A gasp of despair escaped his lips, his chest tightened. He was in one of the cells where the murderers were confined. Lister had declared that the ship was going to sink, and he was locked in a box, where he would drown like all the other rats. He paced back and forth, his heart racing, touching the moist, matted skin on his side where the captain’s bullet had grazed him, futilely trying to recall what had happened after the black water had closed about him. What had he done to be sealed into this oversized coffin? He had wanted so desperately to die, then after speaking with Lister and seeing Adam’s medallion, he had wanted so abruptly to live.
Frightened shouts rose from the decks above. Someone called for pumps to be manned, someone else for a Bible. He heard the sound of water running past the door and with a wrench of his heart felt a puddle forming at his feet. He pounded on the door until his fists throbbed; then the ship lurched, his head slammed into a wall, and he sank into unconsciousness again.
“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known.”
The thin eerie chant echoed in Duncan’s nightmare as he struggled back to awareness, the meaningless, haunting words repeating themselves endlessly, from nowhere and everywhere. He pinched himself in his dream and pushed at his eyes, trying to make certain they were open, then pressed the wound in his side. The flash of pain jerked him upright.
“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known.”
He was awake but the nightmare would not fade.
The storm, however, seemed to have passed. The sea no longer fought with the hull, the water had drained from his cell. He stripped off his wet clothes, wrapping the sailcloth around him, then sat in the black emptiness, listening to the chilling, melancholy chant a few minutes, realizing it was not a trick of his mind, but the utterances of a forlorn woman. He stood, trying to understand how he could hear her voice so clearly. Searching the locked door with his fingertips, he discovered a six-inch-square hatch halfway up the door, hanging open on a leather hinge. His hands shaking, he put his mouth to the hatch and shouted.
“It was a pig’s heart!” As the terrible reality of where he was sank in, he repeated the words in a hoarse, desperate voice. “Not a man’s! No man was killed!” There was no response, no movement in the darkness. He was on the prison deck, abandoned, alone.
Not entirely alone.
“Black snake wind, black snake wind, make yourself known!” The sad voice seemed more urgent now, almost frantic, and its source became clear. The woman was in the cell next to his. Duncan tightened the scrap of cloth around his waist.
“Who are you?” he asked, futilely pressing his eye to the hole, seeing nothing but a dim line of light at the bottom of a door several feet in front of him. “Are you ill?”
“Take the skin you are,” the woman replied in a thin, plaintive tone. “You will see this is the real earth circling about.”
He had found a new level of hell after all. He was wounded, trembling from the cold and damp, imprisoned in the dark without explanation, and his sole companion was not only a murderer, but a lunatic murderer.
“It was a pig’s heart!” Duncan cried again, shouting the words, continuing despite the low curses they now drew from cells farther away, stopping only when he realized they were coming out in long sobs.
“Fresh meat!” cooed a coarse voice from the darkness. “The storm washed up fresh meat for our pets!”
He dropped to his knees as he realized the prisoner down the passage was speaking of him, then sank backward against a corner, listening to the murmur of the sea until finally, gratefully, he found slumber.
When he awoke, Adam Munroe was with him, squatting in the opposite corner, urging his weevil forward, tossing from hand to hand the wooden buttons he was using for betting. This was the grinning, roguish Adam whom Duncan had come to know, the one who softly sang Highland ballads in the middle of the night and cracked jokes when Company spirits sagged. Except this Adam had seaweed in his hair. Duncan, trembling, spoke his friend’s name. Adam looked up, cocked his head, and, his grin fading, extended his open palm with his betting pieces toward Duncan as the tail of an eel began squirming out of his ear. Duncan recoiled in terror, pressing against the wall, his heart thundering, as Adam slowly faded into the blackness.
When he stirred again-was it hours, or only minutes that had passed? — there was a new sound, someone whispering low, rhythmic words that had the semblance of prayers. Their meaning seemed to linger at the edge of his consciousness, as if he should recognize them, but the words were not in English, nor in Gaelic, nor in any other language of Europe.
“Haudenosaunee! Haudenosaunee! Ohkwari! Ohkwari!”
Through the darkness he could not discover the source, only knew that the longer the whispers were spoken, the more they made his skin crawl. They could have been from the murderer next door or from another down the corridor, or even from someone roaming the aisle itself. Or something clinging to the hull outside. The dead were trying to take over the ship, the sailors had insisted. Or perhaps they were just trying to share their secrets.
He began shivering, though his wound burned like a hot poker. In the fever that took hold, questions and faces swirled in his mind. Lister. Evering. The ghostly woman who had drowned. Adam Munroe, again and again Adam, whom Duncan would dishonor because he was incapable of grasping his friend’s dying bequest. Nothing of that terrible day made sense, but he knew better than to think everything unconnected. Someone had performed the work of the devil in the compass room, leaving Adam’s strange medallion, then the melancholy angel had materialized on the mast and chosen to die by leaping into the raging water. The captain and Arnold had wanted him to prove no one had died. But instead he had shown them that Evering had died, and not, Duncan knew, in the way it appeared to the crew. Evering, who held the key, had died before Duncan could learn how to save himself.
Redeat, he kept hearing Lister say, over and over, and he kept seeing the chastising way the old Scot had looked at him. Surely it was just a bad joke, that anyone, even a dried-up old sailor, would consider Duncan a clan chief.
He slumped against a corner of the cell, the visions strangely congealing like the blood on his ribs. Adam and Evering, supporting the porcelain white angel between them, ran on the surface of the ocean, pursuing the ship, shouting something to Duncan that he could never quite discern. The captain poked a crimson-hot iron into his ribs. His father whipped him with thistles.
When he awoke again, much later, his mind was clear of the fog brought by the fever. A dim light shone down the corridor of cells, from a lantern hung on a beam. A crock of water had been left inside his door, and he gulped it down before noticing that his wound had been bound with a strip of cloth tied around his ribs. By the door lay another piece of cloth, an extra bandage. Not a bandage as such, his fingers told him, but a linen handkerchief, something from the traveling kit of a gentleman. Inside its careful folds was a small metallic object. He held it up to the meager light seeping through the hatch, touched it to his tongue. It was a button, a silver button with flecks of dried blood.