The Ancient

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Behind him, through the very hull of the ship itself, he felt a manic scraping, the vibration of some horrible metallic scuttling. The sound rats would make if they were ten feet long and made of something other than flesh. And the square of light that bathed the potato sacks blackened quickly into shadow and lit again. The boy leapt to his feet and whirled around to the porthole. It framed a perfect blue sky and bathed him in nothing more than benign sunshine.

Leonardo was surprised to see Salvo back so quickly, but he was pleased to have the help.

‘Turn that bloody stock down. And get over here and finish these carrots.’

‘Yes, Chef,’ the boy said weakly and wiped his sweating upper lip with a burnt hand that he had quite forgotten.

Even the most expensive penthouse apartment in any of the world’s greatest cities would have a hard time competing with the view from the bridge of the Lysicrates. Dilapidated and shabby though it was, when the ship was in sail and the cargo deck below stretched like a pointing finger into the dark blue Pacific, it would be hard to stare down from the bridge’s angled windows with anything other than awe.

When Renato Lhoon entered, the third officer on watch was staring out ahead as one might expect, but not with awe at the might of the ocean and its domination by man. He had the look of a man who was half asleep.

‘Wakey wakey, Ernesto.’

The man turned round quickly and tried to look alert. He nodded to Lhoon then looked down at the screen of the echo sounder as though he were interested. His senior officer stood at his side and glanced down at the array of flickering instrument screens between them and the ocean panorama.

‘Set fair?’

Ernesto nodded and pointed to the curling weather fax on the console beside him, but Renato’s eye had already drifted to the GPS.

‘Have we altered course?’

‘Eh, yeah. Just to the co-ordinates that Officer Cotton decided.’ Ernesto gave an expansive sweep with one open hand over the instruments, imagining that might help explain things.

‘Let me see the log.’

The third officer handed it to him and he scanned last night’s entry. There was no mention of a navigational alteration. But then Cotton would forget to make an entry in his log if dinosaurs roamed onto the cargo deck and tore down the derricks with their teeth. Renato sighed with exasperation.

‘What was the alteration?’

Ernesto fumbled for a moment then told him. The ship had been re-routed five degrees west, and their course was taking them directly up the middle of the Milne Edwards Trench, the one that had so freaked Esther. It was not the usual shipping lane and although it was only a small detour, its purpose, in fine and settled weather, seemed meaningless.

Renato was not going to challenge his senior officer’s decision in front of a subordinate, and so he nodded as though he knew about it and had simply forgotten.

The man seemed relieved, took back the log, and turned again to feign interest in the echo sounder, which was presently showing a vertiginous depth of seventeen thousand feet.

Renato walked casually over to the starboard window and checked on his chilli pepper plants, then as quietly as he had entered, left to go and find Cotton.

‘Recreation Room’ was rather a grand term for a space that boasted only one bookcase with some dog-eared pot-boilers in various languages, and a pile of elderly magazines. But Matthew Cotton was not slumped back on one of the three foam sofas, a rum and Coke in his hand, because he was attracted by the possibilities of the reading material. The sideboard that ran the length of the wall was the officers’ makeshift bar, a trusting affair run by the catering staff, from which imbibers took what they wanted from the generous gantry and filled in their intake for later payment on the personalized sheets left for the purpose.

Matthew had long since given up entering his drinks on his dog-eared piece of paper measure by measure, and it was understood now that he would simply purchase his ration by the bottle.

The dent he had made on his current bottle of Bacardi was not inconsiderable, and his eyes were closed, his head leant against the hard foam as the effects of it started to make their mark.

‘Double watch again, Matthew. Eight till four.’

Cotton didn’t open his eyes. ‘Shit, have a drink, Renato. I know when my fuckin’ watch is.’

Renato Lhoon left the doorway where he’d been standing for some time, looking at his senior officer with contempt, and entered the room. ‘It’s two-thirty. I don’t need no drink.’

‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,’ sniggered Matthew in a mock-Mexican accent, enjoying the unfunnyness of his joke alone, in the way only drunks can. When there was silence in response he opened his eyes and blinked around him to see where Renato Lhoon might be. He was standing over him, and Matthew lifted his head to focus on his face.

‘What?’

‘Thought we had a deal, Matthew.’

‘Huh?’

‘You gonna drink all watch, then you tell me what happens. I fill the log. That’s how it works. That’s how I save your skin.’

‘Yeah? What, you want me to thank you for it like every day?’

Renato crossed his arms. ‘I want you to tell me what you do on duty.’

Matthew shrugged in agreement. ‘So?’

‘You changed course last night. I told the captain everything this morning, like you know you should do and not me, but I don’t tell him that. Know why? ’Cause I don’t know, that’s why.’

Matthew sat up and blinked at Renato. The man was angry. Not like him. ‘What’s the big deal, Renato? So I forgot.’

‘What the captain going to say?’

Matthew took a swig of his drink and exhaled his words on the resulting expellation of air that followed his swallow. ‘Nothing, I shouldn’t reckon.’

Renato snorted. ‘Yeah? You alter course, don’t log it and you think he don’t mind?’

‘I know he won’t.’

‘Yeah? How come?’

Matthew lay back again and looked at Renato as if he were dumb. ‘Because the captain came to the bridge and changed it himself.’

A subtle alteration in Renato’s face made Matthew sit up slightly, ashamed momentarily of his slovenly appearance. For no reason that Matthew could comprehend, the second officer looked as though he had been betrayed.

Matthew cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, man. I just forgot to log it.’

Renato looked down at him for a moment, then walked across to the gantry and poured himself a Sprite. ‘What time?’

Matthew was now uncomfortable, staring at the man’s tense back as he drank his lemonade. ‘What time what?’

Renato turned to face him, his face now inscrutable. ‘What time did he come on the fucking bridge?’

This was not like Matthew’s friend and partner in crime, Renato Lhoon. This was the man who kept him in a job, who kept him on the very edge of the legality of his post, who made sure he got up, made certain he fulfilled his duties, made absolutely sure that First Officer Matthew Cotton didn’t plough the vessel into a tanker at three in the morning.

And in return Renato Lhoon got paid. He got paid well. Why now, was he getting so upset about such a tiny regular misdemeanour as forgetting to log? Matthew ran a hand over the back of his neck. ‘Uh, let me see. I reckon around two, maybe half past. I dunno.’

If only Matthew knew it, there were in fact two reasons that Lhoon was getting upset.

But then there was no way that he could have known, since Lhoon spent a great deal of time and energy concealing them both, but they were nevertheless at the forefront of his ire right now as he stood regarding the hopeless drunk who was one rank higher than he was in the important chain of command.

The first reason was probably the most important: Renato Lhoon hated Matthew Cotton. Hated him with the kind of passion that was bordering on animal. He hated the fact that this man had been given a job he was incapable of doing, that he was given a second chance and employed again after throwing away ten years of being a captain because of his decline into alcoholism in the last two, and that he took the job and paid Renato to keep him there in the full knowledge that he should be ashore, ashore for good.

It made him sick, dressing Cotton when he was naked and ranting, fulfilling his mundane duties for him when he was on watch, keeping the gossip of the crew at bay to prevent the withdrawal of co-operation, and most of all taking his money.

But the second reason was the captain. Lloyd Skinner was a decent man. So decent he had deliberately chosen this wreck of a human being to be his first officer when he could have chosen anyone he wanted. Anyone, for instance, like Lhoon.

Renato knew something had happened to Cotton ashore that had made him the way he was. He didn’t know what, but frankly, he didn’t give a shit. He’d never asked, and he didn’t care. Everyone had bad times, everyone had tragedies. This man had once been a respected captain and now he was a bum.

The sea demanded more of a man.

Lloyd Skinner should know that, and it irked him that if he did, in this case he turned an extremely blind eye. Renato’s relationship with the captain had always been good. They had, he thought, an understanding, an empathy, a rapport. Now, just lately, he felt Skinner was excluding him, and to exclude him in favour of this useless baggage was too much. He couldn’t give a flying fuck about a tiny change in course. What was upsetting him was that the captain had visited the bridge at a highly unusual time in the night, altered course for no reason that Lhoon could see, and most importantly, hadn’t mentioned it to him during the report of the watch he always gave on Cotton’s behalf in the morning.

Sure he was mad about it, but for now he would maintain his inscrutability. Because Renato Lhoon had plans.

He looked back at Matthew. ‘Half-past two? He say why he changed course?’

‘Search me. Maybe there was a tanker or shit. I didn’t see anything on the radar.’

Renato nodded, as though satisfied, then placed his can on the sideboard and walked to the door. Matthew watched him go, expecting more, but he disappeared from view without a parting word.

‘Hey!’ shouted Cotton to an empty door frame. ‘You forgot to write down your Sprite.’

The spaces between the cofferdams were open and stepping over them was possible with care and a little effort. The torchlight illuminated the long cathedral of buttressed iron that supported the main holds like some insane gothic fancy.

A lesser soul might have been tempted to turn and run with every creak and clank of shifting metal that reverberated along the endless corridor, but Lloyd Skinner was not a man to spook easily. He had been surprised, unpleasantly so, to discover that there were rats down here. He knew there were rats on board. He himself had falsified the inspection sheet to claim that there were not, but it was unsettling that they had penetrated into the part of the ship that should be sealed and secure. More than once, the beam had caught the ugly back of a scuttling grey beast, scrambling for safety over the iron spines of the tanks and splashing through the small puddles of sea water that still persisted even after flushing.

Skinner gave a moment’s thought to wonder where there might be a breach that allowed them access to this area from the main holds where he knew they lived, foraged and bred, then as quickly dismissed it and carried on.

He had turned the corner, away from the square of light that came from the engine room, and now he was in a world of total black, with only a cavernous echo to remind him of the scale of his largely invisible surroundings.

Back there, he knew, the engineers would be gossiping, pouring mugs full of the repulsive Filipino coffee they drank in unhealthy quantities, and looking curiously from time to time at the hole through which their captain had gone to do his duty to the company and international safety regulations. But in here, well below the line of the sea that pushed against the iron skin, eager to enter and fill those gaps with its heavy, salty, irresistible body, he was alone, unobserved.