The Jewels of Aptor Part 7

"You really don't know?" Geo asked, quietly.

"You say that in a strange way," Urson said, frowning.

"I'll say the same thing he said," went on Geo. "What man did you kill?"

Urson looked at his hands for a moment, stretched the fingers, turned them over in his lap like meat he was examining. Then, without looking up, he said, "It was a long time ago, friend, but the closeness of it shivers in my eyes. I should have told you, yes. But it comes to me, sometimes, not like a memory, but something I can feel, as hard as metal, taste as sharp as salt, and the wind brings back my voice, his words, so clearly that I shake like a mirror where the figure on the inside pounds his fists on the fists of the man outside, each one trying to break free.

"We were reefing sails in a flesh-blistering rain, when it began. His name was Cat. The two of us were the two biggest men aboard, and that we had been put on the reefing team together meant that this was an important job and one to be done well and right. Water washed our eyes, our hands slipped on wet ropes. It was no wonder my cloth suddenly flung away from me in a gust, billowing down in the rain, flapping against half a dozen ropes and breaking two small stays. 'You clumsy thing'

bawled the mate from the deck. 'What sort of fish-fingered sailor, are you?'

"And through the rain I heard Cat laugh from his own spar. 'That's the way luck goes,' he cried, catching at his own cloth that threatened to pull loose. I pulled mine in and bound her tight. The compet.i.tion that goes rightly between two fine sailors drove a seed of fury into my flesh that should have bloomed as a curse or a returned jibe, but the rain rained too hard, and the wind was too strong; so I bound my sail with silence.

"I was last down, of course, and with only a few lads below on deck, when I saw why my sail had come loose. A worn mast ring had broken, caused a main rope to fly and my canvas to come tumbling. But the ring also had held the nearly broken aft mast together, and in the wind, a split twice the length of my arm pulled open and snapped to again and again like a child's noise clapper. There was a rope near, and inch thick line coiled on a spike. Holding myself to a rat line by not much more than my toes, I secured the rope and bound the base of the broken pole. Each time it snapped to, I looped it once around and pulled the wet line tight. They call this whipping a mast, and I whipped it till the collar of rope was three feet long to the top of the cleft and she couldn't snap any more. Then I hung the broken ring on a peg near by so I could point it out to the ship's smith and get him to replace the rope with a metal band.

"That evening at mess, with the day's incidents out of my mind and hot soup in my mouth, I was laughing over some sailor's tale about another sailor and another sailor's woman, when the mate strode into the hall.

'Hey, you sea scoundrels,' he bellowed. There was silence. 'Which of you bound up that broken mast aft?'

"I was about to call out, 'Aye, it was me,' when another man beat me by bawling, 'It was the Big Sailor, sir!' That was a name both Cat and I were often hailed by.

"'Well,' snarled the mate, 'the captain says that such good thinking in times so hard as these should be rewarded. He's seen the job and approved.' He took a gold coin from his pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Cat. 'There you go, Big Sailor. But I think it's as much as any man should do.' And then he turned and clomped from the mess hall. A cheer went up for Cat as he pocketed the coin; I couldn't see his face.

"The anger in me started now, but without direction. Should it go to the sailor who'd called out the name of the hero? Naw, for he had been down on deck, and through rain and darkness probably he could not have told me from my rival anyway at that distance. At Cat? But he was already getting up to leave the table. And the first mate, the same first mate of this ship here, friend, that we're on now, he was out stomping somewhere on deck.

"Perhaps it was this that caused my anger to break out the next morning when we were in calmer weather. A careless salt jarred me in a pa.s.sage way, and suddenly I was all fists and fire. We scuffled, we banged, we cursed, we rolled. In fact, we rolled right under the feet of the mate who was coming down the steps at the time. He sent a boot into us and eight different curses, and when he recognized me, he sneered, 'Oh, the clumsy one.'

"Now I'd had a fiery record before. Fights on ship are a breach few captains will allow. This was my third, and one too many. And the mate, prompted by his own opinion of me, got the captain to order me flogged.

"So, like a carca.s.s to be sliced and bid on, I was lead out before the a.s.sembled sailors at the next sunrise and bound to the main mast. I thought my wrath went all toward the first mate now. But black turned white in my head, into something that I could bite into, when he flung the whip to Cat and cried, 'Here, Big Sailor, you've done your ship one good turn. Now rub sleep off your face and do it another. I want ten stripes on that one's back deep enough to count easily with a finger dipped in salt.'

"They fell, and I didn't breathe the whole time. Ten lashes is a whipping a man can recover from in a week. Most go down to their knees with the first one, if their rope is slack enough. I didn't fall until they finally cut the ropes from my wrists. Nor was it till I heard a second gold coin rattle down on the deck from the first mate's hand and the words to the crew, 'See how a good sailor gets rich,' that I made a sound. And it was lost in the cheer which sprung from the other men.

"Cat and one other lugged me to the brig. As I fell forward, hands scudding into straw, I heard Cat's voice come, 'Well, brother, that's the way the luck goes.'

"Then the pain made me faint.

"A day later, when I could pull myself up to the window and look out on the back of the ship, we caught the worst storm I'd ever seen, and the slices in my back made it no easier on me. Pegs threatened to pull from their holes, boards to part themselves; one wave washed four men overboard; and while others ran to save them, another came and swept off six more. It had come so suddenly that not a sail had been raised, and now the remaining men were swarming to the ratlines.

"From my place at the brig's window I saw it start to go and I howled like an animal, tried to pull the bars away. But legs pa.s.sed my window running, and none stopped. I screamed at them, and I screamed again. The ship's smith had not yet gotten to fix my makeshift repair on the aft mast with another metal band. Nor, with my anger, had I yet even pointed it out to him as I had intended. It didn't hold a quarter of an hour.

When it gave there was a snap like thunder. Under the tugging of half furled sails, ropes popped like threads. Men were whipped off like drops of water shaken from a wet hand. The mast raked across the sky above me like a claw, and then fell against the high mizzen, snapping more ropes and sc.r.a.ping men from their perches as you'd sc.r.a.pe ants from a tree.

"The crew's number was halved, and when somehow we crawled from under the sheets of rain, one mast fallen and one more ruined, the broken bodies with still some life numbered eleven. A ship's infirmary holds ten, and the overflow goes to the brig. The choice of who became my mate was between the man most likely to live, figuring that he could take the harder situation more easily than the others, and the man most likely to die, figuring that it would probably make no difference to some one that far gone. The choice was made, the latter choice, and the next morning they carried Cat in and laid him beside me on the straw while I slept.

His spine had been crushed at the pelvis and a spar had pierced his side with a hole big enough to put your hand into.

"When he came to, all he did was cry--not with the agonized howls I had given the day before when I watched the mast topple, but with a little sound that escaped from clenched teeth, like a child who doesn't want to show the pain. It didn't stop for hours, and such a soft sound, it burned into my gut and my tongue deeper than any animal wailing would.

"The next dawn stretched copper foil across the window and reddish light fell on the straw, the board floor, and the filthy, crumpled blanket they had laid him in. The crying had stopped and was replaced now by a gasped breath, sharp every few seconds, irregular, loud. I thought he must be unconscious, but when I kneeled to look, his eyes were opened and he stared straight into my face. 'You ...' he said to me with the next gasp. 'It hurts ... You ...'

"'Be still,' I said. 'Here, be still.'

"The next word I thought I heard was water, but there wasn't any in the cell. I should have realized that the ship's supplies had probably gone for the most part overboard. But by now, hungry and thirsty myself, I could see it as nothing less than a stupendous joke when one slice of bread and a single tin cup of water were finally brought and embarra.s.sedly and silently handed in to us about seven that morning.

"Nevertheless, I opened his mouth and tried to pour some of it down his throat. They say a man's mouth and tongue turn black from fever and thirst after a while. It's not true. The color is the deep purple of rotten, shriveled meat. And every taste bud on the dead flesh was tipped with that white stuff that gets in your mouth when your bowels are upset. He couldn't swallow the water. It just dribbled over the side of his mouth that was scabbed with purple crust.

"He blinked his eyes and once more got out, 'You ... you please ...' and then he began to cry again.

"'What is it?' I asked.

"Suddenly he began to struggle and got his hand into the breast of his torn tunic and pulled out a fist. He held it out toward me and said, 'Please ... please ...'

"The fingers opened and I saw three gold coins, two of whose histories suddenly leapt into my mind like stories of living men.

"I moved back as if burned; then I leaned forward again. 'What do you want?' I asked.

"'Please ...' he said, moving his hand toward me. 'Kill ... kill ...'

and then he was crying once more. 'It hurts so bad ...'

"I got up. I walked across to the other side of the cell. I came back.

Then I broke his neck with my knee and my two hands.

"I took my pay up. Later I ate the bread and drank the rest of the water. Then I went to sleep. They took him away without question. And two days later, when the next food came, I realized, sort of absently, that without all of that first bread and water I would have starved to death. They finally let me out because they needed the muscle, what was left of it. And the only thing I sometimes think about, the only thing I let myself think about, is whether or not I earned my pay. I guess two of them were mine anyway. But sometimes I take them out and look at them, and wonder where he got the third one from."

Urson put his hand in his tunic and brought out three gold coins. "Never been able to spend them, though," he said. He tossed the little pile into the air, and then whipped them back into his fist again, and laughed. "Never was able to spend them on anything."

"I'm sorry," Geo said after a moment.

Urson looked up. "Why? I guess these are my jewels, huh? Maybe everyone has theirs some place. You think it was old Cat, maybe, sometimes when I was in the brig, perhaps, earning that third coin, slicing out that little four-armed monster's tongue? Somehow I doubt it."

"Look, I said I was sorry, Urson."

"I know," Urson said. "I know. I guess I've met a h.e.l.l full of people in my short, wet life, and it could be any one of them." He sighed. "Though I wish I knew which. But I don't think that's the answer." He lifted his hand to his mouth now and gnawed at his thumb nail. "I hope that kid doesn't get as nervous as I do," he laughed. "He'll have such a h.e.l.l of a lot of nails to bite."

Then their skulls nearly split apart.

"Hey," said Geo, "that's Snake."

"And he's in trouble too," said Urson. He leaped onto the floor and started up the pa.s.sageway. Geo came after him.

"Let me go first," Geo said, "I know where he is."

They reached the deck, raced along the side of the cabins, until they reached the door.

"Move," ordered Urson. Then he rammed against the door and it flew open.

Inside, behind her desk, Argo whirled, her hand on her jewel. "What is the ..."

But the moment her concentration turned, Snake, who had been immobile against the opposite wall, suddenly vaulted across the table toward Geo.

Geo grabbed the boy to steady him, and immediately one of Snake's hands was at Geo's chest where the jewel hung.

"You fools!" hissed Argo. "Don't you understand? He's a spy for Aptor."