Polaris Read online

  Mario nodded toward a knife and fork on the table and spoke in a soft Spanish accent, “Think those are real silver?”

  Owen eyed him suspiciously. Mario was standing next to his brother, as always. Both were lean and vaguely birdlike, but he knew they were hard workers and that Manny, in particular, was an acrobat aloft. “Of course they’re silver—and they’ve been counted!” he warned.

  Mario put his hands up, palms out to show that they were empty.

  “Is there anything else we ain’t allowed to touch?” asked Aaron Burnett.

  He was a powder monkey, responsible for carrying gunpowder to the ship’s cannons. The Polaris had four of them, not too bad for an armed merchantman. Hauling gunpowder in the heat of battle was dangerous work, and Aaron had been on deck when a powder monkey named Josué had blown up trying to carry two cartridges at once. Rumor had it that bits of the boy could still be found up in the topsails. Aaron had become exceedingly cautious ever since. He measured his steps and the gunpowder with equal care. Owen didn’t bother to answer him. He knew that the timid boy would be no trouble.

  But there was one boy who might be. Owen’s eyes landed on the only ship’s boy left to consider: the new hold rat now that Obed Macy had gone missing. Owen sensed him more than saw him, skulking silently in the far corner of the cabin, hiding his scarred face in the shadows. Thacher Maybin …

  Shouting out on the deck interrupted Owen’s thoughts. As he rushed over to press his ear against the locked door, the reason for their confinement came back to him. An all-hands meeting had been called, and the ship’s boys were not welcome. At the very least, there would be swearing. At the worst … He didn’t want to think about that.

  A light rain was falling and the seas were up. A storm was approaching, but the tensions on board had little to do with the worsening weather. The uneasy feeling had been rising steadily for the last week, ever since the doomed inland expedition had returned and the ship had immediately set sail for home.

  The loss of so many men had taken a toll. Everyone on board had lost a friend or six, and of course, their absence left that much more work for the survivors. The demise of the popular and proficient first mate was an especially heavy blow. Now the former second mate, the dour and hard-driving William Shannahan, oversaw the day-to-day running of the ship.

  And almost as bad for the crew’s morale as the loss of their comrades was the lack of any real explanation. What exactly had happened out there in the dark precincts of the jungle? The captain had forbidden any open discussion of the matter. To question the captain was to risk flogging, or even hanging. But down in the crew quarters, Owen had heard the whispered rumors spread.

  There was talk of a strange tropical sickness and wild tales of a beast in the night. And as much as he’d heard, Owen knew there was much more being shared in secret. The sailors had never trusted the captain’s nephew. But trusted or not, he’d witnessed some of the strange happenings below deck himself. The sights and sounds—and even the smells—seemed to bring those rumors to life.

  Now the ship had dropped anchor, sheltering from the wind in the lee of a small island, preparing to ride out the storm, in every sense. With the dark mood nearly unbearable, a meeting had finally been called.

  Suddenly, there were more shouts on deck. Owen leaned in, but the wooden door was too thick—and the wind outside too strong—for him to make out the words. He cupped his hand around his right ear and moved over to the narrow gap of the doorframe. He could sense the others crowding around behind him.

  “What’re they saying?” asked Aaron.

  “SHHHH!” said Owen, closing his eyes and trying to concentrate. The steady drone of half a dozen people talking at once was mostly drowned out by the wind. But as the gusts died down for a moment, a single shout cut through the air.

  “Hand over Wrickitts!”

  Owen heard it clearly, not just the words but the voice. It was the new first mate, William Shannahan. But who was he shouting at? It couldn’t possibly be—

  “Stand down, Shannahan.”

  Owen gasped. It was the captain’s voice. “He’s a sick man and he’ll get our care,” the captain continued. There was a murmuring of agreement.

  “Sick?” shouted Shannahan as the murmuring changed to an angry grumbling. “The man is in—”

  The whipping wind returned, whistling through the gap in the doorframe and carrying away the rest of Shannahan’s words. Owen slumped to the floor, stunned by what he’d just heard. The first mate arguing with the captain …

  “What did you hear?” repeated Aaron.

  Owen looked up at him, his eyes wide with disbelief, and spoke a single word. It was a word that even sailors, who called sharks “Johnnies” and made light of the most dangerous conditions, seldom dared to speak. It was a word like dark magic.

  “Mutiny.”

  “Here, try this,” said Henry.

  Owen raised his eyes from the floor. “Put that back in the case!” he said. “It’s fragile. Not even the captain drinks from it.”

  Henry turned the ornate little glass over in his hands, examining its etched surface. Owen was sure he’d drop it. “It’s decorative!” Owen said, deploying his most formidable vocabulary word.

  “But it’s made of glass,” countered Henry.

  “That’s why it’s decorative!” said Owen. “And if you break it, he’ll hang you with the first mate.” Owen gave up and turned back to the door. He had bigger worries. He pressed his ear against the doorframe again, but all he heard was whipping wind and muffled shouts. He listened harder, but now all he heard was the botanist’s assistant, still talking and filling up his other ear. He turned back to him, exasperated. “Be quiet! We need to find out what’s happening.”

  Once again, Henry held the glass out to him. “This will help,” he said. “Glass is an excellent conductor of sound.”

  Owen squinted up at him. He didn’t like this boy much, and just watching him hold the glass made Owen nervous—but he was desperate. “Show me how,” he said.

  Henry knelt down next to him. “You put the open end on the door,” he said, “and then you put your ear on the closed end.”

  Owen took hold of the glass carefully and followed the instructions. The others all leaned in, trying to measure his reaction. “Anything?” said Manny.

  “Shhhh!” Owen hissed, his ear pressed against the glass. “I hear them …”

  His voice trailed off as the argument started up again. The glass amplified the words and spared him the whistling wind in the door gap.

  “There he is!” called a voice Owen couldn’t quite place.

  “It’s Wrickitts—dear Lord, look at him!” Owen tried to understand what was happening. Had William Wrickitts heard his name called and dragged himself out of his sick berth? A louder shout interrupted his thoughts: “Get him!”

  The words were followed by more shouts and heavy thumping sounds. The argument had become a scuffle. But why argue over a man who could barely walk? A man who could no longer even speak?

  Owen tried to picture Wrickitts, remembering how he’d barely cleared the ship’s rail on his return from the jungle, and how the odd hitch in his walk had gotten worse and worse in the days since. He’d shambled around, dragging his feet heavily across the deck, clumsier and more confused with each passing day. A strange and gruesome rash had broken out on his skin, and he’d fallen mute, either with nothing to say or no way to say it. That was when he’d been confined to a sickbed to recuperate—or at least to prevent his devilish ailment from spreading. Rumor had it he’d even taken to perfuming himself to cover the heavy smell of his decay.

  Owen hadn’t given it much thought, except to pity the man, formerly one of their best and strongest sailors. Imagine an old salt like Wrickitts reduced to perfuming himself, using a gift procured for a lady, perhaps, on his own leathery hide. But now something else occurred to Owen: the rumors of the “strange tropical illness” that had cut a deadly swath through the lan
ding party, and the reality of the one laying poor Wrickitts low … Was that why the mutineers wanted him? His illness? But to what end?

  The answer came quickly. “We’ve got him, Mr. Shannahan!”

  “Do as you must!” called the first mate.

  “Don’t you touch that man!” called the captain. “He is under our care, and if we must fly the quarantine flag in port, then so be—”

  A sound like thunder cut off the captain’s words. No glass was needed to hear it through the door. Owen flinched as the amplified blast rang in his ear. The others in the cabin jumped back, and one or two even shouted with alarm. Owen leaned back in. He held his breath and listened harder than he ever had in his life. Approaching storm or not, he knew that was no clap of thunder.

  It was a gunshot.

  “Throw him over the side!” called Shannahan. Between the wind and waves, Owen could only imagine the next sound: a soft and silky splash he knew all too well. He’d heard it several times before—during burials at sea.

  “My Lord,” he whispered.

  “You mutinous cur!” called the captain. Owen was relieved to hear his voice, if not his words. “I’ll sail into New York with the lot of you hanging from the yardarms!”

  The shouts intensified, and the scuffling gained such strength that Owen could feel it through the wood of the deck beneath him. He sprang to his feet and tossed the precious glass back over his shoulder. He didn’t need it anymore. The time for words was over. It was open mutiny now.

  Three shots rang out in quick succession—the officers’ pistols. Shrieks of pain mixed with the shouts of rage, telling Owen that the rest of the work would be done with blades and hands. He rammed his shoulder hard into the heavy door, only to bounce off. “Help me!” he called. “We must break it down.”

  He turned back to the others, but they had taken cover as soon as they’d heard the gunshots. Aaron and Thacher were huddled under the table, and the Spanish brothers were kneeling along the wall. Only Henry was still standing close by, staring down at the broken glass at his feet in what seemed to Owen a spell of stupid consternation.

  Owen glared back at him, the other boy’s slender frame silhouetted against the heavy glass windows at the back of the cabin. Outside, night was falling and the seas were rising. The waves tossed angrily under the fading light, their foamy tops an ashen gray, and the vessel dipped and pitched and rolled under their command.

  Out on deck, the fight was already ending. There was one last scream, one last sailor succumbing to some unseen slash or phantom stab.

  Owen turned slowly back toward the door. He desperately hoped that the next sound he heard would be Captain Eagling, bloodied but triumphant, opening the door and releasing the young crew members he had kept safe.

  But as the moment stretched agonizingly on, the only sounds were those of wind and waves. And when a human voice rose at last, it was the last one Owen wanted to hear.

  Shannahan.

  “Over the side with ’em, boys!” he called. The silky splashes rose once more in Owen’s mind—bodies committed to the deep with neither goodwill nor prayer. There was a brief pause as the mutineers did their dirty work and then: “Him too. And let it be done.”

  No name was given for the last body tossed over the rail, and none was needed.

  The captain, thought Owen. My captain.

  Aaron lifted his head and drew in a long breath through his nose. “Is that smoke?” he said.

  Owen sniffed the air. It was smoke. He leaned closer to the door. A gust of wind whistled through the gap, and suddenly the smell was stronger. “We have to get out of here!” he said.

  This time, the others didn’t argue. They rushed the door together. Owen and Aaron, the two largest, were in front. They buried their shoulders into the wood as the smaller boys pushed from behind. But the wood was thick. Owen’s shoulder ached as they drew back and crashed into the door for the third, fourth, and then fifth time. Stars burst and swirled across his vision. Finally, on the sixth try, he heard a dry, splintering sound. The door was pulling away from one of its heavy iron hinges. He shifted over, targeting that edge, and with two more bull rushes, the old door broke free.

  Owen stepped through first, squinting into flickering firelight and coughing on thick smoke. His fists were clenched, ready for a fight, but the threat he saw was far more explosive. “What the blazes?” he said as the others filed out behind him.

  It was a fitting oath, because in the center of the deck, a fire was burning. A length of rolled-up sailcloth had been curled into a semicircle, with one end aflame and the other end wedged beneath a wooden barrel.

  “That’s gunpowder!” shouted Aaron.

  The fire had already rounded the bend in the cloth and was creeping forward despite the light rain, the heat drying the cloth as the flames marched onward with an ominous sizzle. If those flames reached the barrel, Owen knew that it would explode with enough force and fire to ignite all the gunpowder below deck too.

  “Get the buckets from the pump!” shouted Owen.

  “There’s no time for that,” called Aaron. Owen didn’t doubt him—the powder monkey knew more about the treacherous nature of combustion than the others ever would.

  Owen rushed across the rolling deck. He could feel the warmth of the flames against his skin as he leapt over the center of the burning cloth to reach the barrel. His heart pounded as he crouched down low and wheeled the little cask off the rolled cloth. Aaron rushed up next to him and kicked the end of the cloth across the deck, just to be sure.

  Owen nodded his approval and then headed over to the seawater pump to get the first bucket of water himself. He cleared the steps to the low forecastle in a single leap. It wasn’t quite night yet, but the heavy clouds made it seem darker than the hour as they doused the burning cloth.

  With the immediate disaster averted, Owen finally had time to wonder: Where in all this gray gloom were the mutineers? And why on earth or sea would they try to blow up the ship?

  As he turned to haul his empty bucket back where he’d found it, he got his answer. A flash of far-off lightning lit the turbulent sea, and he saw a long boat crest a longer wave.

  “Look!” he shouted as Aaron and Manny walked past with buckets of their own.

  “Where?” Manny called over the low rumble of thunder just now reaching the ship.

  Owen waited for it to subside. “To leeward, two points off the beam.”

  The others peered out over the rail waiting for the next lightning strike. The ship’s launch appeared again, half full of men and making for the small island the ship had been sheltering behind. Owen took in as much as he could in the quick flicker of light. “They’ve set up a sailing rig,” he said, eyeing the little mast in the middle of the boat and the tightly furled cloth wrapped around it. He was sure they’d taken the spare navigation equipment as well: a quadrant, a compass or two, and probably a Bowditch as well. Captain Eagling had sworn that nothing aboard was as valuable as Nathaniel Bowditch’s encyclopedia of navigation, and Owen knew he never set sail without a spare copy. “They’ll shelter upon the island tonight and then set sail in the morning.”

  “Aye, but … why?” said Aaron, his voice betraying his bafflement.

  That is the question, thought Owen, staring into the storm. Why capture a ship only to abandon it in an angry sea? And why shut off all hope of return by blowing the ship up behind you? Even in the deepening gloom, he could see that the launch was riding low in the water, weighed down with men and supplies. And as hard as those men were rowing, they were still a long, hard pull from a small and unknown shore.

  He had one final thought as he turned away, darker than the onrushing storm: I hope none of them make it.

  Two events occurred in quick succession, and Henry—taking an analytical approach, as usual—deemed them both regrettable.

  First, night fell. Under the heavy blanket of clouds, the sky became a pure black.

  Then, as if waiting only for the cover of
darkness, the storm hit. No longer far off, the thunder and lightning were now simultaneous, loud enough to stun and bright enough to blind.

  The rain fell in lukewarm sheets as the ship’s boys scrambled across the dark and treacherous deck, taking in the last of the sails and battening down the hatches to keep the water out. Henry heard their shouts and grunts over the whipping wind, but he himself had no idea where to go or what to do. He was in the waist of the ship, the low stretch between the raised forecastle in the front and the quarterdeck aft. Soaked to the bone and blind as a bat, he had never felt so exposed or helpless in his life. It was all he could do to keep his balance, and as the waves rose higher, even that became too much. The Polaris lurched abruptly to the side, and Henry slid helplessly down the rain-slick deck. His soggy, treadless boots provided no traction whatsoever as he hurtled toward a roiling sea that he could only hear. This is how I die, he thought, panic and resignation mixing like the fresh rainwater falling into the salty waves.

  “Ooooof!” he gasped. The sharp pain in his ribs told him that he was still alive—at least for now. He reached down and grabbed for whatever he’d just crashed into. His desperate, clutching hands told him it was the ship’s rail that had saved his life. Lightning lit the sky again, and he gazed down into the frothy tumult below. It seemed mere feet away, but suddenly the distance began to grow. As the wave passed beneath the ship, the low side rose up. Henry soon found himself clutching the rail for dear life, not to avoid falling forward but to avoid flying backward across the deck and tumbling over the other side.

  He cast his eyes around desperately and saw the door to the captain’s cabin crack open, the faint light of the hanging lamp still burning within. A shadow slipped inside and the gap closed. The others were already retreating inside. He unwrapped one sore arm from the rail and took a wobbly half step toward the cabin. As he did, the ship rolled once again, dipping him back down toward the sea. He threw himself against the rail.