The Ancient. Muriel Gray
on a crate. An examination of the weal told him it was indeed an injury of no consequence, and he smiled at the ten-minute break he’d earned as a bonus in the hot, busy hell that led up to lunch. He craned backwards and peered out into the galley to see where the cook was now. Becko’s head was turned the other way, and the boy quickly shut the storeroom door a fraction more with his foot, reached into his back pocket under his apron ties and took out a packet of cigarettes.
He glanced up to the porthole, then stood on the crate and opened the window. Leonardo Becko hated smoking in the galley, so he would have to be extra careful. He pushed his body against the bulkhead, stuck his head as far out of the porthole as the limited hinge would allow, lit up a cigarette and took a long, delicious drag. The sun beat down on his hot face, but the breeze from the sea blew away both his smoke and his sweat in a way that made him close his eyes in pleasure, enjoying the rare moment of solitude.
Salvo loved the ozone smell of the sea, the fresh, salty tang that it left on your skin and in your hair. It was the one great consolation for working in this hole of a ship. He took another long suck of nicotine and let himself dream of home.
The breeze was souring. He opened his eyes and took a deeper sniff, curious as to where this new smell was coming from. Instantly, his senses were assaulted by an almost solid intake of air that was fetid and foul beyond reason. He coughed back a throatful of vomit, fighting to control it and sent it back below where it belonged.
Tears in his eyes from the effort of this, he stepped down from the crate and looked around to see if the cause was coming from within. The air he breathed freshened again, full of the hot comfortable smells of cooking, steam and condensation. The rotting had most definitely come from outside.
He looked quizzically up at the porthole, and this time stepped more gingerly up on the crate and put his head out. Only four or five inches of the window would open on account of the safety catch, but he forced his face out through it, trying not to breathe deeply this time. To his left, the limited space let him see along the outer hull of the ship as far as the bow. It was harder to see to the right, or above, but he could also look down and just see the foam breaking below at the waterline. He sniffed more gently this time, and the same reek attacked his nostrils like acid. He coughed, waited until his eyes cleared of the tears, then strained to see.
There was movement. It was above him, faint, only on the very edge of his vision, and he felt it rather than saw it. Salvo contorted his head to twist up and see what it might have been, but the movement was unfeasible. He flicked through some possibilities of what might have moved on a smooth metal hull of a ship doing twenty knots. A seagull, maybe, caught in some peculiar way on something sharp? Or maybe a rope or cable come loose, dangling and scraping on the side. But what was making the smell? He tried one more tortuous move then gave up. Who cared what it was?
He flicked his precious cigarette from the porthole and shut the glass tight. The air inside the storeroom was like nectar after the stench from outside, and he sat back on the crate, his back against the wall, to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, gazing dreamily at the square of brilliant sunlight being projected onto a pile of potato sacks on the wall opposite him.
Not much would send a galley boy back to his work early from a break he had been gifted by the chef, but two things happened simultaneously that did just that.
Behind him, through the very hull of the ship itself, he felt a manic scraping, the vibration of some horrible metallic scuttling. The sound rats would make if they were ten feet long and made of something other than flesh. And the square of light that bathed the potato sacks blackened quickly into shadow and lit again. The boy leapt to his feet and whirled around to the porthole. It framed a perfect blue sky and bathed him in nothing more than benign sunshine.
Leonardo was surprised to see Salvo back so quickly, but he was pleased to have the help.
‘Turn that bloody stock down. And get over here and finish these carrots.’
‘Yes, Chef,’ the boy said weakly and wiped his sweating upper lip with a burnt hand that he had quite forgotten.
Even the most expensive penthouse apartment in any of the world’s greatest cities would have a hard time competing with the view from the bridge of the Lysicrates. Dilapidated and shabby though it was, when the ship was in sail and the cargo deck below stretched like a pointing finger into the dark blue Pacific, it would be hard to stare down from the bridge’s angled windows with anything other than awe.
When Renato Lhoon entered, the third officer on watch was staring out ahead as one might expect, but not with awe at the might of the ocean and its domination by man. He had the look of a man who was half asleep.
‘Wakey wakey, Ernesto.’
The man turned round quickly and tried to look alert. He nodded to Lhoon then looked down at the screen of the echo sounder as though he were interested. His senior officer stood at his side and glanced down at the array of flickering instrument screens between them and the ocean panorama.
‘Set fair?’
Ernesto nodded and pointed to the curling weather fax on the console beside him, but Renato’s eye had already drifted to the GPS.
‘Have we altered course?’
‘Eh, yeah. Just to the co-ordinates that Officer Cotton decided.’ Ernesto gave an expansive sweep with one open hand over the instruments, imagining that might help explain things.
‘Let me see the log.’
The third officer handed it to him and he scanned last night’s entry. There was no mention of a navigational alteration. But then Cotton would forget to make an entry in his log if dinosaurs roamed onto the cargo deck and tore down the derricks with their teeth. Renato sighed with exasperation.
‘What was the alteration?’
Ernesto fumbled for a moment then told him. The ship had been re-routed five degrees west, and their course was taking them directly up the middle of the Milne Edwards Trench, the one that had so freaked Esther. It was not the usual shipping lane and although it was only a small detour, its purpose, in fine and settled weather, seemed meaningless.
Renato was not going to challenge his senior officer’s decision in front of a subordinate, and so he nodded as though he knew about it and had simply forgotten.
The man seemed relieved, took back the log, and turned again to feign interest in the echo sounder, which was presently showing a vertiginous depth of seventeen thousand feet.
Renato walked casually over to the starboard window and checked on his chilli pepper plants, then as quietly as he had entered, left to go and find Cotton.
‘Recreation Room’ was rather a grand term for a space that boasted only one bookcase with some dog-eared pot-boilers in various languages, and a pile of elderly magazines. But Matthew Cotton was not slumped back on one of the three foam sofas, a rum and Coke in his hand, because he was attracted by the possibilities of the reading material. The sideboard that ran the length of the wall was the officers’ makeshift bar, a trusting affair run by the catering staff, from which imbibers took what they wanted from the generous gantry and filled in their intake for later payment on the personalized sheets left for the purpose.
Matthew had long since given up entering his drinks on his dog-eared piece of paper measure by measure, and it was understood now that he would simply purchase his ration by the bottle.
The dent he had made on his current bottle of Bacardi was not inconsiderable, and his eyes were closed, his head leant against the hard foam as the effects of it started to make their mark.
‘Double watch again, Matthew. Eight till four.’
Cotton didn’t open his eyes. ‘Shit, have a drink, Renato. I know when my fuckin’ watch is.’
Renato Lhoon left the doorway where he’d been standing for some time, looking at his senior officer with contempt, and entered the room. ‘It’s two-thirty. I don’t need no drink.’
‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,’ sniggered Matthew