Cinnamon and Gunpowder (18 page)

I confess that there is a part of me, loathsome and cowardly, that wishes to be done with hope and call this ship home. It would be strangely relieving to give up and let myself become just another of Mabbot’s men, loafing with never a decision to be made. This is the siren’s call.

And so I find I must nurse my courage as tenderly as I nurse my yeast sponge, for it too would quickly dry up and perish here.

10

SAUERKRAUT AND THEATER

In which cabbages and history are mistreated as we cross the equator

Saturday, September 4

While eating this morning, the men were whispering about the Brass Fox, and before I knew it they’d gathered around me. “Tell us what you know!” Conrad shouted. For he was usually the one who instigated these gossip parties. Simply whispering “Fox” was usually enough to bring the unctuous cook running.

“What can I know?” I have never been a great liar. “I hardly saw the man. I was half-drowned.”

“I’ve told ye the truth,” one man said. “Mabbot an’ the Fox were lovers, sleeping on a heap of hoarded gold. But the Fox had an eye for the dairymaids, and on the day of their wedding, he left Mabbot holding her flowers. Since then she’s been after him. Her plan is to marry him at noon an’ kill him at one.”

“That could be—” I said.

“Pig shit!” spat Conrad. “Lovers? They were no such thing. The Fox is the deposed duke of Portugal, this I heard from Short Jim. The Fox was betrayed by his own cousin, who sold the royal jewels to finance a rebel army. Now the Fox travels the world stealing the jewels back and slitting sleeping throats. Didn’t he have that air about him?”

“The air of a deposed duke?” I muttered. “I couldn’t say for cert—”

“Naw!” barked another. “The Brass Fox is a true fox whose skin was stolen. Everyone knows a fox is charmed and has riches aplenty stowed under the mountains. He’s looking for his skin so he can return to his fox fambly.”

This was followed by such bickering as made my exit rather easy. It is a position of strange privilege to be keeping secrets with Mabbot. No doubt, unholy grief would befall me if I told these men the truth I know. She has judged that her pirates would hardly be motivated enough by the return of the spoiled child to keep up the interminable chase, and so lets them conjure their own fantastic stories. Whatever Mabbot intends to do with the brat, I hope it involves a goodly reward for her crew.

Saturday already, and tomorrow I must feed her again. Having heard the stories from a young age, we may take for granted the water to wine and multiplication of fishes, but making sustenance ex nihilo is no easy miracle, to say nothing of victuals that actually please the palate.

I have separated my stolen potpourri into discrete piles. These are the usable contents: five broken bay leaves; two sticks of cinnamon; a few fragile sprigs of rosemary; several cloves; what I believe to be anise seed (very stale); and a handful of small dried rosebuds. All of these have succumbed to the odor of cedar, that brute. Still, with a little heat, I might be able to coax their whispering voices to sing.

Here in the privacy of my scribbles, I admit that I feel a childish spark in me. Prior to this, all of my study and sweat, no matter the party or circumstance, had concerned no greater stake than the glazing of wealthy tongues. Now the game has changed. Despite the indignity, the debasement, despite my molten outrage, a piece of me is eager to meet this challenge.

I’ve added the cedar to my castile soap, and the result is quite refreshing. My cell affords me privacy, a rare commodity here on the ship, and I’ve taken advantage of it several times to crouch naked over a bucket to wash my clothes. Of course the seawater leaves a white rime no matter how many times I rinse.

It occurs to me that the sailors upon this boat, though slavish to their beloved captain, are not without wiles of their own. Did they not save the horrid Hottentot for last because they knew it would be the end of the party?

My botched attempt and subsequent pickling has me reconsidering my plans for escape. If it is to happen, it must be within clear sight of land, or at least of a rescuing ship, for I cannot risk being lost upon open waters again. My opportunity will, no doubt, appear suddenly, and I must be ready for brave action.

Eager to use the new cabbages before they wilted, I made sauerkraut, that loyal friend. The cabbages were of a Chinese variety unfamiliar to me, their leaves long and their taste mild, striking me as rather a hybrid of cabbage and lettuce. But the hearts were crisp, and I found myself stuffing my mouth like an old goat, so welcome was the crunch of a real vegetable.

I kneaded the shredded cabbage with salt until it sweated brine, then packed it with a few cloves of garlic in a small wooden keg and set a rock upon it to keep the devil out. Sauerkraut will make my internment a little more bearable. It is one of the staples of civilized life that I had taken for granted and now feels to me like a blessed luxury. It has a hundred uses: it cures scurvy as well as limes while aiding digestion, strengthens the heart, sharpens the mind, and makes one’s deposits as regular and well formed as those of an ox. Its juice can be drunk as a tonic and serves as a flavorful replacement for vinegar, while the kraut itself can garnish anything but sweet-cake. I assume that manna was something akin.

As it ferments, kraut whispers alchemical secrets. In two days, it will smell as agreeable as an old pillow still warm from night’s use. In five days it will smell like a horse run to foam. The odor will then lessen as the vegetable begins its tart transformation. It will be good to eat in two weeks, but at five weeks it will reach the zenith of its power, its taste a violin bow drawn across the tongue. After six weeks it will err slowly toward slime. Like hams and men, it gets better with age only to a point.

Mabbot is correct in this: I do have more idle time than I have ever had. Last week I spent it pacing and fretting. Now, after my misadventure in the sea, I take moments to appreciate the air and sun—my left ear, having been thoroughly irrigated, aches when I get too cold—and to watch Bai practice his slow martial dances while Feng angles for opponents over a specially made chessboard whose every square is bordered by half-inch runners that keep the pieces from toppling as the ship rolls.

The Chinaman has ruined chess for most of the crew. While he and his brother are usually as stony as gargoyles, the game brings out a surprisingly uncouth side of Feng. If he had invented the game, he couldn’t take more pride in it. He will play anyone and takes as much pleasure in five-move victories as in the rare hour-long contest. He seems almost addicted to it, and few can face him on the board for long before he snatches their king with a cackle.

As hardly any wish to play him, he is not above bullying passing sailors into a game, saying, just loudly enough for them to hear, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you are a coward” or “You walk like a woman.”

When he wins, as he inevitably does, he lets loose an almost girlish laugh and places his small hand on the loser’s chest to say with mock concern, “Oh, don’t cry!”

When I sat to play him, though, he swept the board into a sack with one quick motion and left me sitting alone. The man’s hatred for me feels personal, though I cannot put my finger on the exact reason for it.

Chinkle, buntline, sheepshank, monkey fist—these sailors have as many names for knots as I have for cheese, and they make about as much sense. They’ve made a game of asking me to identify a given knot, then snickering when I answer incorrectly. They’re happy for their loot, and today I’ve lingered at the periphery of the gangs taking their leisure, listening to their music and jokes, learning from them the complicated craft of keeping the
Rose
on her tack, which sails are royal and which topgallant, how to secure a line to a belay pin, and how to scale the shrouds. The men even gave me a hempen bracelet for having successfully climbed to the top of the mainmast and kissed the brass cap there.

I can attest that pirates do indeed sing, unceasingly and in ravens’ voices, but not always unpleasantly, as they have plenty of practice and they harass those who break rhythm. Their themes are redundant and, more often than not, pornographic. But I suppose, if one wants hymns, one does not seek out pirates.

They are forever telling stories as well. On any given day, one can hear a variety of outrageous yarns about underwater kingdoms, scandalous assignations, or ghost ships. I admit I was interested to hear one sagacious sailor explain to several of us how Feng and Bai came to work with Mabbot. It was a wet oration delivered around a wad of tobacco in the man’s cheek, and we all had to wait patiently while he spat over the railing every few sentences.

Feng and Bai, I learned, were the youngest of five brothers of the wealthy Tsang family, owners of a great silk-making house. “Their worms,” the sailor said, “produced fabric so light an’ airy that an entire bolt weighed no more than a sparrow. When their father refused to take a warlord’s opium as payment, he was skewered ’pon a pike and the entire house was burned to cinders. The five brothers gave themselves to a Buddhist mystic to learn boxing. Then, years later, they cut their revenge from the warlord, his opium factory, his family, and his workers. But this bloodletting brought back neither their home nor their father, no, not even a single silkworm. Their grief was not slaked. They set themselves against the officials who had cooperated with the warlord. Scores died on their swords before they were eventually ambushed, tried, and sentenced to hang. It was in the Canton cell awaiting their death that they met Mabbot. She’d been captured by the navy and was awaiting transport to England, where the Pendleton Company planned to parade her in the streets before hanging her near the ports as a warning against piracy. Those of us left, myself, Apples, and a few more, used the hanging of the Tsang brothers as a distraction to break her out. Mabbot, though, refused to flee before she’d cut the brothers from the gallows with her own knife, while we fought off the guards.”

“And what became of the other three brothers?” I asked.

“Mabbot could only cut so fast,” he replied, and spat into the wind such that I was obliged to duck a brown string of saliva.