The Apprentices (20 page)

At the post office, her vocal cords felt dry and unused, but she made herself understood, and they gave her a sack of mail. She sat on a bench in a small park and began to sort through it.

There were letters from colleagues within China, some of them two years old, and a letter from the university in Beijing. There was a coded letter from Marcus Burrows, postmarked before she left for London to join him for the voyage to Nova Zembla—it was pointless to decode now.

That the mail hadn’t been seized was a good sign. No one was tracking her. Then a thought made her freeze with an envelope in her hand: Maybe the authorities did know everything. Maybe they had left the sack of mail untouched so she would think they weren’t on her trail.

She scanned the park, and saw no watchers. Jin Lo looked down at the pile of envelopes again and pulled free a small envelope with her address typed on the front. It was a telegram, and it was recent: dated two days before. She tore it open and read the typed message:

Alistair Beane, deliberately misspelled as
Alistiar,
was the apothecary’s code name, to be used in an emergency. To confirm that she had received the telegram, Jin Lo was supposed to reply with her own alias, which was Mrs. Josef Bankes, after the botanist and explorer Joseph Banks.

She held the telegram in her hand. She had set her family free. Now her friends needed her help. It seemed very simple. The telegram had been sent just in time for her to retrieve it. Perhaps the world was orderly after all, and not chaotic and random.

Either way, she had to make a decision. She sifted through the rest of the mail to make sure there was nothing else recent, and went back to the post office to ask where she could send a telegram.

B
enjamin left Manila as a nervous skylark, keeping an eye out for hungry falcons, but after a while he settled into the pleasure of flying and the absorbing work of navigating in the empty sky. The sea was bright turquoise and deep blue, marked by reefs and depths and currents, the air shot through with lacy clouds. Benjamin caught thermals that let him rest his wings, and flew southwest along the coast of the Philippines, charting the islands along the remembered path in his head.

It was lonely, flying by himself. On the way to Nova Zembla, he’d had Janie and his father and Jin Lo and Count Vili for company. Count Vili, an albatross with a vast wingspan, had navigated. Now Benjamin had no one. He whistled to himself. He looked for fish, although he wouldn’t have known how to catch one, and couldn’t imagine swallowing it raw—bones and scales and all. He saw an ominous gray shadow beneath the waves, at least twelve feet long. It made his speedy skylark’s heart race even faster, knowing he might change into a boy and plummet into the water.

The wind came up, surprisingly strong. The sky on the horizon was dark blue like a bruise, and it seemed to be moving toward him, fast. Benjamin tried to remember what he knew about cyclones, how they rotated in the same direction as the earth, how they strengthened as evaporated water from the ocean rose and condensed in the air, how the core was always the warmest part. But none of that helped him decide what to do as the storm picked up his tiny bird’s body and whipped him across the sky. He couldn’t see anything, with the wind and pelting rain in his eyes. When he stretched out his wings to ride the air currents, strange gusts caught him so hard, he feared his fragile bones might break. On and on the storm battered him. Sometimes he didn’t know which direction was the ocean and which the wet sky. He had seen dead birds washed up on beaches after storms before, and he began to fear he might become one of them.

And then suddenly it was still and warm. There were other birds—exhausted, wet, and now flying weakly. He thought he might have lost consciousness, because the warm stillness had the surreal quality of a dream. He was in the eye of the storm, trapped in the center of it, being carried wherever it decided to take him. He considered fighting his way back into the swirling winds, but it seemed too dangerous. He didn’t think he could survive that battering much longer. So he let himself be carried along with this bedraggled aviary in the strange warm core.

Hours later, or maybe days, he found himself huddled beneath a stand of trees, ragged and disoriented and missing
feathers. As he rested there, he saw other windblown birds eating seeds off the ground. Benjamin was hungry, and drew nearer. The storm-tossed birds darted away, full of mistrust. There was something about his skylark form that made the real birds uneasy.

Benjamin ate the abandoned seeds as quickly as he could. But the other birds, starved from their ordeal, lost their fear and flew at him, pecking at his eyes and wings. They screamed in their tiny voices, and Benjamin ducked his head and flew away.

In a tree, he found some grubs: fat white worms waving their tiny heads blindly in the soggy air. The bird in him said they were good to eat, but the boy was revolted. He ate them anyway, knowing he needed strength, and they were salty, with the texture of grapes, the thin skin popping in his mouth. He swallowed as quickly as he could.

He flew on, not knowing where he was. He had a better intuitive sense of navigation as a bird, just as he had better eyesight, and he knew he had been blown east, but how far east? He was definitely out in the Pacific Ocean, well east of the Philippines. But he hadn’t intended to go that direction, so hadn’t studied the map carefully.

A series of small islands appeared. Benjamin was thinking about where they might fall on the chart when he felt a hard blow in the back of the neck. Then there was a searing pain as something dug into his skin, through his feathers.

Benjamin screeched and flapped, trying to free himself, but the pain grew worse as he struggled. There was a gust of
air and a sound of heavy wings, and he realized it was another bird that held him. It was carrying him toward the nearest island as he fought.

Benjamin felt his skylark heartbeat start to slow, and his skin start to tingle, and he knew he was beginning to change. But he couldn’t let it happen yet. Not now. He would break his legs, or even his neck, if he became a boy and fell with the giant bird to the island. He concentrated on keeping his bones light and birdlike, his pulse quick, his arms winged. But it was hard to concentrate on
anything
with knifelike talons seizing the back of your neck. He couldn’t hold on to his bird shape much longer, and the beach was still too far below. There was a canopy of trees off to the right. If he could only steer his captor toward the trees, maybe the branches would break his fall.

He tried flapping in the direction of the trees with his ineffectual, trapped wings. The bird that held him screamed and squeezed harder with its talons. A lightning bolt of pain erased all thoughts and all willpower, and Benjamin started to grow, in spite of himself.

His bones stretched and thickened, and his skull expanded and grew heavy. His legs and feet took on weight and density. His feathers retracted into his tingling skin and his wing tips became fingers. Then the fingers were attached to featherless hands…forearms…elbows. His blood slowed, his heartbeat dragging in his ears.

The big raptor, his load growing heavier, screamed and let Benjamin go. The green of the trees flew at him and he crashed
into the treetops. He hit one branch with his ribs and another with his shoulder, and then he grabbed a third with both hands and hung on. The world that had been so noisy and chaotic, all crashing and screaming, grew still. The clinging, stabbing creature was off his neck. But the ground was still far below his hanging feet. He took a deep, shuddering breath.

How to get down? He considered, then swung hand over hand down the branch until he could grab the trunk with his legs. He clung there like a monkey, arms shaking, feeling the relative safety of the solid tree trunk. He wondered what island this was, and how he would get off it. But right now he needed to concentrate on climbing down. Just do the next thing. That was his task. He reached for a shaky foothold, then for a finger-shredding new handhold. He groped blindly with his toes for a lower foothold, then another.

Finally he lowered himself to the ground and put a hand to his neck to feel the damage. He came away with spots of blood on his fingers, but the raptor didn’t seem to have torn him to shreds. His ribs were bruised where he’d hit the first branch, and his hands were raw from climbing down, but nothing was broken. He’d been lucky.

He looked up, scanning the treetops, and saw a muscular white bird with a gray hood of feathers perched on a high branch. It glowered down at him, looking both confused and humiliated. A sea eagle. It had nearly been his death. He wondered: Would his bones have grown inside the bird’s stomach? Or would he have stayed a tiny thing if he had died as one?

“Nice try!” he called to the sea eagle.

The bird ruffled its white wings as if shrugging off embarrassment, and gazed away into the middle distance.

“Nice try,” a gruff voice said on the ground, and Benjamin looked to find a man standing near him. The man had dark skin and a faded red Coca-Cola T-shirt over a woven grass loincloth. He had appeared out of the trees, and he was smiling. “John Frum?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” Benjamin said, putting up his hands to push the idea away. He knew about John Frum from their time on Espíritu Santo, where the Americans had set up a base during the war. The navy had brought trucks and food and radios, things the people of the island had never seen before. A legend had spread of a man named John Frum, who was supposed to come back to the islands in an airplane, bringing more supplies—more cargo. The people were still waiting for him, on more than one island group. “Not John Frum,” he said.

“You come from sky,” the man said.

“Yes,” Benjamin said. “Well, sort of.”

“You have cargo.”

“No,” Benjamin said, holding out his empty hands. “No cargo. See?”

The man reached and took Benjamin’s rumpled shirt collar between two fingers and rubbed it reverently, inspecting the fabric. “I tell the people, belong this island, long time,” he said. “They don’ believe. I say, John Frum, he must come. He come from sky. He bring cargo.”

“I only came from the sky because I was a bird,” Benjamin said. It sounded outrageous, spoken aloud. But being a bird seemed more plausible than that he, Benjamin Burrows, was the long-awaited South Pacific hero, bringing Cokes and wristwatches and jeeps to the people. And it had the advantage of being the truth.

The man looked at him a long time. “John Frum come from sky.”

“But John Frum has an
airplane,
” Benjamin argued. The exact beliefs were different from island to island, but he knew that John Frum was usually believed to be a pilot. Sometimes he was said to wear a navy uniform.

“John Frum come from bird,” the man said. So either the cult on this island was different, or the prophet was willing to be flexible. Prophecies were tricky. The outcome was all in the interpretation.

“No!” Benjamin said. “I’m Benjamin Burrows. What island is this?”

The man moved toward a gap in the trees and made a beckoning gesture. “You come, John Frum,” he said.

Benjamin hesitated, but he had no choice. He didn’t know where he was and didn’t have any way to get off the island. He looked at the bird that had brought him, but it lifted its great wings to go look for easier prey. So he followed the barefoot man.

His father said that the cargo cults had started even earlier than the war, with the nineteenth-century missionaries who arrived on the islands. The belief had only been intensified by
the astonishing wealth of the American navy. The navy had so many goods, but the men who brought them clearly hadn’t made them. The men had no skills. They did nothing but sit in offices, moving papers, listening to voices that came over small boxes. When the boxes broke, the men sent them away to be fixed. So there must be a source, elsewhere, of all this magical
stuff.

After the war, the navy had bulldozed a lot of equipment into the sea, to try to discourage the cargo cults and return the islands to their undisturbed existence. But there was no returning to an earlier time. Such wanton waste of trucks and goods had only convinced the islanders that the coveted objects were
infinite
in the land of John Frum—in the legendary land of America. More would surely come.

The man in the loincloth talked quietly to himself as they walked.
“Nice try,”
he said.
“Nice try.”

Benjamin realized that the man was memorizing the first words of the returning John Frum. It was so ridiculous. He had to make them see that he wasn’t a god.

They reached a clearing and found two small boys crouched over a bowl, chewing. The boys were bare-chested, in loincloths, and they looked up with wide eyes and fat cheeks. They were making kava. Benjamin’s father had studied the root, interested in its narcotic properties, looking for possible medicinal uses. It was a drink prepared by chewing the root of the kava plant, mixing it with saliva, and spitting it into a bowl. Then the chewed pulp was fermented. Only boys who hadn’t reached adolescence or had any contact with girls could be given the task of preparing it. Once fermented, it became a powerful hallucinogen.