The Confusion

Van Hoek rose and excused himself, for from the point of view of ship's captain the story was finished. There was no point in hearing the details. The others remained and listened.

"Now, many ponderous sermons could be written about the rich pageant of greed and folly that played out over the next days. The correct action would have been to man the pumps and drench everything in the hold with sea-water. But this would have ruined all of the silks, and caused incalculable losses, not only for the merchants but for the ship's officers, and various of the King's officials in Manila and Acapulco who had bales of their own in the hold. So the captain delayed, and the fire smoldered on. Men were sent below with buckets of water to find and douse the fire. Some returned saying that the smoke was too thick—others never came back at all. Some argued that the hatches should be opened and bales brought out onto the deck, but others who had more knowledge of fires said that this would allow an in-rush of air that would cause the fire to billow up and consume the Galleon in a moment.

"We sighted your ship in a mirage, and fired a signal-ca

"Was everyone shocked and dismayed?"

"No one batted an eye. The signal ca

Edmund de Ath bowed his head slightly, so that arcs of reflected candle-light gleamed in the tear-filled cha

"You may scratch the one woman off that list, at least for the time being," Jack said. "We plucked her out of the water fifteen minutes after you."

There was a long pause, and then Edmund de Ath said: "Elizabeth de Obregon survived?"

"If you call this surviving," Jack answered.

"HE SWALLOWED!" SAID MONSIEUR ARLANC the next day, having cornered Jack up at the head. "I saw his Adam's apple move."

"Of course he swallowed—he was eating di

"Di

"All right, he was drinking sugar-water then."

"It was not that sort of a swallow," said Monsieur Arlanc. "I mean he was perturbed. Something is not right."

"Now Monsieur Arlanc, consider it: What could de Ath possibly find troubling about the poor lady's survival? She's half out of her mind anyway."

"People who are half out of their minds sometimes forget discretion, and say things they would normally keep secret."

"All right, then, perhaps he and the lady were having a scandalous affair de coeur—that would explain why he's been sitting at her bedside ever since."

Jack was sitting in a hole, his buttocks dangling over the Pacific, and Monsieur Arlanc was standing next to him; together they gazed down the length of the ship for a few moments. The several divisions and subdivisions of the current watch were distributed among the masts and sail-courses, ru

"We gained two mouths from the Galleon, and fretted about going hungry on that account," Jack mused. "Since then three have died."

"There must be some reason for you to sit there and tell me things of which I am already aware," said Monsieur Arlanc, mumbling pensively through swollen gums, "but I ca

"If strong sailors are dropping dead, what chance has Elizabeth de Obregon?"

Monsieur Arlanc spat blood over the rail. "More chance than I have. She has endured a voyage that would slay any man on this ship."

"Are you trying to tell me that there is a worse voyage in all the world than this one?"

"She is the sole survivor of the squadron that was sent out from Acapulco years ago, to find the Islands of Solomon."

Now Jack was glad in a way that he was sitting on the head, for it was a pose well-suited to profound silent contemplation. "Stab me!" he said finally. "Enoch told me of that expedition, and that the only survivor was a woman, but I had not drawn the co

"She has seen wonders and terrors known only to the Spaniards."

"In any event she is very sick just now," Jack said, "and so it is no wonder that Edmund de Ath sits at the lady's bedside—we'd expect no less of a priest."

"And nothing more of a blackguard."

Jack sighed. The corpse went over-board. Several Filipino idlers—which meant tradesmen not attached to any particular watch—were arguing about ducks. A flight of ducks had been sighted in the distance this morning and several were of the opinion that ducks were never seen more than a few miles from land.

"It is in the nature of men cooped up together aboard ship that they fall to infighting at some point," Jack finally said.

Monsieur Arlanc gri

MONSIEUR ARLANC DIED a week later. They held on to his corpse for as long as they could, because a fragment of kelp was sighted in the water almost at the moment of his death, and they hoped that they could make landfall and bury him in the earth of California. But his body had been well decayed even while he'd been still alive. Dying scarcely improved matters, and forced them to make another burial at sea. It was just as well that they did. For even though kelp-weeds continued to bob in the waves around Minerva's hull, it was not for another ten days after they threw the Huguenot's corpse overboard that they positively sighted land. They were just below thirty-nine degrees of latitude, which meant they'd missed Cape Mendocino; according to the vague charts that van Hoek had collected in Manila, and a few half-baked recollections of Edmund de Ath, the land they were looking at was probably Punto Arena.

Now the so-called idlers, who really had been idle for most of the last several weeks, worked night and day re-making Minerva for a coastal voyage. The anchors were brought up out of the hold and hung on the ship's bow. Likewise ca