy took it in his small starfish hands.

“An astrolabe,” he breathed.

“Very good. With this, you can cross all the skies of the world using nothing but the stars. Handsome thing, isn’t it?” he said, looking at me.

“Very, sir,” I said.

“Now then, where’s Delilah?” Szpirglas asked. She appeared as if conjured and took Theodore’s hand. The boy didn’t want to leave his father.