The Dead Men Stood Together (10 page)

I finally glimpsed his pale face through the murk. I had intended to apologise for not speaking up for him when he was attacked. But down there, in the dark, I felt too afraid of him, too afraid to remind him of my treachery.

‘Uncle,’ I said eventually, ‘how can you stand being in such darkness? I can’t see a thing.’

‘There is nothing to see,’ he said.

There was no comfort in his voice. I felt like I was in a cave with a wounded wolf.

‘But it stinks down here,’ I said.

‘Does it?’ he answered wearily.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It really does. Why do you spend so much time down here on your own?’

He did not reply.

‘You see,’ I said cheerfully. ‘All is well again. You had no need to despair. Perhaps your repentance was heard.’

‘Repentance?’ he said, with a flash of his old haughtiness in his voice. It troubled me to hear it and I struggled to keep the annoyance I felt from showing in my voice.

‘You were sorry for it and now all is well,’ I persisted, in the hope he would change his tone.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head and carrying on tying off a rope. ‘You’ve heard the crew. I was right all along. I was
right
!’

Even as I spoke, I felt I should simply agree with him and leave. Every second in that place was revolting to me. But I could not bear his triumphant tone.

‘Is that why you killed the bird, then?’ I said. ‘To free the ship and save the crew?’

‘What difference does it make why I shot it?’ he said, his eyes glowing in the darkness. ‘Are we not back on course? Are we not free of the ice and safely through the mist? I saved us by killing that bird. Spare me your grief for that creature. It is shared by no one on this ship.’

I had perceived the same madness in him that day – in the moments before he shot the albatross. He had not changed. It was only the crew who had changed their opinion of him. And it was not to last.

XX

My uncle smiled and talked to the crew when he was working; most other times he took himself off into his little lair below deck. He did not eat with us, nor sleep with us.

This didn’t seem to bother anyone but me, and after a while it didn’t bother me either. I had nothing to say to him and I felt that only I saw his true nature. I remembered the pilot’s son and felt a little like him now, in that I too sensed evil hovering around my uncle.

What could I do? My uncle was right: the whole crew, and the captain too, they all wanted to believe that he had saved them by killing that bird. They all wanted to believe that misfortune was behind them.

And the truth was I wanted to believe it as well. I wanted to be part of this new happier mood. I wanted to believe that everything would be well. Because, as soon as I stopped to think, there was still much to be concerned about.

We were sure of little about our position other than that we were somehow now in the Pacific – waters unknown to most of the crew. The compass had not worked since we had entered the icy seas of the frozen south and we had not been able to use the stars because the mist had obscured our view.

We knew also that we were heading north and, judging by the position of the sun in the now clear skies, we were about to cross the Line – the equator – where the sun at midday would stand directly overhead.

The captain and helmsman consulted maps, trying to decode where we might be, but, until we sighted some land or another ship, we could not be certain. And all we could hope for was that the ship we saw would be a friendly one, or the land we came upon would not wreck us or be inhabited by cannibals or some such.

Day by day, this new uncertainty chipped away at the relief we had felt to be free of the mist. With heavy hearts we all came to realise that we were not free of the enchantment; we had just exchanged one kind for another.

Being able to see for miles was no help in finding our way. All we could see was miles and miles of empty ocean. We were as lost as we ever had been, and now it felt as though we were being teased and toyed with, our hopes raised only to be cruelly hacked down.

And the more we realised this, the more unbearable the heat became. We were in a desert: a desert of salt water. We had seen nothing but water for weeks now. The albatross had been the only sign of life outside the ship. On the entire voyage since leaving Cape Verde, we had seen not even a single fish – no, nor even one strand of weed. And there was no more life in this sun-drenched ocean than there had been in the frozen one.

We had enjoyed the sun after so many days of mist and cold and damp, but we had yet to feel its full force. Now the sun rose to its full height and there was nowhere to escape its roasting glow.

The boards of the ship began to shrink as all the moisture was driven from them by the force of the sun. Flesh was baked along with wood and canvas and all effort seemed too much to bear.

We did what needed to be done at night, the darkness having returned as we had sailed to more northerly climes. Repairs were needed: the shrinking boards were in danger of sending us to the bottom of the ocean as leak after leak was found and sealed.

We sweated the day away, and our sweat turned to steam before it hit the deck. The captain rationed the water we had taken aboard but our need was too great and it was quickly disappearing. The cold had preserved our foodstuffs, but all that we had left now began to rot and fester. The holds were a stinking, evil place.

And so, bit by bit, all the joy we had felt in leaving the grip of the ice evaporated in the heat. As changeable as the sea, the crew began to think again about my uncle and his part in our supposed salvation.

‘I told you we spoke too soon,’ said the very same sailor who had spoken in my uncle’s defence only days before.

‘Aye,’ said another. ‘He might have freed us from the mist, but we were only swapping one hell for another.’

‘Who knows if we’ll ever sight land?’ said the first. ‘How much longer can we last in this heat?’

The sailors hushed their voices as the captain approached and went back to their tasks. The captain watched them leave and stepped up beside me.

‘What were they saying?’ he asked, still looking in their direction.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

The captain turned to me and his expression made it clear that this wasn’t going to be enough to end the conversation.

‘They are worried, Captain,’ I said. ‘We are worried.’

He nodded, looking away.

‘They have been at sea too long,’ he said. ‘The salt gets into your brain.’

‘Do you know where we are, Captain?’ I asked.

He looked up, squinting into the sun.

‘We are very close to the Line,’ he said. ‘But where along the Line – well, your guess is as good as mine.’

He looked at me and smiled. It was a kind smile.

‘No ocean lasts for ever, boy,’ he said. And then, after a pause, he patted me on the shoulder. ‘Nothing lasts for ever.’

I’m not sure whether this was meant to comfort me or make me accept whatever fate was about to deliver.

The searing temperature heated up the blood of the crew as well. Tempers shortened and fights flared up over trivial things. More than once the captain had to threaten a flogging before the men would calm themselves and go about their work.

My uncle found himself shunned once more and I didn’t feel the need to seek him out. Why should I suffer because of what he was and what he’d done?

There was an edge now, a tension all through the ship. It was better not to make eye contact for fear that it might be misunderstood. I’d feared that kinship to him would damn me as well in the eyes of the crew. But I think they had long ago forgotten there had ever been a link between us.

Even when the crew had welcomed him back, he had not taken to sleeping with us. He had kept himself to his favoured dank, dark part of the hold and stayed there whenever he was not called upon to work.

The crew accepted this behaviour and didn’t bother him. My uncle could do as he pleased. It was not as though they had ever really come to like him any better than they had before. But it was different for me.

I could not so easily forget him, however much I would have liked to. I was his nephew. Although I could not think of him without thinking of the albatross he had shot without cause or thought, he was still my father’s brother.

‘Maybe you can look out for him,’ my mother had said. I heard her voice clearly in my head. I had thought it a joke at the time. Now it felt like a request I was honour-bound to obey. It made me angry that I could not set it aside.

Eventually, once again, cursing as I went, I was moved to go and speak to him. It wasn’t just that he was my uncle, I wanted some sense that he understood what he’d done.

I climbed the ladder down into the darkness. The stink was even worse than before. As usual, he was sitting alone in the hold, lit only by a thin ray of milky light seeping through the timbers above his head.

‘Uncle,’ I said curtly, more than once before he turned his face to look at me.

He looked at me for some little while, his eyes shadowed and impossible to see.

‘What is it?’ he said.

His voice seemed to be laced with the humid dampness of the hold. His tone infuriated me again.

‘I have come to see you,’ I said, finding that now I was here I could not actually think of anything I wanted to say to him.

He nodded and looked away. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I noticed that he had the body of the albatross beside him. He saw my eyes moving towards it and placed a hand on it defensively. The smell drifted towards my nostrils. It turned my stomach.

I had wondered where the dead bird had gone, but had assumed the captain had tossed it overboard. It was all I could do to stop myself screaming at him in fury.

‘Why have you got that?’ I hissed.

‘Why shouldn’t I have it?’ said my uncle. ‘It’s mine.’

I covered my nose and mouth and peered forward. The albatross glowed slightly – a dull rotten glow – and I could see that it was decaying, with feathers lost and matted and the flesh revealed was speckled with mould. The albatross’s beak was open and its rancid tongue lolled out. Its eyes were clouded.

‘Throw it away,’ I said, disgusted. ‘If they find you with it, they’ll –’

‘Don’t try to take it from me,’ he said, fingering the cross round his neck.

The tone of threat in his voice was clear. I remembered that time in the barn, his knife at my throat.

‘Why did you do it?’ I said after a pause. ‘Why did you kill the albatross?’

My uncle closed his eyes and sighed, as though the question bored him.

‘You would not believe my prowess with the crossbow,’ he said. ‘You thought me a liar.’

‘You could have shot anything!’ I said, angry that he seemed to be trying to involve me in the blame.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, in a quiet voice I would not have recognised as his own. ‘I only knew that I must. It felt right.’

‘Right?’ I said. ‘How could it be right? The bird had done nothing to you.’

He turned to me, his eyes twinkling darkly.

‘If I had shot a woodcock or a pigeon, you would not ask me why.’

‘But you did not kill it for food,’ I said. ‘You killed it for . . . I don’t know what.’

‘And what of that nightingale you shot?’ he said. ‘What was your reason?’

‘I never meant to kill it!’ I shouted.

‘Truly?’ he said, with a cruel twist of his lips.

I stared angrily at him and yet he had touched a nerve somewhere. I found I couldn’t reply. My uncle dropped his head and his face was swallowed by the darkness. I wanted to strike him but I feared him more than my anger would allow. I turned and climbed the ladder. When I looked his way, there was nothing but blackness.

XXI

I knew then that I had been right. His madness had never left him. It had simply been hidden by the goodwill of the ship on escaping the mist. As I looked back, I saw that all that time my uncle had still stood among the shadows in the grip of . . . I could not say what.

I hated him at that moment. I had followed my father to sea – my father who I could scarcely even remember – and I had been lured here to this hell by my uncle, who I hardly knew.

I must have been mad myself. Better by far to have stayed with my mother who I loved like life itself. Never again! I vowed that if I ever held my mother again I’d never leave her. Not for all the treasures in the world.

My home never seemed so dear when set against this nothingness. I longed to see familiar faces and feel the sweet unmoving earth beneath my feet. I would roll in the grass like a lamb. I was full of such dreams.

Then the wind stopped. Winds come and go, all sailors know that, but no wind ever dropped like that one did. One minute the sails were full to bursting, the next they sagged against the mast and the once taut rigging drooped.

The sea, which a moment before had been furrowed by a thousand troughs and foaming crests, was now as flat as a painted dish. The ship slowly came to a halt and sat as still as if we were back in the ice sheet.