The Emerald Storm

Chapter 44

It was an uphill climb to the cabin of the Pelee. We were at the complete mercy of the sea, being driven toward a reef, every man left now to God and glory. The strongboxes were broken, the glorious artifacts of Tenochtitlan clutched desperately like talismans by drowning men, or rattling loose like seashells in the surf. My own mind fogged with fury. That Napoleon Bonaparte himself had set this disaster in motion, as Martel claimed-that he’d used my family and me as puppets-was beyond ordinary political calculation. I’d spent nearly a year plummeting toward this disaster, in pursuit of ancient trinkets that were no more likely to produce real flying machines than scribbles at an asylum. My son had been kidnapped and his mind likely scarred. All to further lunatic aims of invading Britain?

Madness!

What I could do now was what I’d been trying from the beginning, to save my family.

The cabin’s latch had broken and its door flapped and banged. I hoisted past it to the chaotic cave the cabin had become, awash in water and broken furniture. The tier of stern windows was half smashed in, shards of glass sliding in seawater. It was dim to see. “Astiza!”

“Holding Harry! What happened? Everything upended!”

I saw her by Brienne’s bunk, her face cut. “You’re hurt.”

“Afraid. Are we going down?”

“Martel cut the rudder cable. We’re nothing more than a driftwood wreck.”

“I love you, Ethan.” She called it, yards out of reach. “You did what you thought best.”

I clung to that thought like I did to a bulkhead, but had more urgent things that needed saying, or so I thought. The confirmation of my love for her could come later.

So do we miscalculate.

The dim light was growing even darker, and I could see a mountain of water rising astern, a wave higher and higher, green and glassy, streaked with foam, the largest wave, in fact, that I’d ever seen. It filled the view from the windows. Then it filled the sky.

“The masts are gone. We need to get out. Maybe we can find a hatch cover or grate to float off. There’s a reef nearby, which likely means land-”

The cabin exploded.

The rogue wave blew in the last of the windows to shove out the air and kick me against the boards. The cabin filled with the sea, foam boiling against its ceiling beams. Then the ocean sucked out as I tried to grip, hauling at my weary fingers. I gasped for air, neck-deep in swirling water. Where were my wife and son?

“Astiza!”

The storm answered me.

Pelee was upending, the decks becoming walls, and I climbed its floor like a ladder, leaping for the windows in the wreckage of the stern. Mullions hung like ragged ribbons. Beyond was the wilderness of water that had sucked out my wife and son.

I didn’t hesitate. I crawled through, stood on the stern, and watched the useless rudder come out of the sea to flap like a broken whale fluke. Then I dove as far as I could. I managed to thrash to the backside of a comber trying to bury the ship, which meant that instead of being pulled under by the vessel’s sinking, I successfully struggled a few yards away, kicking against the suck of the disappearing ketch. Even with my head above water it was hard to breathe; the boundary between sea and air was indistinct. I looked wildly about. Where was my family?

Something bumped me, and I frantically grasped. It was the ship’s wheel, a modest float but wood enough to help keep me from drowning. I clung like a kit raccoon to its mother-my ship, my treasure, my friends, and my family all gone. The weight, power, and chill of the churning seawater seemed unbelievable.

I thought Pelee was gone, too, but no; at the edge of visibility she rose again like an emerging iceberg, picked up by a wave curling toward that wicked line of white that marked a reef or a beach. Was Martel still aboard? Her broken stern climbed toward the sky, the rest still under, and the entire mass of the vessel was hurled forward in the wave as if shot from a sling. Then the comber broke with a roar, and there was a larger crash as thousands of tons of wood hit something solid, splinters of oak and coral tossed up in the air like an exploding grenade.

The vessel had disintegrated after colliding with a reef. Fragments were whipped away by the wind.

“Ethan!”

I whirled in the water. Astiza! She rose in view to the top of the swell, clutching what must be Harry, and then sank out of sight in the trough on the other side.

Kicking while holding the broken wheel, I began swimming to where I guessed she must be, faster than I thought possible.

For a long minute I thought I’d lost her again in the chaos, and then rain parted and I saw her hair like a tendril of seaweed, playing on the water as she struggled to float.

I thrashed toward her. She’d disappear under the waves, then rise again in tired struggle. I kept fearing she’d sink for good before I could get to the pair of them.

But no, I made it! I grabbed her hair and hauled her to me. As she hacked and coughed I roughly took Harry. I feared the boy dead, but he blinked at my squeeze and spat out seawater. He was in shock.

Incongruously, on Astiza’s neck was the golden pendant Napoleon had granted us, that N surrounded by a laurel leaf. Maybe that was the curse! I yanked it off her and let it drop in the sea.

Around my own neck was still the magnifying glass for the emerald I had swallowed.

The three of us clung to the wheel fragment, but now our weight was almost doubled. The wood sank, and we sank with it, the sea closing over our heads.

Astiza released her grip and we floated up again, Harry and I carried by the wheel and my wife thrashing.

“We need more wood!” I cried. “There! Salvation!” One of the ship’s masts rolled in the tempest like a log.

She gasped and paddled to me again, exhausted. As she grabbed we sank again, so I decided to let go. But when I tried she insistently pushed Harry and the wheel against me and let go herself.

We surfaced.

“Ethan, you’re stronger. Hold on.”

“You take it, too!”

“It won’t float the three of us.” She coughed. “My strength is almost gone. Hold Harry, and we’ll both swim for the mast.”

“Then you take the wheel!”

She shook her head. “Harry needs it. I can’t carry him anymore, Ethan. I’m fading.” She was drifting out of my reach. “Keep the wood and our son.”

“Come here! I’ll help you swim!”

“Don’t you dare let him sink.” Her eyes were glazed, but her tone still urgent. “You mustn’t let him go, Ethan. He’s your responsibility now.” She made swimming motions, but they were feeble. She almost lolled in the waves, trying to take a breath. In my exhaustion, she was a thousand miles away.

“This way!” I don’t think she heard me because I sobbed the words and didn’t have the strength myself to chase both her and the mast. Harry was wheezing, half full of water, and the wheel seemed pitifully inadequate. I glanced back. The breakers on the reef were close, furious, crashing down to throw off huge clouds of spume. Would any of us survive crossing those shallows? We needed the mast! A wave closed over Harry and me, pushing us down, and so I kicked until finally the wheel fragment helped bring us up.

The mast rolled closer.

Where was Astiza?

There, on a swell.

I saw the wave lift her up as if she’d floated free of our miseries, her beautiful black hair framed against green water like a sea fan. As her head slipped below the surface the wave kept lifting her up, up, up, so that I saw her entire body for a moment, suspended as if captured in glass, backlit by a watery sun, a silhouette that left me aching with longing, regret, and shame. Her legs, her dress, suspended in green amber.

There was something else in the wave, too, a dark blob just below the surface. It was our diving bell, I realized, like a waterlogged cork. When the mainmast went over, it must have floated free.

Then Astiza slid onto the swell’s backside and was gone.

“Astiza!” It was a croak, not a cry. Harry and I went under again, about to follow his mother. I had energy for one last rise, breaking clear, the wheel beginning to loosen.

The wood, our last hope, slipped away.

So we sank a final time. We, too, were doomed.

And then something gripped and hauled, as strong as the arm of Poseidon.

We erupted out of the water and were thrown onto the mast. I retched, trying to get air. “Hold, white man!” It was Jubal. He’d been clinging to the timber and snagged us. I tucked my arm inside a rope, and as Harry threatened to slip free, the Negro grabbed him and pulled my boy to his own chest, his other arm locked on the mast as if welded. No, he was tied; he’d lashed himself to the wood.

“Astiza?” It was merely confusion. I was about done.

“Hold!” And then it was our turn to be lifted skyward, higher and higher, impossibly high, rising on the crest of a breaker as if the mainmast of Pelee had become a flying machine itself. We were hurled forward, impossibly fast toward whatever was beyond that line of white, and then fell as it broke. We plummeted down like going over a waterfall.

Thunder as the wave hit and broke on the coral, the whole mast underwater. We bumped and skidded on the reef. I clung from instinct, not sensibility, while we rolled.

Then somehow we were beyond, tumbled upright into the air for another agonized breath, and skimmed toward a beach where sand was almost black. The log grounded, started to suck back out, and then another wave struck and we lurched even farther in. Water hammered, sand filled every orifice, and I had no sense of where I was or what I was doing.

“Let go!” Jubal was waist-deep, yanking to free me from the rope. I came clear, body battered. Harry hung from Jubal’s arm as if dead. The sight of my son was the only thing that kept me going, so I stood, staggering in the swirling surf, and then we awkwardly plunged toward land. The mast pursued, as if to knock us flat after saving us.

I fell and it struck, but it just knocked me farther ashore. I crawled in foam while the wooden spar rolled away from me.

A final wave carried me far enough to get clear of the sea. I wiggled upward like a turtle.

I was on terra firma.

I looked back at the fury we’d survived. The reef was a leaping boil of crashing waves, and the water between it and shore a soup of foam. Beyond was a tormented sea, some swells picked out by the sun and glowing green and blue, and others shaded by dark cloud and gray as iron. My body ached as if beaten by a club. I was half blind from salt, reddened from cuts and scratches, and emptied of will.

I was also alive, and horrified by that fact.

Because it meant that I was still conscious enough to recognize that Astiza, who’d seen our fate as she peered into the future, was gone.