Kage Baker: Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key

John was too weary, after a day of hard work, to press for more. His restraint seemed to embolden Mr. Tudeley, who one day announced he was just going for a coconut.

“Either of you fellows care for one? I’ve a damned perishing thirst.” he said, elaborately casual.

Sejanus, busy planing a length of broken plank into a rudder for the pinnace, merely grunted his refusal. “Aye, thank’ee,” said John, who was hobbling back and forth in the sun like a donkey, dragging planks and beams from their lumber pile.

They worked on a while. At last John stopped, wiped his face on his sleeve and glared at the little heap of pegs Mr. Tudeley had been set to whittle.

“Where’s he got to, anyhow?”

“I reckon it’s all the fresh air,” said Sejanus cryptically, as he worked.

“What’s that?”

“Didn’t you notice? He’s been using the word damn all morning. Damn this, damn that, damn hot sun, damn wet wood. Did a lot of talking about damned Society and its damned restraints. Must be feeling powerful manly today.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I’d like my God-damned coconut,” said John. Sejanus snickered.

“I reckon he would too.”

“I’ll go get it myself, then,” said John, and started up the sand dune. As he came limping over the top he met Mr. Tudeley staggering back. Mr. Tudeley’s spectacles hung under his chin; one lens had been broken, and he had a split lip.

“Where’s my coconut? And what happened to you?” John demanded.

“Oh! I just thought I’d…see if there were fresher coconuts on the tree, you know, and I made to climb one, and, er, fell,” said Mr. Tudeley, pulling his straw hat down in a vain attempt to shade his face. He had lost another tooth, too. “Terribly sorry.”

He wobbled on past John, who watched him go and then hastened back to camp. There he found Mrs. Waverly apparently serene and untroubled, though her color was a little high. She was weaving strips of rags into cord to make slow-match, the very picture of a thrifty housewife.

“Is all well?” John asked. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Why, of course, Mr. James. What do you lack?”

“I was only thirsty, is all.”

“Ah!” She rose and, taking a cutlass, neatly whacked the top from one of the coconuts in their makeshift larder. “Allow me.” She presented John with the coconut. He drank from it, thanked her, and went back to work.

As he stood looking down at the beach, John saw a line of cloud advancing over the sea, far off to the east, the same dirty coppery color as he’d noticed the morning of the storm. “Bugger,” he muttered, and hurried down to the others. Sejanus had paused work to pick the broken glass out of Mr. Tudeley’s spectacles. As John approached he was tying a loop through the empty half of the frame.

“There you are,” he said, fastening it through Mr. Tudeley’s buttonhole. “It’ll dangle there and you can just hold it up to your eye when you want to look at something close.”

“Not that I waste much time reading nowadays,” said Mr. Tudeley, with a sigh.

“Look out there,” said John, pointing at the horizon. They looked.

“Oh, hell,” said Sejanus.

They spent the rest of the afternoon dragging everything they had salvaged up from the beach, and the half-finished pinnace and the boat too, as close to the center of the island as they could haul them. The clouds advanced smoothly, relentlessly, and the heat came with them. John thanked God he was safe on dry land this time.

They battened down, stowing the powderkegs under several thicknesses of canvas, and rigged a shelter with barrels and the overturned boat, for when the rain came; and yet, as the hours went by and the skittering hot wind fanned their faces, no rain fell. The sea rose and began to break on the reef with a sound like cannon fire.

“Maybe it’ll miss us,” said John, at sunset, looking at the red sky in the west. Sejanus shrugged.

They ate hastily of a kind of stew of salt beef and coconut water, and sat around the fire watching as night fell. All to the east and north there were flashes of lightning but an eerie lack of thunder. The wind dropped off suddenly. John, looking up at the black starless sky, felt he might as well have been in a room indoors.

“I wish it would break,” said Mr. Tudeley, mopping his forehead. “The air’s stifling.”

Mrs. Waverly, who had risen to open a coconut for herself (she being disinclined to drink rum like the others) cried out suddenly. “Oh, the sea!”

The others jumped to their feet. Looking out over the palisadoes they could see the waves breaking in green fire. “Great God!” cried Mr. Tudeley.

“That’s just, what d’you call it, that’s just a red tide,” said John. “Phosphorescence.”

“What makes it?” demanded Sejanus. John shrugged.

“Seen it in a ship’s wake plenty of times,” he said. “Maybe it’s something rotten in the water, same as tree stumps when they shine in the dark. Nothing to be scared of.”

“Do you think it’s all the drowned men?” asked Mrs. Waverly in a shaky voice.

“Suppose so,” said John.

A flash of lightning came then, a flare of violet fire that ran across the sky. A long forked chain stabbed down into the sea; John could imagine the water boiling to steam where it struck, and cooked fish floating to the surface from five fathoms below.

“Storm’s getting closer,” said Sejanus. “Maybe we’d best—”

Another flash came, so close the branched lightning looked thick as a man’s arm, white-hot as the sun’s heart, with a shattering boom of thunder. John could have sworn he felt its heat scorching his face. For a second he was blind, but for the afterimage dancing in his eyes. His heart contracted with the fear that he had just seen something out at sea, briefly illuminated in the flash. Had there been masts and spars? Was some other luckless mariner out there in the night?

“Did anyone see—” began Mrs. Waverly, before the next flash came. There was a noise like a bomb rolling across the floor of heaven and then it exploded, with a roar that knocked them down. John found himself groveling in the sand at the base of the palisadoes, feeling with his fingers to be certain his eyes hadn’t been burned out of his head.

“Oh, no, no, no—” Mrs. Waverly moaned. John struggled to his feet, using his crutch, and she seized his arm. “Why would anyone go to sea—”

There was a ship, black and gleaming with rain. He could see her clearly now. The green flame in the water swept her deck and ran from her every line and spar. Saint Elmo’s Fire, thought John, and tried to tell Mrs. Waverly that was all it was, but his words were lost in the next crash of thunder. Yet after all it wasn’t the ship glowing with phosphorescence that was the horror, it wasn’t that her sails were rags and still carried her before the wind with sickening speed; it was that she was being driven straight for the rock that had broken the Harmony ’s back.

John opened his mouth to shout, for all the good that would have done. But he made no sound; and neither did the ship, when she struck. He saw it all, he saw her strike and slew around just as the Harmony had done, he saw her heeling over, with her mainmast sprung and toppling from the impact. He fancied he saw the little black wet figures staggering about on her slanting deck, before the next terrible flash came and left him blinking at floating spots.

There wasn’t a sound. Not even thunder. He rubbed his eyes and looked, and saw that the ship was gone. The sea beat to a glowing green mist on the rock, but there was nothing where the wreck had been a moment before.

“Where’d she go?” he cried hoarsely. His voice sounded strange and muffled in his ears. He turned to stare at the others. Mr. Tudeley and Mrs. Waverly looked on, their faces set, drained of all color. Sejanus watched stonily, with inexplicable anger.