Minutes went by, Fatos lolling on Bruno’s shoulder, Milena and Bruno staring at each other as Landau drowned and his men screamed from the rail above. But not a single man jumped from the ship to try and save their drowning officer. Not even Captain Gunter, who stared down at Bruno with a look of hateful surprise.
The Captain turned away first, just as Landau ended his struggle and his body began to float languidly down to what Gunter had called “the briny crypt.”
When the body had vanished from sight, Bruno looked at Milena and asked, “Can you swim?”
The hermaphrodite looked toward the distant shore and said, “Some of it. Probably not all of it.”
Bruno nodded.
“Give me the pole,” he said.
Milena released it reluctantly. Bruno passed it across his chest until he reached the midpoint. Then he placed Fatos over the far end of the pole and let the mule’s face dip into the water for a second. Fatos came awake again and Bruno said, “Just hold on and keep your head up. I’ll take you in.”
Turning to Milena, he said, “Get on the other side. Give me some balance.”
Milena swam to Bruno’s left, arms draped over the pole. Up close, Bruno could see the cherry welts rising like bulbs on the hermaphrodite’s neck and shoulders. Bruno straightened himself out and began to kick his mighty legs and the trio was propelled away from the ship.
Bruno kept an eye on Fatos to make sure that the mule was staying awake, but when he spoke it was to Milena.
“You took that beating like a man.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” Milena said, but the words didn’t have the performer’s normally dry sarcasm.
They stayed quiet for a while, Bruno kicking with everything he had, until finally he had to know and he asked, “The dwarf and the chicken boy. Did they suffer in the end?”
Milena didn’t answer and Bruno was forced to imagine the worst. He kicked harder, until the hermaphrodite finally said, “They’re still up there. The Captain was saving them for last.”
It wasn’t what the strongman was expecting and he almost stopped kicking. But Fatos was passing out again, so he brought up a leg to nudge the mule awake, then focused on the last sprint to shore.
When they rolled into the beach, Antoinette and Jeta were calmer but still curled in Durga’s lap. Aziz and the twins had collected driftwood and scrub and Nadja was digging a pit for a fire.
“I told you he’d make it,” Durga said to her clan.
The twins ran to retrieve Milena and Fatos from the surf, dragging them up onto the beach and gently tending them. And though some of the clan had never before seen the hermaphrodite naked, none thought to gape.
Aziz approached Bruno and asked, “Can you go back?”—his way of asking if there were, in fact, any reason to swim out to the ship one more time.
Bruno was starting to tire. The lungs of even the strongest man in Bohemia have their breaking point. His legs were cramping and weak. And he was so chilled that his skin was entirely puckered.
He spoke softly to the human torso.
“They were alive when Milena jumped.”
“Then I won’t keep you,” Aziz said, already assuming, there at the start, that Bruno was a patriarch who would sacrifice anything for his brood.
Bruno nodded, spat into the foam at his feet, turned and began to trudge back into the sea. He chose a simple stroke and maintained a consistent speed. He tried not to think of all the hours he had spent playing cribbage with Karl Gunter in the basement recreation room of the Jungborn Gymnasium in Maisel. He tried not to think of the sound that Shoshone McGee’s neck had made when he twisted it and all those tiny bones had cracked like knuckles. He tried not to wonder what was compelling him to risk his life for the sake of some hideous abominations. And he tried very hard not to think about what was transpiring aboard The Touya at this moment.
AND WHAT WAS transpiring was a kind of sadism that, with the death of First Mate Landau, had escalated from dangerous hazing into an orgy of brutality and humiliation.
The chicken boy, fully in the grip of the Limbo now, had been trussed at the feet and hoisted to hang upside down from a cargo boom suspended off the mizzenmast. There he hovered, a feathered and twitching piñata, assaulted by both his visions and the group of crewmen who took turns batting his body with clubs and shovels and mop handles.
Inside the Limbo, the illusions had never been so vivid before. It was like watching a film at the Kierling Theater back in Maisel, but better, sharper, more colorful. More real, like a play, a tragedy in which the chicken boy was the main character. He was running from Dr. Fliess with the rest of the freak clan. He was running through a desert, the sand burning his feet. And then the desert became a swamp, a dank, fetid marsh that gave birth to enormous flies. The flies bit at his face and tried to hide in his feathers. And then the swamp became a beach, where terrible waves broke over massive boulders, this romantic nightmare taking place under the shadow of a looming black castle where the doctor and his creatures lived and worked.
Chick cried out with the terror of the hallucination, but his cries were no distraction for the crew of The Touya, half of whom had pinned the dwarf, Chick’s Kitty, to a bulkhead, a chain wrapped around her neck like an iron snake.
Captain Gunter had only a tentative control over his men, mad as they were with lust and hate. And, of course, the Captain himself was fighting a siege of powerful and complex urges. Landau’s attempted rape of the bi-genitaled creature revolted him, but the first mate’s murder by the hermaphrodite enraged him. In the beginning, he had wanted nothing more than to frighten and humiliate the abominations and then be rid of them forever. But, as the Captain should have known from all his reading, such plans have a way of not only unraveling, but of coming back to ravage the planner.
Gunter had lost an efficient, if depraved, first officer. Now he wanted only to dispose of the last two monsters and get the ship to the Port of Chaldea. The men, however, had other ideas. And to oppose them, while they were in this agitated state, was to invite mutiny and, perhaps, even his own dispatch off the conveyance beam.
So he decided to allow one last ritual of exorcism, one final venting of the crew’s fear and discomfort, before tossing the chicken boy and the dwarf into the blue. But when he came upon a sailor — Hoess Wirth, by name — standing over the chained dwarf with his pants around his ankles, he couldn’t help but forbid the congress, saying, “Son, would you know an animal in this way?”
Possibly Wirth was ashamed of his answer because his johnson immediately went flaccid. Enraged by this, he looked at the Captain and said, “Anything wrong with this, sir?” and began to urinate upon the helpless Kitty.
The Captain allowed for the lesser of two evils, but when one of the crewmen who’d been waiting on the sidelines for his turn yelled, “I’ve got a better idea,” Gunter was truly frightened.
The sailor ran to the hold, calling for his mates along the way. They disappeared for a time, made abundant noise down below, and reappeared, each carrying a full drum of the Bergauer fertilizer, which they at once began to open, prying off welded lids with fire axes and shovels, and dumping the excrement in a growing mountain all over the Captain’s once-gleaming deck.
“The skipper says they’re animals,” said Wirth, the urinator, taking the late Landau’s position as leader and spokesman. “And animals love to rout in their own shit.”
Cheers went up and crewmen began to pull down the still-quaking Chick, while others hauled Kitty up off the bulkhead. They threw the freaks like sandbags into the mountain of feces and then began to cover the misshapen bodies with shovels full of night soil until there was no part of the deformities remaining to be seen.