The Isle of Blood (43 page)

Later that evening I woke from a light sleep to find myself alone. A shadow moved outside the window. I peeked between the wooden slats onto the veranda. Silhouetted against the silvery sea was the form of the monstrumologist facing east, looking toward Socotra.

He turned suddenly and peered down the beach toward the quay, his body stiffening, his right hand dropping into his coat pocket, searching for his revolver. He would not find it, I knew.

Tell him
, a voice whispered inside my head.
You must tell him
.

I got out of bed and dressed in the semidarkness, shivering, though it was not cold. I’d never hidden anything from him—had never tried, because my faith in his ability to see through any lie was insurmountable.

I was pulling on my shoes when the floor creaked outside the door. In a panic—apparently my quick thinking was done for the night—I jumped back into bed and yanked the covers up to my chin.

Through half-open eyes I watched him cross the room to the chair where I had carelessly thrown my jacket. If he checked the revolver’s chamber, I was done for. But what did it matter? I was going to confess, wasn’t I?

He went to the same window through which I had spied on him and stood for a long while with his back to me before saying, “Will Henry.” And again, with a sigh, “Will Henry, I know you are awake. Your nightshirt is on the floor and your shoes have gone missing.”

I opened my eyes fully. “I saw you outside and—”

“And when you heard me coming back, you jumped into bed fully dressed.”

I nodded.

“Do you think such behavior might strike someone as odd?” he asked.

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“So the most reasonable thing that occurred to you was jumping into bed and pretending to sleep?”

He turned to me and said, “I know why you left this afternoon.”

I swallowed hard. My faith in his powers was not misplaced. He did not need my confession. He knew.

“Do you trust me, Will Henry?”

“Of course.”

“Your actions today give lie to your words. Why did you think I wouldn’t come back for you? I told you I would, and yet you left to look for me. And just now, finding me gone, you threw on your clothes to chase after me. It’s New York, isn’t it? You remember New York and you fear at any moment I may abandon you. Perhaps I need to point out the difference between New York and this afternoon. I made no promise in New York.”

I was wrong. The monstrumologist had not discerned the truth. I felt the burden settle back upon my shoulders.

“I don’t know what we will find on Socotra, Will Henry. Kearns and the Russians have beaten us to the treasure, and there is a possibility that once again the grail has slipped from our grasp. I hope not. I pray it is not too late. If it is not, then you and I must shoulder a burden greater than most men can carry. Our only hope for success lies not in the force of arms or in numbers, or even much in our wits. No,
this
is what will save us.” He pulled my left hand into his a squeezed hard. “It saved you in America and it saved me in England, the thing in which I must now put absolute faith—the one thing I do not begin to understand! The thing that frightens me more than the abominations I pursue—the monster whose face I cannot bring myself to turn and face. We have been—we are—we must be—
indispensable
to each other, Will Henry, or both of us will fall. Do you understand what I mean?”

He let go of my wounded hand, rose, turned away.

“On the night you were born, your father drew me aside and with great solemnity—and tears in his eyes—told me your name would be Pellinore. He did not, I think, expect my reaction to this flattering gesture, of which I’m sure your mother was unaware. I unreservedly upbraided him, disavowing him of any notion that I was honored by the choice. My own anger confounded me. I did not understand why it enraged me, the thought of you carrying on my name. So many times we express our fear as anger, Will Henry, and now I think I wasn’t angry at all but afraid. Terribly, terribly afraid.”

It was time to confess. Were not my actions that day the indispensable proof that his faith in me was not misplaced? I tried. My mouth came open, but, like with Rurick’s before I killed him, no sound came out. Though I had most likely saved both our lives, though I had chosen the only door through which our salvation lay, I remembered his quiet despair on the beach at Dover.
The very strange and ironic thing is that I left you behind so you wouldn’t have to live on that plate with them
. If I confessed, there would be no absolution; I would still be
nasu
.

And so would he. He would be made unclean by my touch. My “success” at the Tower of Silence would be his failure, the fulfillment of his deepest fears. He would know beyond all doubt that by my saving him he had lost me forever.

Captain Julius Russell, owner of the cargo clipper
Dagmar
, was a tall, flush-faced, one-eyed expatriate, a former officer in the British cavalry who’d retired from the army following the second Afghan campaign. He’d come to Aden in ’84 to make his fortune in the coffee trade, plunking down his life savings on a retired packet steamer that in its day had been the fastest vessel of its class in the British fleet. He’d had trouble finding contracts, though—most of the coffee exporters used their own ships to transport their goods to Europe—and his hopes to undersell them by buying directly from the growers, thus cutting out the middlemen, had been dashed by the near monopoly held by companies like the one Rimbaud used to work for in Aden.

“It’s the bloody heat,” Russell told my master. “It melts the honor right out of a man. The customs officers are so corrupt they’d sell their mums for a sixpence and a bottle of
araq
.”

Bankrupt and desperate, Russell turned to trading in a decidedly more lucrative commodity—diamonds. Twice a month he sailed the
Dagmar
down the African coast to Sofala, where he picked up the contraband from a corrupt Portuguese official for transport to brokers based in Port Said. The diamonds were hidden in coffee bags, not so much to fo customs officials as to provide reasonable cover for the inevitable raid of Somali and Egyptian pirates who prowled along the glittering corridor between Mozambique and the Bab-el-Mandab Strait, the Gate of Tears, where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, and where the poet in Arthur Rimbaud had died.

We met the captain and his first mate, a Somali of gargantuan proportions named Awaale, in the hotel dining hall for breakfast. Awaale took an immediate fancy to me, his landlubbing equivalent.

“What does your name mean?” He spoke perfect English.

“What does it mean?”

“Yes. I am Awaale; it means ‘lucky’ in my language. What does your name mean?”

“I don’t know that it means anything.”

“Oh, all names mean something. Why did your parents name you William?”

“I never asked them.”

“But now you will, I think.” His eyes danced and he broke into a wide smile.

I looked away. The doctor and Captain Russell were engaged in a rather heated conversation about the portage fee, the continuation of an argument that had taken up the majority of Warthrop’s visit the day before. Russell wanted the entire amount up front, and the doctor, as tightfisted as ever, would agree to only half, with the remainder to be paid upon our safe return.

“What happened to your parents?” asked Awaale. He had read my reaction correctly.

“They were killed in a fire,” I answered.

“Mine are gone too.” He laid his huge hand over mine. “I was just a boy, like you. You are
walaalo
, little Will. Brother.”

He glanced at Russell, whose naturally rosy countenance now burned a deep crimson, and smiled. “Do you know how Captain Julius lost his eye? He fell off his horse at Kandahar, and his gun misfired when he hit the ground. He missed the entire battle. He tells people he was wounded in a charge, which like many stories of war is true but also not quite!”

“I must cover my risk, Warthrop,” Russell was insisting vehemently. “I’ve told you, no one attempts Socotra this time of year. The British won’t bring even their biggest frigate within a hundred miles of the place until October. They shut down Hadibu during the monsoon, and Hadibu is the only decent deepwater port on the whole bloody island.”

“Then, we make landing at Gishub or Steroh in the south.”

“
You
can attempt a landing there. The currents in the south are treacherous, especially this time of year. I will remind you, Doctor, I did not promise you a stroll from deck onto shore.”

Awaale leaned close to me and asked in a quiet voice, “Why do you go to Socotra,
walaalo
? That place is
xumaato
, evil… cursed.”

“The doctor has important business there,” I whispered back.

“He is a
dhaktar
? They say there are many strange plants there. He is going to collect herbs for his medicines, then?”

“He is a
dhaktar
,” I said.

We boarded the
Dagmar
at a quarter past eight, and for once I could not wait to put out to sea. The quay was swarming with British military police and soldiers; I expected to be pulled aside for questioning about the two bodies left for the carrion birds on the front porch of the world, for I was certain they had been discovered by now.

We would make excellent time, Russell promised my anxious master; our journey should take no more than five and a half days. The
Dagmar
had been recently refitted with new boilers (a wise investment if you are running diamonds), and her holds would be empty, which would nearly double her speed.

“That is the last thing I wanted to confirm with you,” Warthrop said, casting his eyes about for eavesdroppers. “We are agreed as to the particulars for our return to Brindisi?”

Russell nodded. “I’ll take you all the way to Brindisi, Doctor. And port your special cargo for you, though it goes against my better judgment. I would hope we could trust each other, like gentlemen.”

“Like yours, Captain Russell, my business is fraught more with scoundrels than gentlemen. You’ll know soon enough the nature of my special cargo and will be well compensated for the risk of its transport, I promise you.”

The monstrumologist and I walked forward as the
Dagmar
chugged through the harbor for the open sea. To our left were the towering rust-colored mountains of Aden, the roiling black dust of the coal depot, the graceful sweep of the Prince of Wales Crescent, and the tired-looking facade of the Grand Hotel De L’Univers, where I spied a man in a white suit sitting on the veranda, caressing a tumbler filled with a vile green liquid. Did I see him raise his glass in a mock toast?

“So, Will Henry,” said the doctor, “what did you learn from the great Arthur Rimbaud?” He must have seen the same man.

There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle
.

“What did I learn, sir?” The breeze was delicious upon my face. I could smell the sea. “I learned a poet doesn’t stop being a poet simply because he stops writing poetry.”

He thought that was very clever of me, for very complicated reasons. The monstrumologist clapped me on the back, and laughed.

First there was the land receding behind us, until the horizon overcame the land. Then a bevy of ships, packets and cargo steamers, light passenger crafts filled with colonists escaping the heat, and Arab fishing dhows, their great triangular sails snapping angrily in the wind, until the horizon rose up to swallow them. The terns and gulls followed us for a while, until they gave up the chase and returned to their hunting grounds off Flint Island. Then it was the
Dagmar
and the sea beneath a cloudless sky and the sun that hurled her shaow upon the churning wake, and the empty horizon in all directions. There was the great rumbling of the ship’s engines and the faint singing below of the coal-heavers and the laughter of the indolent crew lounging topside. Somalis all, and none who spoke a word of English, with the exception of Awaale. They had been told nothing about our mission and did not seem in the least curious. They were grateful for the respite from pirates and nosy customs officials; they laughed and joked like a group of schoolboys on holiday.

There were only two cabins on board. One was the captain’s, of course, and the other belonged to Awaale, who cheerfully gave it up for the doctor, though there was room for only one.

“You shall sleep with me and my crew,” Awaale informed me. “It will be grand! We’ll swap stories of our adventures. I would know what you have seen of the world.”

The doctor took me aside and cautioned, “I would be judicious in describing the parts I had seen, Will Henry. Sometimes the best stories are better left untold.”