Lempriere's Dictionary (73 page)

‘Wonderful!’ he greeted the June sunshine flooding the decks, then ‘Aah’ as his back twinged. ‘Dear oh dear….’

‘Come on there!’ Hörst ‘the Wurst’ Craevisch chivvied him from somewhere below. Gradually the pirates assembled, wheezing in the cool morning air, watched from the helm by Wilberforce and the Internuncio. They scratched and muttered as brittle bones and rheumatic joints began their own slow reveille. Clearly, the mornings were difficult for them.

A scrabbling somewhere aloft and ‘Mussel’ Wilkins descended from the crow’s nest to join them both.

‘Saw her around three bells,’ he panted, ‘crossing the moonlight. She’s closer than we thought.’ Wilkins stopped to heave breath into his lungs.

‘How close?’ asked Wilberforce.

‘Close. Eight, ten leagues. Just for an instant the moonlight caught her sails. She’s showing no lights. Reckon she’ll be….’

‘Oi!’ a shout came up from the lower deck. All three looked down and saw Horst lying on his back, fat arms and legs pumping the air as he tried to rise from the deck.

‘Is it snails do that? Fall on their backs and can’t get up?’ Wilkins asked.

‘Tortoises,’ said the Internuncio. Lobs and Oiß de Vin each had hold of an arm and were pulling him upright. Wilberforce looked north once again.

‘Reckon she’ll be coming up to Rochelle about now.’ Wilkins finished his sentence.

‘
Megaera
,’ Duluc read aloud. He lowered the weight of the telescope to the ground. The ship was in full sail a mile or more off the coast. Protagoras took the instrument from his companion’s hand and looked for himself.

‘Mmm,’ he said, then swinging left towards He de Ré he scanned the sea between the island and its neighbour. The dark patch of water they had spied there on their first day at Rochelle had turned out to be algae. Local fishermen had complained that it poisoned the surface-fish in these waters and indeed whole shoals had been seen floating belly up in the broad
channel between the islands. By night, the area had glowed a ghostly green as currents running off the coast stirred the cells of tiny creatures. The light reflected off the white bellies of the fish floating in their midst about which the algae seemed to cluster as if needing a centre, some confirming totem. The previous night, Protagoras had stood aboard a hired lighter, communicating by lunar heliograph in an improvised code with Duluc, who arranged the specially ordered panes of green glass in front of an array of oil lamps and adjustable shutters until they were certain that the prearranged signal could be seen clearly by a ship approaching along the promised bearing. In the long intervals while Duluc directed his small work force to realign this shutter or that flange on the hillside, Protagoras had watched the algae slowly creep out from behind the low headland of lie de Ré. The smell of dead fish wafted over a black sea. Green lights flashed intermittently from the shore and he silently urged his colleague to hurry up and finish the business. It seemed as though the algae had sensed the small boat and were heading very slowly towards it, to surround it.

Now, as he searched with the telescope, the carpet of light seemed to have disappeared altogether. The tide, he supposed. If the algae had drifted around to the blind side of Île de Ré, as he suspected, the
Megaera
would pass directly through it. He returned the telescope to Duluc.

Below them both, down the hillside and beyond the dense undergrowth which ran in a strip behind the strand, their work force was hard at work on the jetty. In the fortnight since their arrival, and in contrast to the monster at Cherbourg, a simple sturdy construction had taken root off Point du Plombe. Rising twelve feet out of the water, a double row of piles extended for twenty yards out to sea, as if an avenue of trees had been lopped off midway up their trunks. It was low tide now, but when the waters rose they would come within three or four feet of the tops of these piles. On the thirteenth of July, at three in the morning according to Duluc’s extensive calculations (checked against his own empirical observations and frequent consultation of the published tables) the tide would reach within six feet of the tops of these piles and thus within eight of the broad gangway which the piles would support. It was a compromise: enough water to float the arriving ship, but with her decks low enough to be on a par with the gangplank. Speed of unloading; that was essential. But if the ship ran aground.… He worried about this fine margin, checking and re-checking his calculations.

He was pleased with his jetty, and even regretted that after a single night, a crucial night certainly but still a single brief night, his effort would be abandoned to the tides and the weather. Naturally, his reports to the Cardinal mentioned only the bare facts of the work: this or that stage completed, such and such materials required and so forth. The
Conseil aux
Conseils
had no interest in his enthusiasms, and in fact were liable to regard them with suspicion. Regarding his colleague, Protagoras, he maintained a looser protocol, but he was careful too. He embroidered his jetty in secret, even shamefully. It was a strong and excellent beast and his enthusiasm galvanised the workforce. A low rumbling disturbed his thoughts then and, turning to discover its source, Duluc saw with pleasure two carts hitched together and drawn by four oxen, their driver up and out of his seat, pulling hard on the brake as the whole contraption descended down the hill towards him. The weight was palpable. It was his mooring post. Thirty feet long and forty feet in diameter, solid oak. He walked down the hill towards his work force who waited on the strand. A good day was ahead.

Later, when the sun was low in the sky and his work force lay propped on their elbows, exhausted, with the mud on their legs drying in the last of the day’s heat, Duluc was able to look out and see his post standing straight and tall out of the water. There for the next hundred years, he thought. As his eye wandered down the avenue of piles the second ship came suddenly into view, framed perfectly in the jetty’s perspective as though it were constructed for this purpose alone. Fishing smacks were passing back and forth between himself and the vessel, day fishermen being replaced by the men who cast their nets by night. The ship resembled the
Megaera
superficially, but the earlier vessel had slid behind the north headland hours before. Taking up his telescope once more, Duluc picked out the name of this second ship. Like the first, she was bound north under full sail. His eye wandered over the decks where several groups of old men stood idly. The hull of the vessel was black. Not tar-black or paint-black; absolutely black. She reflected nothing, the sea and fading sun, a red June fireball this evening, seemed to be swallowed whole. Even the water around her sides looked darker. Then he swung the telescope up to the mainmast. He looked once, blinked, again, then called ‘Protagoras!’ On the top of the mast a pennant flew and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones.

‘Protagoras!’ he called again. ‘She’s flying the Jolly Roger!’ He was about to call for a third time, but Protagoras was nowhere in sight and Duluc knew suddenly that he had returned underground once again, to the cave and the subterranean lake beyond it.

‘Pirates,’ he said to himself and then, still only half-convinced, he looked again. ‘Very old pirates.’

Passing within two or three miles of the open mouth of Rochelle, Wilberforce pointed out the twin towers guarding the entrance to the inner harbour, the citadel in which the Rochelais had died and the line across the outer harbour where, at low tide, the remains of Richelieu’s mole could be
seen. Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw a town where pressure of space had forced the buildings high. Slate-grey roofs crushed together in angled zigzags and chimneys pushed higher still with their faint smoke fading against the dip of the horizon as the sun settled and the city was redrawn in shades of grey like an old stone ghost. He looked at the harbour and tried to imagine Buckingham’s fleet drawn up in a crescent, the men o’war flying their battle flags and signal pennants, baffled by Richelieu’s barrier. They would have floated there just three hundred yards from the safety of the twin towers and the Inner Pool beyond, and to the Rochelais starving behind the walls those three hundred yards must have seemed an ocean they would never cross.

lie de Ré drifted to their stern as the
Heart of Light
continued on. They were sitting to the port side of the ship. In accordance with the rota, ‘Mussel’ Wilkins had relieved Wilberforce at midday. Now it was almost sunset. A half-completed jetty ran off the headland to the north of the city and a gang of men were walking up the hillside behind it. Beyond that the land was wooded, a few low hills and the smoke from a village somewhere behind them. Peter Rathkael-Herbert watched as Wilberforce packed the pipe, his hands shaking a little as resin was thumbed into the bowl. He lit it, drew three or four lungfuls and handed it to his companion.

‘So they all died?’ he asked, taking the pipe. The smoke was hot, curling up from the bowl in dense plumes as he released the mouthpiece and drew it down. Waves slapped louder against the sides of the ship.

‘Died? Died, yes. Some of them. They all died in the end.’

The sea was darker, bluer too. His mouth was dry and when he hawked his spit was thick and very white. He watched its arc over the side flatten and quicken, metres per second per second, falling into the slopping waters in a splash of blue-green light.

‘Poor Rochelle,’ said the Internuncio. A smell familiar from the
Tesrifati
wafted over the decks. He looked over the side once more and saw its cause. Hundreds of dead fish floated upside down in the water. Towards the bows the water gave off a faint glow as it was cut by the
Heart of Light’s
prow.

‘I’ve had my fill.’ He handed the pipe back to Wilberforce.

‘Hmm?’

‘Enough. I’ve had enough now. The sea is, behaving strangely….’ Wilberforce stirred himself to look over the side.

‘Algae,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Glows when you disturb it. Bloody nuisance, but we’ll be through it soon enough.’

Thus reassured, Peter Rathkael-Herbert took back the pipe and within the hour he was drifting in a dreamscape where, as gubernator of a judicial inquiry, he presided over the trial of his former employer for treason.

Wilberforce sat back and watched the algae twinkle blue and green all around the ship as the death throes of red snappers and incautious catfish disturbed its toxin-loaded calm. The Internuncio slumbered in the chair beside him. Occasionally a word or broken phrase would escape from his tortured dream. Wilberforce van Clam thought he heard ‘Guilty’ and a little later, ‘Hang the Emperor.’ The algae went on and on. Must be the biggest bloom in seven oceans and a hundred years, was his last thought before the opium pipe slid from nerveless fingers, his eyelids closed and he too was overcome with sleep.

When the
Heart of Light
reached Cherbourg sixteen days’ sailing later, she still floated in the same algae. By then the crew would have realised that they were actually being followed by the billions of tiny creatures which made up the poisonous blue-green carpet. An efficient system would have evolved to clear the larger, more noxious fish from the vessel’s immediate vicinity and various theories put forward to explain the algae’s evident attachment to the
Heart of Light
. The algae carpet extended for fifty or sixty yards to port and starboard and almost a hundred off the stern. From time to time, portions of the carpet would break off and float away to wreak havoc on hapless icthyo-ecosystems elsewhere, but the algae would quickly regenerate and by sundown the gap would be refilled by millions of new bioluminescent cells. The reason for their attachment to the
Heart of Light
was simple. Weed.

When, as the
Alecto
, the
Heart of Light
was captured by Wilberforce and the rest of the pirates back in 1752, her hull was clean as a newly scrubbed butcher’s block. Six weeks before, she had been careened and scraped at Blackwall until you might have seen the grain in her oaken sides. But twenty-six years at sea had taken their toll. Above the waterline, countless tiny carnivorous molluscs had affixed themselves and slowly spread up to the wales where they realised belatedly that the beast to which they clung was not animal but vegetable and began to die of starvation. Now dead, and still fixed there, their decayed remains accounted for the matt black of the
Heart of Light’
s hull. The pirates had often given silent thanks for these molluscs and the legacy of night camouflage which their mass self-sacrifice had left behind. Below the waterline, the story was not so happy. Weed, the curse of any helmsman, infested the hull making the
Heart of Light
sluggish and unresponsive to the wheel. When undertows caught the thick forest of undersea tendrils the whole vessel would list to one side. Fish approaching from below sported happily in this unexpected feeding ground. Naturally rich in proteins and nutrients, with mussels for the clamp-jawed wolf fish and juicy tuberous neritic kelp for wriggling eels, the ragged shaggy underside of the
Heart of Light
formed a compelling habitat for the algae which clung there fiercely, building up in untypically
thick layers below the waterline, snuggling up to every ribbon and trailing frond until the whole hull was encased in a gelatinous and parasitic soup. Motile cells wagged their flagellae in happy self-congratulation, noctilucal lights pulsed on and off, flickering between sea and sky, water and air, between their one- and zero-states until the scintillons packing ten thousand glittering square metres of thrashing diflagellates united in one vast configuration, an expansive love letter from the algae to their reluctant host. Pursuit of the
Megaera
or no, the algae had said goodbye to their wild, floating years and decided en-masse to anchor themselves here. Their compulsion was absolute. The algae were in love with the
Heart of Light
.