The Ancient

‘What about the Roman Empire?’ she asked without aggression.

He smiled again, a father to a child. ‘Ah yes, Fascism.’

Before he could begin a prepared response about that particularly abhorrent form of human politics, she interrupted. ‘I mean, specifically, how did it hold back humanity and halt progress?’

He had raised his eyebrows. ‘How about slavery, genocide and corruption?’ He was looking forward to humiliating her. She could tell he made a living out of it.

‘How about social order and justice for the majority, engineering and military advances of a type that have survived even until now, creativity in the arts equal if not superior to anything we enjoy today?’

‘No, no, no …’ He tried to stop by her shaking his head with sympathy, but she was undeterred.

‘Oh yeah. And ice cream.’

The class burst out laughing. He laughed with them, but only with his mouth. His eyes were pinning her down, marking her out.

‘And Hitler? I trust you admired the fact the trains ran on time?’

‘Hitler was voted into power.’ She spoke the next word deliberately slowly to irritate him. ‘Democratically.’

She was starting to irritate him as much he annoyed her. She could tell.

‘I guess you must be a National Socialist, young lady.’ He smiled at his own joke.

‘I’m Jewish.’

His smile faded and he looked at her coldly, cleared his throat and gave his pat response to the rest of the class while Esther sat thinking. It wasn’t important to prove the point here. Of course she believed in the might of democracy. It had simply become interesting to her as a student to see if what the English jerk was saying was true or not, and more importantly, in the true naive spirit of the young, to try and ruin his experienced certainty.

That night she sat in the library and after three long hours chose the most successful ancient civilization she could find that was comparable to her own, and one that was not based on any form of democracy whatsoever. The Incas.

They were perfect. Haughty dictators who were so successful in building their empire that their people always had huge surpluses of food. They had plumbing they would be proud of in Idaho, irrigation engineering over thousands of miles that still defies modern understanding, and a hierarchy that by and large only slaughtered each other, leaving the man and woman in the well-paved streets unharmed. There was social welfare, free education and health care, little or no crime, and all with not a sniff of anything remotely approaching democracy.

Unfortunately there was also human sacrifice, but since church was not separate from state in the way it must always be in modern democracies, this would only help to further prove her point. So it was just what she needed. An enviable civilization destroyed not by its lack of democracy, but by an equally undemocratic horde of avaricious religious hypocrites from Europe. Now, thousands of years later, under the democratic rule of a bastardized Spanish civilization, was Peru more successful? No sirree. She was off, and her dissertation was born.

The paper she had created from the dross of notes and photos of temples and dig sites she’d had developed in Cuzcou included sketched diagrams and twenty-nine full pages of her writing. Because unbelievably she had chanced upon something she wasn’t expecting. Something that was so exciting she could hardly contain it. A three-week trip onto the high plateau with some shepherds she had befriended in a small village had led her to an extraordinary piece of living human archaeology, something she hoped she was the first to find, and when she wrote of it might just cause a stir.

The shepherds had told her of a small group of nomadic people, rarely seen, who moved and lived on the very edges of the eastern mountain range that divided the high Andean plateau from the Amazon jungle. What was remarkable about these people, apart from the fear they seemed to inspire in the otherwise hardy shepherds, was the fact that they were Incas. Esther had tried not to laugh. There were, of course, no Incas. All the research told her that in the days of the great empire there were in fact only forty thousand full-blooded nobles who called themselves by that name. The hundreds of thousands of people who lived peacefully under their rule were merely Inca subjects.

The pure-bred Incas were either slaughtered or interbred with the Spanish to create through countless generations the modern Peruvians. To suggest that some of the original royal Incas had survived thus far intact would be outrageous. But the normally reticent shepherds were adamant, insisting, as further proof, that these people were still sun-worshippers, that they had the power and dark practices of the ancient ones very much in their grasp. Not only that, but the shepherds spoke enigmatically, and Esther thought, somewhat fearfully, about the tribe being unusually active recently. One had said in a small anxious voice that some of them had been travelling to towns and cities, a thing previously unheard of.

She begged to know where they might be found and after days of pleading and haranguing, they had left her in a place where the tribe were sometimes seen. She was afraid at first, being left alone in such a desolate spot, but even more afraid when after three days she emerged from her tent in the early light of dawn to find a small group of men sitting silently outside, waiting for her to emerge.

She’d had an incredibly brief twelve days in their company, before they disappeared in the night, their tracks indicating they had moved off in a direction that was too obviously a route to the jungle for her taste. Everything she’d learned from them during their time together was from a peculiarly intense and very beautiful seventeen-year-boy in their midst who could speak a little halting Spanish. She had spent time cultivating him, flirting even, to make him sit with her and talk into her Dictaphone in very broken and difficult Spanish. But then Esther had a talent for making men want her without ever giving them what they expected might be theirs after time. He was no different. Just younger. He’d started haltingly, shyly, glancing at the older men who regarded him and Esther impassively as they sat together by her tent. But as the days progressed he began to take a great, almost obsessive interest in her, talking more animatedly and rapidly, leaving her confused and ignorant of the majority of what he was trying to tell her. He’d been so intense, sweating profusely as he spoke, even though they were camped on the freezing plateau. But at least she’d confirmed what the frightened shepherds had told her. The boy had been to Lima, an incredible journey from here. But his eyes shone when he spoke of it, even though the elders lowered their eyes when they heard the name of the city. Teenagers the world over, thought Esther. Here she was wanting him to tell her about the traditions and rituals of his tribe, and probably all he wanted to talk about would be discos and girls. He certainly became even more flushed and excited when she made him understand she was heading for Lima on the way back, and indeed after that, he rarely left her alone. But his Spanish was too rapid for her. No matter. She checked the tapes each time he finished, and whatever he said was all there.

All she would have to do was to take the time later to decipher and translate, no doubt kicking herself for not asking the right things when she had the chance.

She had also written everything down that the elders had said, in exactly the words they’d used, unfamiliar or not. It was not for her to interpret it until she could think straight later.

The diagrams she had were of the makeshift altar they would build and destroy each morning and she sat examining it, looking forward to comparing it with the ancient lay-outs of the temples she had visited endlessly throughout the rest of the trip. When she awoke one morning to find they had gone in the night, there had been a particularly intricate pattern scratched in the hardened dust directly outside her tent, and what interested her when she’d made a careful sketch of it, was that unlike the altars they built, there was nothing even remotely familiar about its twisting lines. She treasured that one above all.

Esther blessed the dull English professor with the beard. Through a routine academic exercise to try and discuss the effects of democracy on civilization, she might, quite incredibly, have run into what she firmly believed was an almost completely unknown tribe of people.

She had no one yet to share the thrill with, particularly on this ship of fools, but even if it was laughed out of college when she got back, right now she was as excited as if she’d struck gold.

She lay back, and with some difficulty started the long task of deciphering her own appalling handwriting.

Sohn was trying not to laugh. Lloyd Skinner was a big, powerful man, and from the engine room, the only hatch into the cofferdams between the cargo holds and the outer hull was one that was considerably smaller than him. The fourth engineer and a cadet had unscrewed it laboriously to give him access, but he was struggling to get in, especially with the big industrial torch and ridiculously formal flightcase he was carrying. ‘You need that in there?’ Sohn asked, pointing to the aluminium case.

Skinner looked back. ‘The only way to keep this damned paperwork together.’

The chief engineer grinned and shrugged. Skinner was a strange man. Anyone would have accompanied him if he’d ordered it, would have held the papers for him and offered their back as a makeshift table for any documents that needed ticked or filled in at site.

Indeed, Sohn would have been pleased to do it himself. He hadn’t been inside the cofferdams on this ship before, and he was always delighted to acquaint himself with the concealed architecture of any vessel he powered through the water. But Skinner was a loner, a perfectionist, an utter stickler for duty, and if any inspection needed to be done, he always wanted to do it by himself.

The curious thing was not only why the company would want this done now, while at sea, but why they wanted it done at all.

There was nothing in there. Just a long dark space, at least eight feet wide and as tall as the entire hull, running the length of the ship, both to port and starboard. They were supposed to be checked and flushed regularly at port, so that any problem would become rapidly obvious on the loadicator. But that took time and manpower, and Sonstar were not a company to waste either if it got in the way of making money. Skinner was to be admired for pursuing the official line when his bosses would almost certainly have turned a blind eye to its omission. And if he wanted to go wandering in the dark, fumbling with plans and treading on rats, then that was his business. It was Lloyd Skinner’s ship to command and he could do what he wanted.

The captain had already pushed through and was standing upright on the other side by the time Sohn formulated his last offer.

‘You want to take walkie-talkie? In case you fall or something?’

Skinner shook his head, but smiled weakly. ‘Thank you, Chief Engineer. No. I only need to check and see there’s no leakage from the holds. The bosun reported there might be a small lesion near the bow. It’ll only take half an hour at most. If I’m not back by Friday you can send in the dogs.’

He turned and walked away, his boots making a lonely echo on the virgin metal floor. As the circle of his torchlight retreated into the long dark tunnel of dripping metal, three heads peered after him, glad to be on the side of the hatch where the striplights burned bright and Radio Lima played Mariah Carey.

‘Shit fuck bastard and double fuck!’

Leonardo Becko looked round quickly and tutted with exasperation. The galley boy was hopping from foot to foot, his hand tucked protectively under his arm, his face contorted with pain. One glance down at the deep fat frier he’d been feeding told the cook all he needed to know.

‘You stupid fucking idiot. You drop the potatoes from a height, ooh, surprise surprise, they’re going to make a splash.’

The boy was hissing through bared teeth, immune for the moment to his boss’s taunts. Leonardo wiped his flour-covered hands on a filthy apron and walked across the galley floor.

‘Here. Let’s see it, you moron.’

Salvo Acambra took his hand from his armpit and looked at it. It was burned only very superficially, a thin red weal rising from the wrist to the thumb. Leonardo tutted again, this time with heavy sarcasm, shaking his head like a vaudeville doctor making a fatal diagnosis. ‘Have to come off, I think.’

Salvo scowled.

Leonardo gave him a harmless swipe over the head and turned away to get on with his pastry. ‘Take ten minutes, and make sure it’s only ten. You bloody moron.’

‘Yes, Chef,’ said the boy, brightening considerably. He moved quickly to the galley storeroom, and sat down on a crate. An examination of the weal told him it was indeed an injury of no consequence, and he smiled at the ten-minute break he’d earned as a bonus in the hot, busy hell that led up to lunch. He craned backwards and peered out into the galley to see where the cook was now. Becko’s head was turned the other way, and the boy quickly shut the storeroom door a fraction more with his foot, reached into his back pocket under his apron ties and took out a packet of cigarettes.

He glanced up to the porthole, then stood on the crate and opened the window. Leonardo Becko hated smoking in the galley, so he would have to be extra careful. He pushed his body against the bulkhead, stuck his head as far out of the porthole as the limited hinge would allow, lit up a cigarette and took a long, delicious drag. The sun beat down on his hot face, but the breeze from the sea blew away both his smoke and his sweat in a way that made him close his eyes in pleasure, enjoying the rare moment of solitude.

Salvo loved the ozone smell of the sea, the fresh, salty tang that it left on your skin and in your hair. It was the one great consolation for working in this hole of a ship. He took another long suck of nicotine and let himself dream of home.

The breeze was souring. He opened his eyes and took a deeper sniff, curious as to where this new smell was coming from. Instantly, his senses were assaulted by an almost solid intake of air that was fetid and foul beyond reason. He coughed back a throatful of vomit, fighting to control it and sent it back below where it belonged.

Tears in his eyes from the effort of this, he stepped down from the crate and looked around to see if the cause was coming from within. The air he breathed freshened again, full of the hot comfortable smells of cooking, steam and condensation. The rotting had most definitely come from outside.

He looked quizzically up at the porthole, and this time stepped more gingerly up on the crate and put his head out. Only four or five inches of the window would open on account of the safety catch, but he forced his face out through it, trying not to breathe deeply this time. To his left, the limited space let him see along the outer hull of the ship as far as the bow. It was harder to see to the right, or above, but he could also look down and just see the foam breaking below at the waterline. He sniffed more gently this time, and the same reek attacked his nostrils like acid. He coughed, waited until his eyes cleared of the tears, then strained to see.

There was movement. It was above him, faint, only on the very edge of his vision, and he felt it rather than saw it. Salvo contorted his head to twist up and see what it might have been, but the movement was unfeasible. He flicked through some possibilities of what might have moved on a smooth metal hull of a ship doing twenty knots. A seagull, maybe, caught in some peculiar way on something sharp? Or maybe a rope or cable come loose, dangling and scraping on the side. But what was making the smell? He tried one more tortuous move then gave up. Who cared what it was?

He flicked his precious cigarette from the porthole and shut the glass tight. The air inside the storeroom was like nectar after the stench from outside, and he sat back on the crate, his back against the wall, to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, gazing dreamily at the square of brilliant sunlight being projected onto a pile of potato sacks on the wall opposite him.

Not much would send a galley boy back to his work early from a break he had been gifted by the chef, but two things happened simultaneously that did just that.

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.