Rembrandt's Ghost Part 14

"Yes. North of Kagayan. I know that much because the ship was north of there when the typhoon struck. We must be pretty well off the ordinary shipping lanes as well."

"No one ever comes?" Finn asked. "Not even the locals?"

"Not in the three years since I washed up here," said Winchester. "And there are no locals." He poured himself some more tea and took a slurping sip, smacking his lips. "I'll take you up Spygla.s.s Hill tomorrow and show you the lay of the land. Most of the coastline is made up of steep cliffs, at least on the leeward side, and the windward side is all reefs and shoals. No anchorage anywhere."

"Spygla.s.s Hill?" Finn said.

"Treasure Island," supplied Billy.

"Quite so," said Winchester. "The place where old Captain Flint had his booty buried."

"And also the name of Long John Silver's tavern in Bristol," added Billy.

"Quite so!" said the professor, raising one very s.h.a.ggy eyebrow. "You really are quite the scholar!"

"It was my favorite book as a child," said Billy.

the Ninth by Rosemary "That and The Eagle of Sutcliff."

"The Once and Future chester. "T. H. White." "The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault," countered Billy.

"C. S. Lewis and the Narnia tales," sighed Winchester longingly. "Not quite as good as cheese, but close. I haven't read a word in print these three long years."

"Now that you've had your little literary discussion maybe we should get down to business," said Finn. "So far I've had leeches, j.a.panese swords, Chinese soldiers, and cheese. I'd like to know just what the h.e.l.l is going on, Professor Winchester. If you know, that is."

"Call me Ben," said the untidy man in his goatskins.

He struggled to stand, went to his shelf, and lifted the lid on one of the baskets. He came back to the fire, sat down again, and tossed two glitterKing," murmured Wining objects through the flames to land at Finn's and Billy's feet. One was a small gold bar stamped with the chrysanthemum seal of the Nippon Ginko Bank. The other was a heavy gold coin two inches across with a square hole in the center and a Chinese character stamped in each of the four quadrants of the circle.

"Would you believe me if I added a mysterious giant submarine and a six-hundred-year-old Chinese galleon-junk the length of a rugby field? The bones of rhinoceroses and lions and giraffes where there couldn't possibly be? A war that's gone on for more than half a century after peace was declared? A treasure beyond compare hidden within the ancient core of a volcano? An island that eats ships and men and has been doing it for a thousand years?"

"Frankly," said Billy, "it sounds quite mad." Winchester let out one of his crowing laughs that echoed into the farthest shadows of the enormous hidden cavern. "You think that sounds insane, young man? Listen, and I'll tell you a story."

21.

"This is what we know for a fact," said Winchester, settling comfortably back on his haunches. "Once upon a time, the late fourteenth century to be precise, a man named Zheng He was born in northern China, probably Yunnan Province. He was a Muslim and his father and his grandfather were members of the governor's court. When the Ming emperor captured Yunnan, Zheng He was taken prisoner, made a slave, and castrated.

"He was made a servant in the Imperial Court in Peking. In due time he was impressed into the army and made a name for himself, rising through the ranks entirely on merit, sort of like a Chinese Richard Sharpe or Hornblower. Oddly, for a man born into the deserts of Uzbekistan, Zheng He joined the Imperial Navy and eventually became an admiral."

"I read a book about this," said Billy. "Someone wrote a book about him not too long ago. They say he even discovered America about fifty years before Columbus."

Winchester nodded. "The book was called 1421. It's based on some controversial maps. Whether or not he discovered America may be conjecture, but Zheng He's activities in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean are well doc.u.mented. He sailed out of Nanking in enormous fleets of junks, from small eight-oared patrol boats a hundred feet long to monstrous, six-hundred-foot-long treasure junks that carried crews of a thousand men and were big enough for caged, live cargoes of everything from Egyptian dung beetles to giraffes and elephants from the African veldt."

"You seem to know a great deal about all this," said Finn.

"When you're on a research ship for several months at a time you watch whatever they have in their video libraries. The Tumamotu had quite a good selection. Mostly in French, mind you, but I muddled through." The man smiled. "And we do actually have our own television shows in New Zealand, you know. It's not all Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings."

"Sorry," said Finn.

"Quite all right, dear. That's what one gets for living at the bottom of the world ten thousand miles from the mother country."

"And proper cheddar," laughed Billy. "Real Stilton," said Winchester, a wistful note in his voice.

"Enough about cheese," said Finn. "What about these fleets of yours?"

"Zheng He's career was a brief one, only twenty years. In that time he made seven of his voyages. Perhaps, as some theories say, he even circ.u.mnavigated the world. Over those twenty years and seven voyages, he lost a number of ships during typhoons. One of those ships was a full-sized treasure junk that eventually wound up here as it made its way back to China. From the evidence and the historical data we have on typhoons, it was probably in the fall of 1425. Zheng He's ships were magnificently designed, complete with watertight compartments. The ship probably survived almost intact, along with its cargo and most of its crew. The main trade route was closer to mainland Vietnam, so they were clearly blown far off course by the winds. From my own observations I'd say that close to six or seven hundred people suddenly found themselves castaway. The historical record also shows that Zheng He's ships traveled with a large number of women on board. "Over the years and centuries here, the population seems to have stabilized at a little more than eight hundred. There was breeding stock on the ship that washed up here, cattle, goats, swine, fowl-enough to provide an agricultural base. Most of the animals Zheng He's people were bringing back to the Ming court died off unless they managed to interbreed with the domestic faunae. There is a particularly vicious sort of wild boar that seems to have some relation to the African warthog and a few small deer, but the lions and elephants and giraffes died out for lack of habitat."

"Jura.s.sic Park in the Sulu Sea," said Finn. "Something of the sort. More like the Island of Dr. Moreau," replied Winchester. "It's been more than five hundred years since the ship was wrecked. In that time the locals have very little idea of the outside world. They've become like cargo cult aborigines, worshipping the remains of their past but having very little idea of the meaning of those relics."

"Cargo cult?" Billy asked.

"Native people who worship manufactured objects. It was something my mother was interested in. After World War Two, all sorts of native tribes in New Guinea started worshipping straw effigies of the airplanes that had dropped supplies by parachute. The idea was if they prayed the airplanes and their wonderful cargo would return. The idea dates back to the eighteenthand nineteenth-century explorers who first interacted with aboriginal people."

"So these survivors eventually began worshipping the remains of the ship?"

"Something like that. The ship itself is long gone, but the treasure and a number of other artifacts were taken to a large cave next to the Punchbowl. It's still there."

"The Punchbowl?" Finn asked.

"It's what makes the whole place tick, so to speak." Winchester smiled.

"You'll have to explain that," said Billy. "Better if I show you," answered Winchester. "Tomorrow, after we get some rest."

Finn slept dreamlessly and woke to the unearthly smell of bacon and eggs. She sat up, blinking, and found a bright-eyed Winchester huddled over a frying pan made out of the bottom of a large tin can and a bamboo stick. Billy was already up and about as well, a simple wooden plate in each hand.

"Mozambique guinea fowl eggs," said Winchester. "One of the old admiral's better castaways. They seemed to have prospered here. The bacon's cut from one of the warthog variants I mentioned to you. Sunny-side up or overeasy?"

"Any way they come." Finn yawned, blinking the sleep out of her eyes. She sat up. "Too bad there's no coffee." She took a loaded plate from Billy and a utensil carved from wood that was a combination fork and spoon.

"But we do have coffee," said Winchester, handing her a steaming mug with his free hand. Surprised, Finn took a swallow. It was delicious.

"It tastes just like Starbucks," she laughed. "It is Starbucks," said Winchester. "Sulawesi, from Torajaland. A whole container of it washed up a week or so ago. Some freighter in trouble, no doubt. It happens more often than you'd think. I ground the beans myself, the old-fashioned way-mortar and pestle."

"Starbucks, bacon and eggs, and Chinese treasure," said Billy, spooning up his breakfast with the wooden utensil. "Will wonders never cease?"

"Early days yet, my boy. Eat up and we'll be on our way."

By the time they finished their meal, the sun was well up and the sky was clear. Before they began their expedition, Winchester gave them both strips of dried and roughly cured goatskin to wrap around their lower legs like his own makeshift puttees. "Keeps the nasties out," he told them. "And believe you me there's lots of them about." Thus prepared, they left the cave.

The pathways along the ridge were dry and the soil was thin. The trees were mostly ma.s.sive maharanga and mahogany, their trunks huge and straight for a hundred feet, their upper-spreading limbs covered in a rainbow spray of fruit.

"It's like walking in paradise," breathed Finn, taking in the rich, rain-forest scents.

"That's all fine and good," said Winchester dryly, "until you step on a pit viper. They like this kind of jungle. Bite's fatal in about ninety seconds."

"What do they look like?" Finn asked.

"The ground," said Winchester. "Almost impossible to spot."

"Full of good news, aren't you?" Billy said.

"Centipedes, millipedes, black scorpions, even a few dangerous plants. Not a place for the fainthearted, the jungle."

They kept walking for the better part of an hour, mostly upward and mostly following well-marked paths. According to Winchester they were animal trails, but Finn wasn't quite so sure; here and there she was fairly certain she could see the recent marks of some kind of blade cutting through the undergrowth.

"What about trying to escape?" Billy asked. "Ever tried it?"

"I thought of it at first," said the professor. "Building a raft, finding the shipping lanes."

"And?" said Finn.

"And then I sat down and had a good think about it. I asked myself why there were still people on this island, and why I've never seen any evidence of any sort of boat building or rafts anywhere. I finally figured out that the locals had almost certainly tried it themselves, and failed for some reason."

"What reason?" Finn asked.

"Many years ago there was a movie called Papillon," said Winchester, "about a man trying to escape from Devil's Island."

"Steve McQueen playing a Frenchman," said Billy. "Dustin Hoffman as a counterfeiter who was almost blind," he added. "Didn't really work for me."

"I wasn't talking about the acting," said Winchester. "I was talking about the escape."

"Didn't he float away on bags of coconuts?"

"Yes," said Winchester. "In reality of course it never would have worked. Believe me, there's enough coconuts on this b.l.o.o.d.y island for everyone here to float away a hundred times. Only they didn't, you see. They couldn't. Simply because the currents and the tides would make it entirely impossible."

They suddenly stepped out of the jungle and found themselves standing on a rocky, windswept promontory. They were at least a thousand feet above the sh.o.r.e where Finn had washed up. Directly in front of them and far below, they could see the heavy line of surf that marked the reef at least a mile distant. Even from where they stood, the sound of the waves was like rolling thunder.

"When I was a young lad at school I excelled in maths. I was one of those rare swots who actually understood trigonometry. I made a transit out of bamboo and actually triangulated the height of those waves down there a year or so ago, just to keep in practice. Even on a calm day they break at close to thirty feet. At low tide the water's even rougher. No raft could ever get past the reefs even in the calmest weather, and trying to launch a raft on the cliff sides of the island would be suicide."

"There has to be a break in the reef," said Billy, holding a shading hand over his eyes and squinting. "There must be. At least if what you've been telling us about Zheng He is true. If the treasure junk made it to sh.o.r.e, there must have been a way for it to get through the reef. We got through."

"In the middle of a typhoon," said Winchester. "And that's the rub."

"What do you mean?" Finn asked, looking down the steep hillside to the beach far below and then out to sea. There was nothing except the distant joining of sea and sky and the delicate curvature of the earth itself. Finn suddenly felt very small and lonely in the face of so much s.p.a.ce. To spend years alone in a place like this must have been terrible. She turned to Winchester, about to say something, then noticed the small tear in the corner of his eye as he looked out across the sea. She kept silent.

"Sometimes when I come here at night, I wish I'd been an astronomer instead of a biologist," said Winchester softly. "You can see every star in the heavens on a clear night, like the sparkles of billions of diamonds on an infinite black velvet sky."

They stood for a moment longer, looking toward the sea, lost in their own thoughts, and then Winchester turned away. Finn and Billy followed him back into the jungle, following a different path through the undergrowth, heading inland.

"What did you mean about the typhoon being the problem?" Billy asked, panting behind the man in his goatskin outfit as they climbed through the dense forest.

"Not the problem, really," responded Winchester. "It almost certainly saved your life." He paused and turned, stopping on the path. "Know much about typhoons?"

"No."

"They create something called a 'storm surge,' an upwelling of water in the eye of the storm that can create a sort of b.u.mp or hill in the ocean. Depending on how shallow the approach to land is the results can be devastating."

"The storm surge from Katrina was twentyeight feet," Finn said with a nod.

"Katrina?" Winchester asked. "Did I miss something?"

"A hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It virtually destroyed New Orleans."

"That was always a disaster waiting to happen," Winchester said with a knowing inclination of his head. "Anyone who knows anything at all about hurricanes or typhoons knew that." The professor shook his head. "Well, twenty-eight feet was about half of the surge that took you. I made it close to fifty feet. A supertyphoon without a doubt."

"I think I see now," said Finn, visualizing the storm. "You're saying the surge raised the water far enough above the reefs to take us through, but when the water receded, the ship was left aground."

"Something like that," said Winchester. "This whole island is like a giant lobster pot or fish trap. The topography is like a huge funnel with the island as the center of the trap. Once in, never out. You'll see it better when we reach the top of Spygla.s.s Hill and you get a look at the Punchbowl."

Another hour pa.s.sed, the heat of the day increasing as the sun rose over the arching canopy of the trees. Sweat began to pour and the air was thick with mosquitoes and swirling clouds of tiny flies. The jungle around them was alive with sound, from the faint sighing of a light breeze in the treetops high above their heads to the smaller chirps and rustles of insects, to the sudden, startling cries of a dozen different exotic birds. It was like being in the middle of the noisiest Tarzan movie ever made.

Finally the trees and undergrowth began to thin and Winchester made a warning gesture with his hand.

"Keep low," he said quietly. He tapped the binoculars hanging on a strap around his neck. "I don't know for sure if the locals or the j.a.ps have a pair of these, but I'd rather not take the chance of being silhouetted on the top of the hill."

Winchester crept forward and Finn and Billy followed. They reached a sloping, almost bare patch of ground at the summit of the hill and peered over. The view was unbelievable.

Fifty yards from where they were perched, a waterfall sprang out of a narrow cleft in the rock and soared down a cliff that had to be as high as Half Dome in Yosemite, a sheer wall of some dark, shining stone that reared up out of a lush, immense jungle valley like a weathered ax blade.

The valley was at least twenty miles across. At its base was a bright blue jewel: an invisible lagoon in the interior of the island connected to the sea by a keyhole rift perhaps half a mile wide, its cliffs as sheer as the one that made up the valleyfacing side of Spygla.s.s Hill. A giant teacup with a crack in the side.

The lake, several miles across in its own right, seemed to be dotted with dozens of small misshapen islands-a model of the larger sea beyond. The sh.o.r.e of the lake was ringed with wide, brilliant white beaches lined with stands of palms. It was almost perfectly round. Finn commented on the fact.

"It's a caldera," explained Winchester. "The remains of an explosive volcano. Like Krakatoa, or Crater Lake in Oregon, Rotorua in New Zealand."

"How big is this place?" Billy asked, awestruck.

"By my calculations it's approximately fortyfive miles across at its widest point and about sixty miles long."

"But that's incredible!" Billy said, stunned. "Surely it must show up on satellite photos and charts!"

"I'm sure it does," said Winchester mildly. "But so what? Half the time it's covered in cloud and there's no obvious sign that it's inhabited. The island is almost impossible to get to without enormous risk and under just the right conditions, so who'd bother to come?" He made a face. "The madmen who run the governments hereabouts aren't quite greedy enough to deforest this little place like they have the rest of Malaysia. Not quite yet anyway."

"This is the place," said Finn, suddenly understanding. "This is where Willem Van Boegart was shipwrecked back in Rembrandt's time. This is where his treasure came from. Somehow he found a way off the island and went back to Holland to found his empire."

"And this is where Pieter Boegart came looking a few hundred years later," said Billy.

"The Dutchman?" Winchester asked, surprised. "You knew him?" Billy said.

"I saw him taken," said Winchester. "The locals got him."

"When?" Finn asked, surprised at the depth of emotion she felt for a man she'd never met.

"About a month ago." Winchester shrugged. "Hard to keep track, but I'd say it was about a month."

"How did he get here?" Billy asked. "I thought you said it was impossible without a storm surge."

"It is. He got here the only way you could without cracking up on the reefs. He flew." The goat skinned professor pointed a filthy, bony finger down toward the huge lake. "He landed down there. It was an old Norseman single engine from the war. They have them all over the Pacific. They've got a range of about six hundred miles, so he must have island-hopped, looking for the place."