Polaris Read online

  We don’t have to be enemies, thought Owen. It doesn’t have to be like that. And then he drifted off for a few hours of restless sleep. His nightmares were built mostly of his memories: cracked masts, bodies tossed overboard, and the dark corners between decks. He woke up near dawn to the jarring blows of the ship smashing crossways into the waves. He knew without needing to look that it must be Henry’s turn at the wheel.

  Over the next several days, the skies stayed clear and the winds held up. The ship continued its steady progress up into the Caribbean. As the ship made the most of its remaining sails, the crew took advantage of the relative calm.

  Aaron took it upon himself to teach Henry what he could of seamanship. Owen saw the two of them talking and even laughing as they pushed their mops around and fussed over frayed ropes.

  “Enough with the old junk, Aaron,” Owen called out at one point. “Teach him to steer!” Everyone on board, weary of their bones being bounced around when Henry was at the wheel, laughed loudly.

  Owen did his best to get along with Thacher. It was easier than he expected. The boy’s disposition seemed to brighten with each day he spent in the sun and salt air instead of retrieving barrels and stowing supplies in the now all but forgotten hold. And as the young crew avoided the dark world below the deck, a new order was established above it.

  Owen continued to give most of the orders, when they were needed, but it was mostly clear what needed doing. Much of it was long established aboard the ship and seemed as inevitable as the sunrise. Adjusting the sails as the wind changed, taking your trick at the helm …

  But some things did change. First names took the place of barked titles. Aaron was no longer “You, powder monkey.” He was simply Aaron. The others no longer had “boy” affixed to the front of their names to bring them low. “Boy Owen” was simply “Owen.” They were all equal in their youth now. And they no longer had their ears twisted or arms tugged by officers unsatisfied with their work.

  The biggest change, of course, was that two of the ship’s boys were now known to be ship’s girls. Owen did his best to ignore the fact. It was a truth widely acknowledged on sailing ships that you could hand, reef, and steer, or you could not. He had seen how the distinctions of race, country, and class that so bedeviled men on land could fall away after a few weeks at sea, outweighed by competence, reliability, and skill. Aaron himself, he’d heard, was half Pequot.

  So why should gender prove any trickier? He no longer believed that females were bad luck on a ship. The Spanish sisters were undeniable assets, and he increasingly relied on Emma, in particular.

  Still, now that their tightly wrapped Spanish style had come undone, it seemed amazing to him that he had ever thought them to be boys. He couldn’t deny that it changed things somewhat. The two had always conversed in Spanish now and then, sometimes whispered and sometimes spoken. The understanding was always that they were sharing secrets, talking among themselves. Owen just didn’t remember ever being so interested in what those secrets might be.

  Especially Emma. What was she saying? Did she think he was a good sailor? Did she think of him at all? He tried to shake these thoughts from his head as soon as they arrived. But like a flock of starlings, they would come home to roost whenever he had time for idle thoughts.

  Fortunately, there wasn’t much of that. The crew was careful now to take in sail when the wind picked up and to let it back out when it dwindled. It seemed they were always either up in the rigging or coming down from it. By the third day, Owen noted, Henry was coming up with them. Still not nearly keeping up, he noted, but sometimes small steps were in order. And that was especially true when those steps took place seventy feet above a pitching deck.

  All in all, it was easy to get along when things were going well. And even with a skeleton crew—and a few cut corners—the work was still manageable in fair weather.

  But at the end of that fourth day, they ran out of supplies above deck. With no rain since the last quick squall, the scuttlebutt was nearly dry. The barrel of salt pork was mostly gone—and the sun had not been kind to what remained. The biscuits, meanwhile, had been done in by covert nibbling.

  “It was going to run out sooner or later,” said Maria, by all accounts the primary biscuit burglar.

  “True,” said Owen. He knew the same could be said of the good weather and goodwill, but he was in no hurry to speed the process along with needless confrontation. “But we will need to go below again, regardless. Nor will this be the last time.”

  The others muttered their assent as Owen looked up into the late-day sky and then down at the grate at his feet. He stared into the gloom below. Was there really something down there? he thought for the hundredth time. And could that truly be why the mutineers had abandoned ship? He considered it, and then, in words that would haunt him to the end, he thought, How bad could it truly be?

  He looked around at the others. He knew they were thinking much the same. The thought of ordering two people below again seemed cruel, especially considering the amiable new order on board. He honestly wasn’t even sure he could find two people who would obey.

  “Perhaps we should all go?” he said.

  The others looked around at each other, noncommittal. He searched his mind for something to sweeten the pot, to make the trip seem a bit less scary. He began to open his mouth before he really knew what he was going to say, and what came out surprised even him.

  “I know where there’s a gun.”

  “Should I stay at the wheel?” asked Aaron hopefully.

  Henry watched as Owen looked up at the sails and then straight ahead. He was pretty sure he even knew what Owen was looking at: light winds and small waves. He’d begun to get a bit of a feel for life at sea. His knees no longer wobbled quite so much as he made his way across the swaying deck, and he no longer lost a portion of his meals over the rail when the seas picked up. He looked down at his arms, which had progressed from an angry red to a dark and even tan.

  “No,” said Owen. “We’ll tie the wheel off. We’ll want all hands for this.”

  Owen consulted the compass once more, and then they looped rope over two of the spokes of the ship’s wheel, fixing it more or less on course. Henry tied one of the loops himself, a basic slipknot that Aaron had taught him the day before.

  “Is this entirely safe?” he asked as Maria lobbed a loop over a spoke on the other side.

  “Nothing is entirely safe,” said Owen.

  “That’s right,” said Aaron, nodding emphatically.

  “But there’s a device somewhere in the neighborhood of the tiller meant to give it a little play, in case the wheel gets stuck,” continued Owen. He paused and added, “Or the helmsman gets shot.”

  And on that note, they all followed Owen back to the cabin, their last stop before heading down the hatch.

  “Is it the captain’s gun?” said Thacher.

  “It’s not, neither,” said Aaron. “His gun is …” His voice trailed off. They all knew where that gun was: at the bottom of the sea. Henry remembered the quick crack of gunshots sounding through the cabin door.

  Owen didn’t answer; he just opened the freshly mended cabin door and went in. The lantern had been left burning. Owen turned it up as he passed, and the room came fully into view. Henry watched Owen’s back as he squatted down and began rooting through a polished leather sea trunk. His shoulder muscles moved visibly under his shirt and vest. Compact, powerful, and hunched over to forage, he reminded Henry of a chimpanzee he’d seen once. Pan troglodytes, he thought, remembering the creature’s scientific name. Owen troglodytes.

  Owen grunted, completing the effect, and then stood up. He brought a rectangular wooden box over to the table, below the hanging lantern.

  “Oooh,” said Thacher as he saw the polished wood and silver clasps of the box.

  Owen pressed a button on the front with his thumbs and the clasps popped open: tik-tik.

  “It’s ceremonial,” said Owen, deploying the word with bot
h pride and care. “He got it for rescuing some shipwrecked Frenchman or other, but I never saw him use it—or even carry it.”

  The room fell silent, and Henry craned his neck for a better look. The pistol was pressed into an indentation in the velvet lining of the case, formed to hold it snugly. The wood of the gun was dark and smooth, and the metal was bright and decorated with ornate etchings. Below its barrel, a small flask of gunpowder and eight polished lead balls—or were they silver?—had their own little homes in the velvet.

  Henry took half a step back as Owen gingerly pried the pistol from its case. Was it loaded?

  Owen wrapped his hand around the pistol’s grip, his finger resting lightly alongside the trigger guard. The gun’s intricate etchings caught the light as Owen pointed it at a blank stretch of wall. Henry saw a little ship riding waves of fine metal lines along the barrel, all sails set. He didn’t know much about guns, but he knew this was what they called a flintlock. He admired it from a purely scientific perspective. He saw the black wedge of flint in the hammer. When the trigger was pulled, he knew, the hammer would fall, striking the metal plate and creating a spark. That would ignite the gunpowder in the barrel and send the lead ball flying forward at high velocity. It was what happened after that—what happened when the lead ball hit its target—that made him a little queasy.

  “The way I figure it,” said Owen, “if there is something down there, we’d better arm ourselves.”

  Henry could hear the fresh confidence in his voice. Guns did that to men, he knew. That part made him a little queasy too. He was not the one holding the gun after all, and he figured he probably never would be. The others were less impressed, though.

  “And the way I figure it,” said Thacher, “if it’s a ghost down there, a gun won’t do one whit of good.”

  Owen frowned, though he couldn’t quite manage to pull his eyes away from the gleaming weapon in his hand.

  “He’s right,” said Aaron. “What more can a bullet do to Obed Macy that hasn’t been done already?”

  Emma crossed herself at the sound of the missing boy’s name, and Henry was surprised to find himself surrounded by so much superstition. Emma and Aaron too?

  “We just need a different sort of weapon,” said Maria.

  Henry looked at her. Had they all lost their minds? Was it really just he and Owen who were still concerned with the real physical world around them?

  Emma was nodding fiercely. “We need the good book,” she said.

  “I have this,” said Owen, lowering the pistol and pulling a small silver cross from under his shirt by its leather cord.

  Incredible, thought Henry. I have lost the chimp too.

  Emma looked skeptical. “That is something,” she said. “But where is the captain’s Bible?”

  Owen pointed the gun at the desk in the corner, looking for a moment as if he meant to execute the thing. “Top drawer,” he said.

  Emma glared at Owen until he lowered the gun, and then she walked over to the desk.

  Henry waited for her to return to the huddled group before posing a theory of his own. “What if it’s a mutineer down there?” he said. “How can we be certain they all left the ship?”

  “It’s true,” said Aaron, willing to consider any possible danger. “It could be a mutineer. Could be he was hurt in the fight.”

  “A wounded animal,” said Owen, considering it. “Dangerous …”

  Henry looked around at the others. They seemed to be at least entertaining the thought. He honestly wasn’t sure if he believed it himself, but he was glad to have restored a little rationality to the discussion. A wounded mutineer stumbling around between decks seemed like a nice middle ground: neither monster nor ghost.

  “Well, if it is,” said Owen, “then we will need the gun after all.” He lifted its gleaming barrel toward the light.

  “And they will need the Bible,” said Emma, lifting its worn leather cover up as well. “For they have sinned.”

  The little group looked around at each other, one last moment of hesitation.

  “So we are in agreement, then,” said Owen. “We have the right weaponry.”

  The others nodded.

  “But you should not have all of them,” said Thacher.

  Owen looked down at the gun, but that’s not what Thacher wanted. “Give me the cross,” he said, casting a subtle vote as to what he believed lurked below deck.

  Owen lifted it from around his neck. “Be careful with this,” he said, handing it over. “It was my mother’s.”

  “Carefulness,” said Thacher, slipping it around his neck, “is why I want it.”

  The final preparations were made. Owen poured gunpowder from the little flask down the gullet of the gun, then rolled a ball in after it, and packed it all in tightly. Then Maria took the lantern down from above the table. “Good idea,” said her sister. “They don’t seem to last long down below.”

  And with that, the little crew filed out of the cabin and toward the aft hatch. Maria was first with the lantern, Owen was next with the gun, and Emma and Thacher were next with their preferred forms of protection. Henry hung back slightly, lost in thought, which gave him a nice view of Aaron swiping one of the knives from the silverware drawer.

  “I want a weapon too,” he whispered once he realized he’d been seen.

  “What are you going to do?” said Henry. “Butter it?”

  “Better than nothing,” said Aaron, slipping the dull blade beneath his ragged belt.

  But Henry barely heard him. He was playing his own words over. I said “it,” he thought. Not “him,” but “it.” Without even meaning to, he’d cast his own subtle vote as to what lurked below.

  Once again he admonished himself with three familiar words: Be a scientist.

  But these were hard conditions for rational thought. The sky was dim above them but not yet dark. It was streaked with violet and hung with a sickle moon. But Henry knew these would provide cold comfort below, where such weak light wouldn’t penetrate.

  The stories played in his head—ghosts, monsters, mutineers—and so did the memories. Shadows at the edge of his vision; crashing noises, getting closer; a sickly sweet smell filling his nose.

  As he grasped the rungs of the ladder and began his descent, it was the last of these that he found himself contemplating. He knew that smell, or at least that type of smell. It wasn’t floral, though it was sweet enough to be. It was fungal. It was the subtle undertone of yeast—every bread lover’s favorite fungus—that gave it away. He had, in fact, encountered several varieties of funguses that smelled both sweet and yeasty, and that was back in boring old Boston.

  He could only imagine what wondrous varieties these tropical climates might hold. That had been the whole point of this expedition. The Amazon jungle was the ideal environment for growing all manner of things: flowers, trees, molds, fungi … It was the lure of all these teeming and exotic—and, above all, undiscovered—species that had cost his employer his life. And as he thought of Dr. Wetherby—of all he had taught him, and the tragic fate that had befallen the great botanist in that jungle—Henry understood something very clearly.

  There were ghosts on this ship, as sure and real as the well-worn wood below his feet, but those ghosts weren’t lurking somewhere down in the darkness. They were living in the minds of the survivors. The cook who had taught Aaron a bit of his craft, or the old salt who had taught him the knots he was now teaching Henry. The captain Owen still revered. The countless conversations between now-dead sailors that had helped shape the Spanish sisters’ English. The authors of all the little slights and abuses that had left Thacher so hardened and scarred.

  Maria called up from the bottom of the ladder, interrupting Henry’s musing. “Shattered!” she said. “Smashed all to pieces.”

  It took Henry a moment to realize she was talking about the lantern—the new lantern they’d just hung there a handful of fair-weather days earlier. Something was breaking them intentionally.

 
; He swallowed hard and descended into darkness.

  They stood in a little cluster at the bottom of the ladder. There was no pool of sunlight there this time. The only light came from Maria’s lantern.

  “Hold on tight to that lamp,” said Emma. “Something down here doesn’t seem to like them much.”

  “Someone,” corrected Thacher.

  Henry looked behind them and saw his own shadow stretching out into darkness. He looked back at the lantern. It didn’t illuminate their surroundings as much as it illuminated them. Come and get us, it seemed to say.

  “Let’s move,” said Owen, pointing his pistol straight down the passageway and into darkness. Henry noticed that the barrel was wobbling slightly, causing the lamplight reflecting off its polished surface to glitter and dance. Is his hand shaking?

  They pressed forward, stepping over the busted lanterns one by one. Their little circle of light moved with them, exposing another foot of the dark passageway with each step. Henry could feel water under his feet and hear the wet slaps of the others’ steps. It hadn’t been this bad the last time he’d come down.

  “There’s more water,” he whispered.

  Owen stopped and looked down. He nodded grimly, pointing the gun at the wall beside them. “Aye,” he said. “There are always little leaks, gaps in the hull, between the boards. The ship is long overdue for some tar and oakum to plug the gaps. She’s never been a dry vessel.”

  The thought sent another chill up Henry’s spine. But just imagine being sent down here with a bucket of tar and some bits of old rope, hunting every dark corner for gaps in the wooden planks of the hull.

  “Some of it will work its way down into the bilge, and we can get it with the chain pump,” said Aaron.

  “Aye, we’ll reach port long before we sink from small leaks,” said Thacher.

  Owen refused to take his eyes off the passage ahead of them, but Henry saw his shoulders stiffen at the suggestion. Even he knew that they were letting most of the day-to-day maintenance of the ship slide now. There was only so much six of them could do, especially when half their number seemed to be up in the rigging at any given time, and one always at the wheel. And that was above deck. What else are we neglecting below?