The Rathbones (33 page)

As we sailed past, a loud whooshing sound startled us both. From the dark caves came pale flashes, flutterings of white—wings rising, then as suddenly sinking down again, out of view. Crow left his post as figurehead to fly toward the flashes of white and was soon lost to view in the dark landscape.

Mordecai half stood, shielding his eyes, looking eagerly toward the
rocks. In a moment he had scrambled over the side and was hurrying across the cove and into the gloom.

I dropped anchor and followed. My boots crunched on the strand of shell, then stepped soundlessly on the thick moss that coated the rocks that rose all around, obscuring the sky. As I clambered up, a cavern, thirty or forty feet across, opened before me, its roof lost in darkness, its rear wall receding in a deep curve. Light, from some opening farther in, filtered through moist air. Rivulets of water trickled down the cavern walls, echoing. I stood waiting for my eyes to become accustomed to the low light. The whooshing sound started again, and I could now see large white birds, dozens of them, rise perhaps a foot in the air then drop to the moss that covered the floor of the cavern. The floor was covered with birds. Where they didn’t stand or mill the rock was white with their droppings. Among the white was one black form. Crow strutted among the flock, all taller than him, turning his head to nip now left, now right; the birds twitched at his nips and moved aside but didn’t startle or scatter.

Mordecai stood among the birds, an ecstatic look on his face. He leaned and lifted one. The bird suffered him to hold it in his arms and gently stroke its feathers. Though I had not seen such a specimen before in the flesh, I knew it well from Mordecai’s map: the black-necked stilt. Here, then, were the birds that should now have been, according to his calculations, winging northward to Greenland with the whales, closely followed by Papa. But these birds had winged nowhere; their wings were scarcely larger than their heads. No wonder they couldn’t rise beyond the lowest branches of the birches. They had, besides, a complacent air, more of the domestic chicken than a wild, man-wary creature; a dull eye; an unassuming beak. I recalled the stilt’s plumage in the tinted engraving as a rich black and white, its legs as quite long and bright red in color. This bird trailed legs of only moderate length, a faded pink in hue. Its plumage didn’t have the stark division between dark and light of its depiction on the map but rather a mottled appearance, a gray and white like the lichens
clinging to the rocks among which the stilt’s companions huddled, emitting low and infrequent
kip-kip-kips
.

Mordecai gravely stroked the bird, which lolled in his arms, gazing vacantly into his face.

“At least I have found my stilts.” He smiled dimly. “Though not where I expected. It seems I have been wrong about everything.”

Something moved in the dark recess behind him, something larger than the birds: a slender shadow, a curve of long pale hair. I wouldn’t have noticed if the figure hadn’t moved slightly, it was so similar to the pale-barked trunks of the birches that sprang here and there from the mossy floor of the cave.

A voice from the dark recess; the figure moved again. This time Mordecai saw and started. A high, soft voice, a woman’s.

“
Kip-kip-kip
.”

I would have thought the birds had made the sound if I had not seen her mouth move. The stilts all began to shuffle excitedly toward the woman.

“
Kip-kip-kip. Kip
.”

We moved closer to the figure in the cave. She was, in the dim light, attractive, with a slender figure and a pale smooth complexion that didn’t suggest any nameable age. She looked so like Mordecai that I caught my breath. Her whiteness, though, was of a different variety, not dried but moist in a fungal way. Her pale hair was long and sleek. She was clothed in a soft garment of a mushroom hue.

“
Kip-kip-kip
.”

I cleared my throat and dropped a curtsey.

“Excuse me, may we introduce ourselves? This is Mordecai Rathbone, and I am Mercy Rathbone. May we know your name?”

The woman didn’t look directly at us, though I believe she tried. Her eyes traveled tidally, rolling high in their sockets then sinking down like waves on a beach, never stopping. The birds were thick around her; most squatted down and drowsed, those nearest stretched their beaks up to her. In her lap lay a cluster of garden snails. As we
watched she placed one on a large flat rock beside her, cracked it with the small rock in her hand, and dropped the meat into a waiting beak.

“What lovely birds. Do you take care of them all yourself?” I said, nudging Mordecai.

“Yes, yes, what fine … robust specimens of
Himantopus mexicanus
you have here. I congratulate you.”

The woman only replied in the language of the stilts. I thought at first that she understood us and was trying to respond, but the sounds she made seemed after all directed at her birds, not us.

As my eyes grew used to the gloom, other, smaller creatures took shape on the rocks around the woman and in the crevices. Each was familiar and yet altered. I recognized several small
echinoderms
; clumps of agarum and sea palm; the sand dollar and the sea urchin, leached of their color and clinging not to a reef but to a tuft of moss; the brittle star become pliable; the horny sponge moistened. When Mordecai, too, could see them, he bent and lifted them close to his eyes, examining first one then the next, exclaiming softly as he turned them in his hands.

We ventured farther into the grotto. Smaller caves were here and there worn in the rock, lit by wan shafts of light from openings in the rock above. In one such recess was the woman’s sleeping place: A fine bedstead of the early colonial era stood, somewhat unevenly, on the rocky floor, its crewelwork hangings still bright, protected in the dim cave against fading. I thought I saw, farther back in the cave, the end of another bedstead, though the light was too dim for me to be certain. In another recess stood a carved chest on which were stacked a few porcelain dishes and candlesticks of pewter. Other niches held baskets. I dipped my hand in each and held it up to see: tree nuts, some kind of twisted root, late berries. My stomach rumbled; the berries were tempting. I had not tasted anything land-grown these many weeks. The
kip-kip
came again; I turned to see the woman gesturing and nodding toward the baskets, smiling. I grasped a handful of dark, prickled berries and ate gratefully.

Mordecai, meantime, tried to slake his thirst at a thin trickle of water running down one wall, pressing his mouth against the stone with little success. The woman, watching, gestured eagerly toward a small pool just behind her, fed by some underground stream or spring. Mordecai knelt at the pool’s edge and sniffed at the surface, dipped a finger, and tasted. His furrowed brow cleared and he put his lips to the pool and drank thirstily. Crow left off tormenting the stilts to join Mordecai at the pool, plunging a greedy beak and drinking deep. Refreshed, he took up a perch high on the cave wall and used it as a base to dive upon the stilts, snatching snails from their beaks. After several dives, the woman called to him. He first approached her as she beckoned gently, then retreated, sidling nearer by degrees until finally he hopped in her lap and allowed her to stroke his head.

My skin began to creep in the dark and humid space. I picked my way across the rough cave floor to get outside, to light and fresher air, Mordecai following behind me. When he stooped to pass through the low entrance, he struck his forehead against the roof of the cave with a loud smack and a howl. Wincing, he lowered himself slowly to sit cross-legged on the rock, hand to head. When he pulled his hand away I was relieved to see that he wasn’t bleeding, but the blood had jumped under his skin to start a great dark bruise already. I burrowed in his bag and found his bandanna, knelt beside him, and gently bandaged his head. Mordecai, grimacing, pressed his spectacles closely against his eyes, drew up his knees, and sighed. We both stared out to sea.

I knew the woman’s eyes were on us. Without turning my head, I leaned close and whispered, “Who is she, Mordecai?”

Mordecai looked down at his hands. In them he turned a sand dollar, not one of the stiff disks with which I was familiar but a soft and spongy circle.

“I believe she may be a relation.” He smiled.

Around us wandered a few stilts, fresh from the cave, blinking in the sun. Mordecai gathered one up as it passed close and cradled it in his arm. He examined, tenderly, its scanty wing.

“They do not need wings here. How admirably they are suited to their environment. Note the beak variance, fully two inches longer than the species mean and angled to adapt to the land-bound snail. Such a beak could no longer pry the recalcitrant sea mollusk. But these stilts no longer need the sea. It looks to me as though they found plentiful sustenance here, stayed and built their nests, and over time lost the power of flight. They had no need to strive further.” Here he patted his bag. “Though I have it on authority that they did once fill these skies.” He looked off, over the water. “And, beneath them, the great herds of sperm filled the sea.”

He cracked open his satchel. Though it had looked moderately old when we started out, the bag now told its true age, its brittle leather bleached and cracked. He took my hand in his and with his other hand reached into the bag, then slid the woven bracelet onto my wrist. I had realized it was missing back in the little temple on the Stark Archipelago, that I hadn’t seen it since showing it to Mordecai our first day on the
Able
. It felt tighter, whether by salting or because my wrist had grown larger, or perhaps both.

Mordecai leaned back against a rock and closed his eyes against the sun that now seemed so bright after our time in the cave. He appeared to be suffering from the same drowsiness that afflicted Crow. He reached up and pulled my bandage lower on his face so that it shadowed his eyes. His skin, golden in our days on the
Able
, was starting to burn, and his eyes were as sensitive to the sun as they had ever been. When he straightened his legs he winced, as though the joint pain that had vanished with all our swimming had returned.

“It is so warm here. I do not like the cold, it does not agree with me. Though I didn’t mind it then …”

His mind was wandering, I thought.

“What do you mean, ‘then’?”

He leaned forward and looked at me groggily.

“Did you know, Mercy, that the northern whalers used a barrel nailed to the crosstrees for a crow’s nest, to shelter the lookout from the cold? Though it provided little protection in those latitudes.”

We had not spoken of that northern voyage since the day Mordecai fell overboard. I had been startled by his vivid description of the polar bear, certain that he had seen
Ursus
not in starry form but in the flesh, rearing against the Arctic sky. So I had suspected then what he told me now, though not all.

“I rode up there, in the crow’s nest, once or twice. Your papa carried me up himself, wrapped in furs of
Ursus
. I didn’t care how cold it was then.” He leaned back against a rock, closing his eyes in the sun. “I beheld the aurora borealis. I observed teeming populations of the
Aptenodytes
penguin filing toward true north.” Mordecai swept his arm across the sky and lost his balance, falling to one side. Righting himself, he slowly smoothed down his wandering hair. “At night great swarms of migrating herring shimmered beneath the ice. If such life thrived so far north in turgid waters, I could scarcely bear to contemplate the glories of maritime life that awaited me to the south.” He paused, drawing his legs up and leaning his chin on his knees. “But it was not to be. I was not to train for whaling, nor to serve in any useful capacity aboard your father’s ship.”

“But Mordecai. You told me Papa didn’t know about you. That Mama and the man in blue hid you in the attic.”

“Did I?” His eyes were unfocused behind the blue lenses. I glanced back at the cave. Crow slept soundly in the woman’s lap, while she continued to feed those stilts who were not themselves napping. Most had gathered their legs beneath them and settled to sleep. I was glad that I had not drunk from that pool.

“Why weren’t you allowed to sail again, a second time?”

“I was … superseded.” Mordecai turned up a corner of the handkerchief and squinted up at me with a wan smile.

I felt suddenly very cold.

“What do you mean … ‘superseded’?”

Mordecai sighed and waved me away with a limp hand.

“You need not concern yourself for my feelings, Mercy. I will be comfortable here, as much as anywhere. I shall stay here, and study the stilt and his companion creatures. I shall classify them. A crustacean
shall be named after me. Perhaps record my own learnings, produce my own volume. Something worthy to gather dust in the attic.”

Stay? That wasn’t possible. I searched for something to say.

“But Mordecai. We have to find Papa.”

He lay back again on the rock and turned his head away.

“We both know that will not be.”

I clutched his arm and shook it.

“But you can’t stay here. You have to help me find my brother. And make Mama tell me what really happened.” I clutched my braids to stop my hands from shaking.

Mordecai sat up slowly. He reached deep into his bag and pulled out one more item. I knew before he laid the folded linen napkin in my lap what it was. I couldn’t bear to look.

“He’s been properly treated. I had wanted to cast him for you in plaster, but there was only enough to repair your skiff …”

From the cave came, again, the woman’s
kip-kip-kip
. Those few stilts that had wandered out into the light turned and hurried back toward the cave. Mordecai lurched up and followed them. He trod into the cave like a sleepwalker, knelt beside the woman, and lay his head on her knee. She began to stroke his hair; soon he lay beside her, his head in her lap, next to Crow’s. Mordecai looked as like to her as a twin. He appeared to have fallen asleep but then he opened his mouth and started to sing, his voice slurred and off pitch.