The Confusion

“You may scratch the one woman off that list, at least for the time being,” Jack said. “We plucked her out of the water fifteen minutes after you.”

There was a long pause, and then Edmund de Ath said: “Elizabeth de Obregon survived?”

“If you call this surviving,” Jack answered.

“HE SWALLOWED!” SAID MONSIEUR ARLANC the next day, having cornered Jack up at the head. “I saw his Adam’s apple move.”

“Of course he swallowed-he was eating dinner.”

“Dinner was finished!”

“All right, he was drinking sugar-water then.”

“It was not that sort of a swallow,” said Monsieur Arlanc. “I mean he was perturbed. Something is not right.”

“Now Monsieur Arlanc, consider it: What could de Ath possibly find troubling about the poor lady’s survival? She’s half out of her mind anyway.”

“People who are half out of their minds sometimes forget discretion, and say things they would normally keep secret.”

“All right, then, perhaps he and the lady were having a scandalous affair de coeur-that would explain why he’s been sitting at her bedside ever since.”

Jack was sitting in a hole, his buttocks dangling over the Pacific, and Monsieur Arlanc was standing next to him; together they gazed down the length of the ship for a few moments. The several divisions and subdivisions of the current watch were distributed among the masts and sail-courses, running through a drill that every man knew in his sleep, trimming the sails for new weather that was bearing down on them out of the northwest. Their limbs were swollen from beri-beri and many of them moved in spasmodickal twitches as their feet and hands responded balkily to commands from the mind. On the upperdeck, in the middle of the ship, a dozen Malabaris were standing around a corpse stitched up in a sheet, joining in some sort of heathenish mourning-chant prepatory to flinging it overboard. A scrap of cordage had been lashed around its ankles and made fast to an empty drinking water jar packed with pot-shards and ballast-sand, so that the body would be pulled smartly down to David Jones’s Locker before the sharks who swarmed in the ship’s wake could make sport with it.

“We gained two mouths from the Galleon, and fretted about going hungry on that account,” Jack mused. “Since then three have died.”

“There must be some reason for you to sit there and tell me things of which I am already aware,” said Monsieur Arlanc, mumbling pensively through swollen gums, “but I cannot fathom it.”

“If strong sailors are dropping dead, what chance has Elizabeth de Obregon?”

Monsieur Arlanc spat blood over the rail. “More chance than I have. She has endured a voyage that would slay any man on this ship.”

“Are you trying to tell me that there is a worse voyage in all the world than this one?”

“She is the sole survivor of the squadron that was sent out from Acapulco years ago, to find the Islands of Solomon.”

Now Jack was glad in a way that he was sitting on the head, for it was a pose well-suited to profound silent contemplation. “Stab me!” he said finally. “Enoch told me of that expedition, and that the only survivor was a woman, but I had not drawn the connexion.”

“She has seen wonders and terrors known only to the Spaniards.”

“In any event she is very sick just now,” Jack said, “and so it is no wonder that Edmund de Ath sits at the lady’s bedside-we’d expect no less of a priest.”

“And nothing more of a blackguard.”

Jack sighed. The corpse went over-board. Several Filipino idlers-which meant tradesmen not attached to any particular watch-were arguing about ducks. A flight of ducks had been sighted in the distance this morning and several were of the opinion that ducks were never seen more than a few miles from land.

“It is in the nature of men cooped up together aboard ship that they fall to infighting at some point,” Jack finally said.

Monsieur Arlanc grinned, which was an unspeakably nasty sight: his gums had peeled back from his mandibles to show blackening bone. “It is some sort of poetic justice. You turn my faith against me by arguing that I am predestined to distrust Edmund de Ath.”

MONSIEUR ARLANC DIED a week later. They held on to his corpse for as long as they could, because a fragment of kelp was sighted in the water almost at the moment of his death, and they hoped that they could make landfall and bury him in the earth of California. But his body had been well decayed even while he’d been still alive. Dying scarcely improved matters, and forced them to make another burial at sea. It was just as well that they did. For even though kelp-weeds continued to bob in the waves around Minerva’s hull, it was not for another ten days after they threw the Huguenot’s corpse overboard that they positively sighted land. They were just below thirty-nine degrees of latitude, which meant they’d missed Cape Mendocino; according to the vague charts that van Hoek had collected in Manila, and a few half-baked recollections of Edmund de Ath, the land they were looking at was probably Punto Arena.