‘How do I stop the boat if I have to?’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know. But if I have to?’
‘It’s not like an automobile where you can put on the brakes,’ said the trader. ‘And it’s too deep to drop the anchor out here. You have to steer around things or put her in reverse if something shows up in front of you. And if you shut off the engine and let go of the wheel the sail will bring the boat up into the wind and she’ll lose way, stop going forward gradually. Right?’
‘Right,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
The trader looked at his watch, moved some of the pegs in his navigating board, gave Boaz-Jachin a new compass heading. ‘In a couple of hours we’ll pass a light on the horizon on the starboard side,’ he said. After that there’s nothing until I come on watch again. All you do is stay on the heading I gave you. Right?’
‘Right,’ said Boaz-Jachin. The trader went below, and he was alone in the dark wheelhouse with the lighted circle of the compass card and the dim green eyes of the gauges before him. Forward in the blackness the phosphorescent bow wave parted always while the Swallow’s wooden eyes looked blindly into the night.
After a time the aloneness became comfortable, the darkness was simply where he was. He remembered the road to the citadel and the ruined palace, how it had seemed nowhere the first time, but the second time it had become the place where he was. The wheel felt good in his hands. When he found his father he would simply say, May I have my map, please? Nothing more than that.
There was a light, a light that turned and flashed from a lighthouse, but it was much closer than the horizon, much sooner than a couple of hours, and it was on the port side.
He said starboard side, thought Boaz-Jachin, and he said it would be on the horizon in a couple of hours. Him and his fucking pegboard. He shut off the engine, let go the wheel, and went below to wake the trader.
‘What time is it?’ said the trader. ‘What happened to the engine?’
‘I shut it off,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘It’s quarter past three and there’s a light on the port side and it’s pretty close.’
‘Shit,’ said the trader, and started for the deck. As he got out of the bunk there was a horrible grating sound along the keel. The boat lifted sharply as they reached the deck, they heard the splintering of planks. The boat lifted again, grated again, with more splintering.
‘Get into the dinghy and pull clear,’ said the trader in a calm voice to Boaz-Jachin as they half-fell down the slanting deck towards the stern.
Boaz-Jachin, pulling away from the Swallow into the darkness, heard the engine start up as the masthead light went on. The Swallow leaped glaringly out of the night, the sea lifted her again, she came off the rocks in reverse and started to settle by the bow as the trader jumped clear with a great splash.
My guitar and my map, thought Boaz-Jachin. Gone. By the time the trader had got himself into the dinghy, half swamping it, the masthead light had gone under and they were in darkness again, across which the beam from the lighthouse regularly swept.
‘Son of a bitch,’ said the trader. ‘Son of a bitch.’ The sea slapped and gurgled quietly against the dinghy as Boaz-Jachin pulled farther away from the rocks that had sunk the Swallow. He could see the trader’s hunched shape leaning forward, darker than the sky behind him. Whenever the light swept over them Boaz-Jachin saw his wet white shirt and dark trousers, his face open-mouthed and wet. Suddenly the being-with-the-lion feeling came to Boaz-Jachin. He almost roared. Then it was gone. Emptiness.
‘How did I do this to myself?’ said the trader quietly. ‘How did I find you? What demon possessed me to put my boat in your hands? Mother of God, who sent you to me?’
‘You and your fucking pegboard,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘How did that lighthouse get on the wrong side at the wrong time?’
‘That’s for you to tell me,’ said the trader. ‘I was sure at least that you could hold a wheel in your hands and look at the compass. When I went below at midnight you were on a safe course. Tell me, you fateful one, imp of the devil, bringer of ill fortune, what did you do then?’
‘It wasn’t midnight when you went below,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘All right,’ said the trader. ‘So it was ten past twelve. Not exactly midnight. We’re not quite so precise here as in the navy. My humble apologies.’
‘It wasn’t ten past twelve either,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I looked at my watch.’
‘Don’t play games with me, imp,’ said the trader. The light swept over them, and Boaz-Jachin saw doubt in his face.
‘It was two o’clock in the morning,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘The little hand was at the two and the big hand was at the twelve. If you want to call that ten past twelve, go ahead, do as you like.’
‘Ten past twelve is the other way around,’ said the trader. ‘The little hand, the big hand.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘You’re learning fast.’
‘Two o’clock in the morning, not ten past twelve,’ said the trader. ‘We were two hours past where I thought we were when I put you on the new heading.’
‘Right,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Which I stayed on as you told me to, and here we are.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ said the trader. ‘The big hand and the little hand.’
‘“Keep the boat and follow the sea,”’ said Boaz-Jachin, and he began to laugh.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ said the trader. ‘Fuck the sea. I’ll never be able to collect the insurance on Swallow because of the way we sank her, but I have a piece of land I can sell, and I’m going to open a restaurant.’
‘One thing about a restaurant,’ said Boaz-Jachin — ‘when you wake up it’ll be exactly where it was when you went to sleep.’
‘Right,’ said the trader. ‘So that’s that. It’s out of my hands. The sea made the decision.’
‘Tell me,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘What’s the name of the rocks that sank us?’
‘The rocks I don’t know. The light is Rising Sun Light.’
‘S-U-N or S-O-N?’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘S-U-N,’ said the trader. ‘It faces east.’
‘Where the son sank,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Well, on my new map the rocks will be called Rising Son Rocks, spelled S-O-N. I’m naming them after you.’
‘Thank you,’ said the trader. ‘I’m deeply honoured.’
The sky was pale now, and in the water they saw oranges floating. The trader leaned over and picked up two.
‘If the gentleman would like breakfast,’ he said, ‘his table is now ready.’
19
Jachin-Boaz’s wife, with her husband and son both gone, now considered the situation in which she found herself. In the first months after Jachin-Boaz’s departure she had gone through torments thinking of him in the arms of young and beautiful women. Wherever she looked she seemed to see only girls and young women, all of them so pretty that she wondered how men could choose among them. But she had talked to other women since, and the consensus was that men of her husband’s age often did what he had done, that after a few months or a year they yearned for the comforts and habits they had left, and, if allowed to, returned. She was determined to encounter such a possibility from a position of strength. She did not expect her son to come back, and made no effort to trace him. Nor did she attempt to locate his father. She concentrated her energies on the shop. She had long had her own ideas about how to run the business, and now she put them into practice.