Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

We stayed that way, in stillness, until I broke free and launched myself out of the hold. Seville was already some distance behind. The crew, surprised by a stowaway, laughed at my terror — I’d never gone to sea, never learned to swim. A hand shoved me overboard, into the water, and I could hear their pleasure at my thrashing. The shoreline disappeared from my view, and I was sure to die.

Without warning, a thick arm wrapped around my neck and I found myself dragged to the surface, then to the riverbank. I vomited water into my lap. My rescuer, the man from the hold, stared back at the ship as it coasted down river. Our swim had transformed him, washed him clean. How supple and pale his skin was, with inky hair tufting along his arms. He took a bandoliered wineskin out from under his shirt — the cork had popped and the wineskin was swollen with water. He poured it and the water ran clay-red. The stolen, ruined mace. The thief shook his head and tossed the skin into the current. We said nothing.

I brought him back to my mother’s shop. My mother was gone and we lay on my bed of flour sacks to dry. He held me tightly, his arm belting me from behind, as Diego has done, as if I were on the verge of falling. There are many ledges that split this world, between the known and the unknown, and we choose to go over. While the thief slept, I watched his pulse tick in a vein in his forearm, a single cord snapping taut then loose in neat, regular meter. I was more awake than I’d ever been. It is said the celestial spheres chime as they roll against each other. In just this way, my body vibrated against his. I knew then I would leave my mother and join his world, the world of men.

The Elena drifted at the ledge. We continued with the watches, four hours to a shift, all heads listening for a catch of canvas. But no breeze filled the sails, and a small, inexorable current pushed us toward the drop.

At evening, the hard sun sank below the ledge. With the Elena hove to and sideways toward it, the English conscript took a crossbow — he was now inseparable from it — and fired an arrow over. It dropped silently out of view. Alfredo told him he “had missed” and fired another. It too vanished.

At half a league’s distance from the ledge, the captain — from his bunk — ordered all the ballast dumped from the ship and the crew to mount the sweeps. We would row the Elena back into whatever trades had brought us here. With our barrels of supplies adrift around us, the crew dug the oars in the water the entire night. I laid my quill in the ledger and joined Diego to pull. We sat next to each other on a bench, and in the darkness, he laid his hand atop mine.

Our interpreter, Pinzón, was afraid the motion of the oars would call the serpents. We set torches along the gunwale, but spotted nothing. Perhaps even the serpents recognized the precipice, the way certain fish know to stop at the mouth of the Guadalquivir and go no further. Despite our hours rowing, the Elena ’s prow made no progress. The current toward the ledge was too strong.

The captain called out to me. Inside his quarters, he lay dressed in a long, loose tunic, Coralito kneeling at his side. From the hem, Captain Veragua’s withered legs stuck out long and rigid as fork tines. He seemed to have lost half his weight.

“How far are we?” he asked. “Coralito cannot see the distance.”

“I should think we will meet the ledge in two days’ time,” I said.

The captain closed his eyes. In the faint light, I made out on his shirt the spottings of blood and grease, where Diego had applied fat as a salve.

“Drop the sea anchors behind us,” the captain ordered. “And bring the longboat.” He lifted himself up and winced. “Dress me, Coralito,” he said.

I did as I was commanded, though his intentions were unclear. I woke Alfredo and Armando to cast the sea anchors. The broad canvas sacks hit the water and swelled. They would slow our drift nearly to a stop, but we would no longer be able to turn and sail. Next, I led the longboat that trailed the Elena up amidships. Without sail or mast, the longboat was designed for short islanding journeys. It was a glorified rowboat, shadeless and exhausting. Didn’t the captain know we were a thousand leagues from home? Or had his mind fevered past reason?

“You can’t row that to Spain,” the English conscript said, a slick rat wriggling in his hand. “Not without miracles.”

“We’re not going back,” I said and tied the line of the longboat to a pin.

Pinzón paced the deck, scratching the back of his hand until it bled. “We must be cursed. Some sin lives aboard this ship.” He saw me then, his eyes begging me. “Where is the sin, Peralonso?”

The English conscript slit the throat of the rat and held it over the water by the tail as it thrashed and the blood drained into the sea. “Tell him, boy. You know where.”

Pinzón looked back and forth, puzzled. A narrow flame coiled inside me, burning away my breath. “My heart is pure,” I said.

He brandished his wet knife. The rat went still. “Is that what Diego likes? Your purity?” he said, tongue flickering between his teeth. He hammered his knife into the gunwale and dug his fingers under the flesh as he tore the skin from the body.

The captain tolled the bell. He winced in his officer’s trousers, a pouch in his hand, and I fell in with the gathering crew, happy to leave the conscript to his work. “Let us give thanks to God who has thought us worthy to discover such a great wonder, this ledge,” the captain began. He shook the pouch. In the sack, he explained, were beans representing the crew of the Elena , and among them were four marked with crosses, four great honors. Each of us would come and take a single bean and those that pulled a cross would strike out for the ledge.

The men eyed one another. Our captain had admitted that our great expedition was folly. The countries we knew were the only countries. But what unimaginable vale awaited us over the ledge? What did it feel like to fall forever?

The sack was passed from man to man. The English conscript went first, and though I prayed for fortune not to visit him, he smiled and showed his smooth bean. When Diego pulled his, he made no expression, which I took for luck. The carpenter Ginés pulled the first marked one and Pinzón the second. He rushed to the captain.

“I’m not a seaman, nor have I any skill with a bow,” Pinzón pleaded. “I will be a failure to the crew of that small boat.”

The captain rested his charred hand on Pinzón’s shoulder. “Every country, every animal speaks a language. When we return, you will tell with your best words what you have seen.”

“But this plan is death.”

The captain said back, “You shall be rewarded. Or face the lash.”

I went last. On the surface of the final bean, I felt the markings of a knife. The last cross.

The captain asked, “Who is the fourth man?”

I looked to Diego, and he must have seen the fear in me because he then stepped forward, casting his bean off the side. He would take my place and leave me alive.

The captain said, “We will leave at dawn.”

As the crew scattered across the deck, sinking into their privacies, I felt a cutting mix of shame and loss. I had been made a coward. The men began to pray for deliverance, for the opportunity to see their fathers and wives and children again, for an everlasting life that I could not understand. I knew only the ache of the present. I thought of my mother pulling a tray of alfajores from the oven, scored with the Hebrew letter for righteousness. “The world begins the day we are born,” she told me, “and the world will end the day we die.”

Under the torchlight, I found Diego on the forecastle, staring out at the drop alone. He looked calm and peaceful and welcomed me with a pat on the deck beside him.