‘They go off watch a little later,’ he said, poised easily at the wheel. I was about to say something about them getting their tot of blood first, when a sound between a boom and a coughing roar echoed out across the night, followed by a heavy splash. ‘Gator,’ remarked Jyp. ‘Havin’ bad dreams, maybe.’
‘My heart bleeds.’ I sank my head in my arms to save my eyelids from the mosquitoes and drifted back in and out of my own unhappy musings. I’d meant to ask where we were going, but I was almost too weary to care. Two or three times more I remember waking in dim unease, but not what woke me. The last time was clearer. Drums thudded in my head, there was the smell of lightning on the air, and on a wall shadows glided back and forth …
Quite abruptly, as if somebody had shaken me, I was awake, sitting up, tense and breathing hard. Nothing had changed, that I could see; yet something had. The air was cooler, for one thing, and the smells were different. The moon was out now, though very low in the sky, and stretching long shadows across the deck. But Jyp stood at the helm still, unperturbed. He nodded as I hauled myself stiffly up, yawned, stretched till my muscles cracked, and wished I hadn’t eaten all those beans. I wasn’t feeling conversational, so I leaned on the rail and gazed out over the river. It looked as wide and as dark as ever, but the banks were changing. The odd trees were still there – some kind of cypress, I thought, seeing them more clearly – but mingled with other kinds as the banks rose higher. And in among them I thought I saw little sparkles now and again, far-off lights. I blamed them on my eyes at first, till the sound of singing drifted out through the darkness – voices in harmony, women’s mostly. It sounded like some kind of blues, slow and mournful as the turbid river.
I was about to mention it to Jyp and ask him where we were supposed to be going when another shape materialized out of the shadows in the river beside us, a tall three-masted bulk even bigger than the Chorazin, lolling heavily at anchor in the channel. Its immense bowsprit seemed to scorn our shattered rig as we slunk by. Beyond it other much smaller boats were moored, and others, little better than canoes, drawn up on the muddy bank. Then came trees again, but more and more cleared gaps were appearing; there were buildings here, almost to the water’s edge, and more voices, raucous this time. I looked over to the other bank, but it was sunk in unbroken darkness. Out in the river, though, the moonlight glinted sullenly on another big ship at anchor, a lean long shark-shape riding strangely low in the water. Its flat decks were capped with dark rounded humps, their long snouts shrouded in draped tarpaulins; a broad stubby smokestack rose up between them, only a little higher. Unmistakably it was a warship, and with turreted cannon that had to be far more modern than our muzzle-loaders. Beyond it the trees vanished, and a phalanx of big ugly buildings fringed the sky, spiked here and there with tall thin factory chimneys. A broad jetty lanced out into the river and back along the banks into the night till only its faint lights marked it, and the shadowy foliage of mastheads ranged alongside, much the same as I’d seen over the Danube Street rooftops. But among them, standing out like the broad pillared trunks of a southern rain forest, were pair after pair of smokestacks. Crowned with fantastical rondels, stellar points, even Corinthian capitals, they capped the high-sided hulls beneath as if they were the factories’ floating spawn. As we drew nearer I saw the huge cylinders, stepped and flanged, at their sterns. I leaned on the rail and held my head.
Jyp made an enquiring noise. ‘It’s this clash of times,’ I groaned. ‘It’s making me giddy. Do times always get jumbled together like this?’
Jyp shook his head. ‘No jumble. Square-riggers, sternwheelers, tin-plate monitors even – round about the 1850s, 1860s, you’d find ’em all moored along here together.’
I nodded, considering Jyp carefully. ‘Remember that, do you? From when you were young?’
‘Me?’ He smiled. ‘Hell, no! I’m not that old. They’d all gone by the time I was born, ’cept maybe a few sternwheelers. Never saw one, anyhow, nor any kind of ship where I was raised; not a drop of sea. The grain, with its waves, mile on mile, they said that was like the ocean; what’d they know? They’d never seen it any more’n I had. Till I ran away to the coast; then I saw, and I’ve never left it since. Even though I got me my master’s tickets just in time for the war, and the U-boats.’
I was startled the other way now; Jyp hardly seemed modern enough to have sailed against U-boats. Tunisian corsairs, yes; U-boats, no. It made his ageless look oddly more outrageous than Mall’s. ‘Sounds rough. What were you on? The North Atlantic run? The Murmansk Convoys?’
‘Yes, to both. But I was born back before the turn of the century, in Kansas. I was maybe sixteen when I ran off; it was World War One I was talking about.’ He jerked his head. ‘I stuck around, that’s all. In the shadows, just like those ships out there. Just like everything we’re seeing – those songs from the old slave barracoons, the little fishing villages, the whole damn river under us. All part of what formed this place, its character, its image. Its shadow. It’s not gone, not yet. Outside the Core it lingers on, clinging round this place. Felt maybe but never seen, though you lived a whole life long here – not ‘less one day you happened to turn the right corner.’
‘Which place –’ I tried to ask. But the screech of the tug’s whistle drowned me out, and the sudden explosion of activity around us on the deck. Jyp yelled out orders and spun the wheel; Pierce came trumpeting up from below, and turned out both watches. We had come to an empty berth along the crowded dock, and the Defiance had to be worked in. Which left me about the only useless person on board – except perhaps the eerie little trio huddled in that foc’sle cabin, and they hardly counted as human. I thought of taking to my half-collapsed cubbyhole, but there was no clear way off the quarterdeck. Lines were being hauled in dripping from the tug and others flung to shadowy figures along the quay. I was doing my best to dodge between them when Mall’s best steam-whistle tones nearly got me hanged in a stray loop. ‘Hoi, beauteous Ganymede! Sliding off like a shovelboard shilling? We’ll warp her in – come lend the weight of your arm! Hands to the capstan!’
I couldn’t quite remember who the hell Ganymede was and I wasn’t sure I wanted to; but at least it was something I could do. We heaved the long bars from their racks, thrust them through the slots and bent our backs to them.
Mall kicked back the pawl and hopped neatly out of our way, onto the capstan’s scarred top. ‘Heave, my sweet roarers! Heave, my ruddy rufflers! Heave your ways to the booze-ken! Bend your backs to the wapping-shop! What, sweat so o’er a feather? Man-milliners all, the best of you! Scarce fit to poke a shag-ruff!’ She unslung the violin from her shoulder and scraped a swinging tune that was obviously a local favourite.