The Wish House and Other Stories

  In the Mediterranean (Nile keeping always her name) there is but one river – that shifty-mouthed Danube, where she works through her deltas into the Black Sea. Up went the young man’s eyebrows.

  ‘Is he any kin to a Sulinor of Tomi, who used to be in the flesh-traffic – and a Free Trader? My uncle has told me of him. He calls him Mango.’

  That man. He was my second in the wheat-trade my last five voyages, after the Euxine grew too hot to hold him. But he’s in the Fleet now…You know your ship best. Where do you think the after-girts ought to come?’

  The captain was explaining, when a huge dish-faced Dacian, in short naval cuirass, rolled up the gangplank, carefully saluting the bust of Caesar on the poop, and asked the captain’s name.

  ‘Baeticus, for choice,’ was the answer.

  They all laughed, for the sea, which Rome mans with foreigners, washes out many shore-names.

  ‘My trouble is this—‘ Baeticus began, and they went into committee, which lasted a full hour. At the end, he led them to the poop, where an awning had been stretched, and wines set out with fruits and sweet shore water.

  They drank to the Gods of the Sea, Trade, and Good Fortune, spilling those small cups overside, and then settled at ease.

  ‘Girting’s an all-day job, if it’s done properly,’ said the inspector. ‘Can you spare a real working-party by dawn tomorrow, Mango?’

  ‘But surely – for you, Red.’

  ‘I’m thinking of the wheat,’ said Quabil curtly. He did not like nicknames so early.

  ‘Full meals and drinks,’ the Spanish captain put in.

  ‘Good! Don’t return ’em too full. By the way’ – Sulinor lifted a level cup – ‘where do you get this liquor, Spaniard?’

  ‘From our Islands (the Balearics). Is it to your taste?’

  ‘It is.’ The big man unclasped his gorget in solemn preparation.

  Their talk ran professionally, for though each end of the Mediterranean scoffs at the other, both unite to mock landward, wooden-headed Rome and her stiff-jointed officials.

  Sulinor told a tale of taking the prefect of the port, on a breezy day, to Forum Julii, to see a lady, and of his lamentable condition when landed.

  ‘Yes,’ Quabil sneered. ‘Rome’s mistress of the world – as far as the foreshore.’

  ‘If Caesar ever came on patrol with me,’ said Sulinor, ‘he might understand there was such a thing as the Fleet.’

  ‘Then he’d officer it with well-born young Romans,’ said Quabil. ‘Be grateful you are left alone. You are the last man in the world to want to see Caesar.’

  ‘Except one,’ said Sulinor, and he and Quabil laughed.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ the Spaniard asked.

  Sulinor explained.

  ‘We had a passenger, our last trip together, who wanted to see Caesar. It cost us our ship and freight. That’s all.’

  ‘Was he a warlock – a wind-raiser?’

  Only a Jew philosopher. But he had to see Caesar. He said he had; and he piled up the Eirene on his way.’

  ‘Be fair,’ said Quabil. ‘I don’t like the Jews – they lie too close to my own hold – but it was Caesar lost me my ship.’ He turned to Baeticus. ‘There was a proclamation, our end of the world, two seasons back, that Caesar wished the Eastern wheat-boats to run through the winter, and he’d guarantee all loss. Did you get it, youngster.

  ‘No. Our stuff is all in by September. I wager Caesar never paid you! How late did you start?’

  ‘I left Alexandria across the bows of the Equinox – well down in the pickle, with Egyptian wheat – half pigeon’s dung – and the usual load of Greek sutlers and their women. The second day out the sou’-wester caught me. I made across it north for the Lycian coast, and slipped into Myra till the wind should let me get back into the regular grain-track again.’

  Sailor-fashion, Quabil began to illustrate his voyage with date and olive stones from the table.

  ‘The wind went into the north, as I knew it would, and I got under way. You remember, Mango? My anchors were apeak when a Lycian patrol threshed in with Rome’s order to us to wait on a Sidon packet with prisoners and officers. Mother of Carthage, I cursed him!’

  ‘Shouldn’t swear at Rome’s Fleet. ‘Weatherly craft, those Lycian racers! Fast, too. I’ve been hunted by them! Never thought I’d command one,’ said Sulinor, half aloud.

  ‘And now I’m coming to the leak in my decks, young man,’ Quabil eyed Baeticus sternly. ‘Our slant north had strained her, and I should have undergirt her at Myra. Gods know why I didn’t! I set up the chain-staples in the cable-tier for the prisoners. I even had the girt-hawsers on deck – which saved time later; but the thing I should have done, that I did not.’

  ‘Luck of the Gods!’ Sulinor laughed. ‘It was because our little philosopher wanted to see Caesar in his own way at our expense.’

  ‘Why did he want to see him?’ said Baeticus.

  ‘As far as I ever made out from him and the centurion, he wanted to argue with Caesar – about philosophy.’

  ‘He was a prisoner, then?’

  ‘A political suspect – with a Jew’s taste for going to law,’ Quabil interrupted. ‘No orders for irons. Oh, a little shrimp of a man, but-but he seemed to take it for granted that he led everywhere. He messed with us.’

  ‘And he was worth talking to, Red,’ said Sulinor.

  ‘You thought so; but he had the woman’s trick of taking the tone and colour of whoever he talked to. Now – as I was saying…’

  There followed another illustrated lecture on the difficulties that beset them after leaving Myra. There was always too much west in the autumn winds, and the Eirene tacked against it as far as Cnidus. Then there came a northerly slant, on which she ran through the Aegean Islands, for the tail of Crete; rounded that, and began tacking up the south coast.

  ‘Just darning the water again, as we had done from Myra to Cnidus,’ said Quabil ruefully. ‘I daren’t stand out. There was the boneyard of all the Gulf of Africa under my lee. But at last we worked into Fairhaven – by that cork yonder. Late as it was, I should have taken her on, but I had to call a ship-council as to lying up for the winter. That Rhodian law may have suited open boats and cock-crow coasters,* but it’s childish for ocean-traffic’

  ‘I never allow it in any command of mine,’ Baeticus spoke quietly. ‘The cowards give the order, and the captain bears the blame.’

  Quabil looked at him keenly. Sulinor took advantage of the pause.

  ‘We were in harbour, you see. So our Greeks tumbled out and voted to stay where we were. It was my business to show them that the place was open to many winds, and that if it came on to blow we should drive ashore.’

  ‘Then I,’ broke in Quabil, with a large and formidable smile, ‘advised pushing on to Phenike, round the cape, only forty miles across the bay. My mind was that, if I could get her undergirt there, I might later – er – coax them out again on a fair wind, and hit Sicily. But the undergirting came first. She was beginning to talk too much – like me now.’

  Sulinor chafed a wrist with his hand.

  ‘She was a hard-mouthed old water-bruiser in any sea,’ he murmured.

  ‘She could lie within six points of any wind,’ Quabil retorted, and hurried on. ‘What made Paul vote with those Greeks? He said we’d be sorry if we left harbour.’

  ‘Every passenger says that, if a bucketful comes aboard,’ Baeticus observed.

  Sulinor refilled his cup, and looked at them over the brim, under brows as candid as a child’s, ere he set it down.

  ‘Not Paul. He did not know fear. He gave me a dose of my own medicine once. It was a morning watch coming down through the Islands. We had been talking about the cut of our topsail – he was right – it held too much lee wind – and then he went to wash before he prayed. I said to him: “You seem to have both ends and the bight of most things coiled down in your little head, Paul. If it’s a fair question, what is your trade ashore?” And he said: “I’ve been a man
-hunter – Gods forgive me; and now that I think The God has forgiven me, I am man-hunting again.” Then he pulled his shirt over his head, and I saw his back. Did you ever see his back, Quabil?’

  ‘I expect I did – that last morning, when we all stripped; but I don’t remember.’

  ‘I shan’t forget it! There was good, sound lictor’s work and criss-cross Jew scourgings like gratings; and a stab or two; and, besides those, old dry bites – when they get good hold and rugg you. That showed he must have dealt with the Beasts. So, whatever he’d done, he’d paid for. I was just wondering what he had done, when he said: “No; not your sort of man-hunting.” “It’s your own affair,” I said: “but I shouldn’t care to see Caesar with a back like that. I should hear the Beasts asking for me.” “I may that, too, some day,” he said, and began sluicing himself, and – then—What’s brought the girls out so early? Oh, I remember!’

  There was music up the quay, and a wreathed shore-boat put forth full of Arlesian women. A long-snouted three-banker was hauling from a slip till her trumpets warned the benches to take hold. As they gave way, the hrmph-hrmph of the oars in the oar-ports reminded Sulinor, he said, of an elephant choosing his man in the Circus.

  ‘She has been here re-masting. They’ve no good rough-tree at Forum Julii,’ Quabil explained to Baeticus. ‘The girls are singing her out.’

  The shallop ranged alongside her, and the banks held water, while a girl’s voice came across the clock-calm harbour-face:

  ‘Ah, would swift ships had never been about the seas to rove!

  For then these eyes had never seen nor ever wept their love.

  Over the ocean-rim he came – beyond that verge he passed,

  And I who never knew his name must mourn him to the last!’

  ‘And you’d think they meant it,’ said Baeticus, half to himself.

  ‘That’s a pretty stick,’ was Quabil’s comment as the man-of-war opened the island athwart the harbour. ‘But she’s overmasted by ten foot. A trireme’s only a bird-cage.’

  ‘Luck of the Gods I’m not singing in one now,’ Sulinor muttered. They heard the yelp of a bank being speeded up to the short sea-stroke.

  ‘I wish there was some way to save mainmasts from racking.’ Baeticus looked up at his own, bangled with copper wire.

  ‘The more reason to undergirt, my son,’ said Quabil. ‘I was going to undergirt that morning at Fairhaven. You remember, Sulinor? I’d given orders to overhaul the hawsers the night before. My fault! Never say “Tomorrow”. The Gods hear you. And then the wind came out of the south, mild as milk. All we had to do was to slip round the headland to Phenike – and be safe.’

  Baeticus made some small motion, which Quabil noticed, for he stopped.

  ‘My father,’ the young man spread apologetic palms, ‘is not that lying wind the in-draught of Mount Ida? It comes up with the sun, but later—‘

  ‘You need not tell me! We rounded the cape, our decks like a fair (it was only half a day’s sail), and then, out of Ida’s bosom the full north-easter stamped on us! Run? What else? I needed a lee to clean up in. Clauda was a few miles down wind; but whether the old lady would bear up when she got there, I was not so sure.’

  ‘She did.’ Sulinor rubbed his wrists again. ‘We were towing our longboat half-full. I steered somewhat that day.’

  ‘What sail were you showing?’ Baeticus demanded.

  ‘Nothing – and twice too much at that. But she came round when Sulinor asked her, and we kept her jogging in the lee of the island. I said, didn’t I, that my girt-hawsers were on deck?’

  Baeticus nodded. Quabil plunged into his campaign at long and large, telling every shift and device he had employed. ‘It was scanting daylight,’ he wound up, ‘but I daren’t slur the job. Then we streamed our boat alongside, baled her, sweated her up, and secured. You ought to have seen our decks!’

  ‘Panic?’ said Baeticus.

  ‘A little. But the whips were out early. The centurion – Julius – lent us his soldiers.’

  ‘How did your prisoners behave?’ the young man went on.

  Sulinor answered him. ‘Even when man is being shipped to the Beasts, he does not like drowning in irons. They tried to rive the chain-staples out of her timbers.’

  ‘I got the main-yard on deck’ – this was Quabil. ‘That eased her a little. They stopped yelling after a while, didn’t they?’

  ‘They did,’ Sulinor replied. ‘Paul went down and told them there was no danger. And they believed him! Those scoundrels believed him! He asked me for the keys of the leg-bars to make them easier. “I’ve been through this sort of thing before,” he said, “but they are new to it down below. Give me the keys.” I told him there was no order for him to have any keys; and I recommended him to line his hold for a week in advance, because we were in the hands of the Gods. “And when are we ever out of them?” he asked. He looked at me like an old gull lounging just astern of one’s taffrail in a full gale. You know that eye, Spaniard?’

  ‘Well do I!’

  ‘By that time’ – Quabil took the story again – ‘we had drifted out of the lee of Clauda, and our one hope was to run for it and pray we weren’t pooped. None the less, I could have made Sicily with luck. As a gale I have known worse, but the wind never shifted a point, d’ye see? We were flogged along like a tired ox.’

  ‘Any sights?’ Baeticus asked.

  ‘For ten days not a blink.’

  ‘Nearer two weeks,’ Sulinor corrected. ‘We cleared the decks of everything except our ground-tackle, and put six hands at the tillers. She seemed to answer her helm – sometimes. Well, it kept me warm for one.’

  ‘How did your philosopher take it?’

  ‘Like the gull I spoke of. He was there, but outside it all. You never got on with him, Quabil?’

  ‘Confessed! I came to be afraid at last. It was not my office to show fear, but I was. He was fearless, although I knew that he knew the peril as well as I. When he saw that trying to – er – cheer me made me angry, he dropped it. Like a woman, again. You saw more of him, Mango?’

  ‘Much. When I was at the rudders he would hop up to the steerage, with the lower-deck ladders lifting and lunging a foot at a time, and the timbers groaning like men beneath the Beasts. We used to talk, hanging on till the roll jerked us into the scuppers. Then we’d begin again. What about? Oh! Kings and Cities and Gods and Caesar. He was sure he’d see Caesar. I told him I had noticed that people who worried Those Up Above’ – Sulinor jerked his thumb towards the awning – ‘were mostly sent for in a hurry.’

  ‘Hadn’t you wit to see he never wanted you for yourself, but to get something out of you?’ Quabil snapped.

  ‘Most Jews are like that – and all Sidonians!’ Sulinor grinned. ‘But what could he have hoped to get from anyone? We were doomed men all. You said it, Red.’

  ‘Only when I was at my emptiest. Otherwise I knew that with any luck I could have fetched Sicily! But I broke – we broke. Yes, we got ready – you too – for the Wet Prayer.’

  ‘How does that run with you?’ Baeticus asked, for all men are curious concerning the bride-bed of Death.

  ‘With us of the River,’ Sulinor volunteered, ‘we say: “I sleep; presently I row again.”’

  ‘Ah! At our end of the world we cry: “Gods, judge me not as a god, but a man whom the Ocean has broken.’” Baeticus looked at Quabil, who answered, raising his cup: ‘We Sidonians say, “Mother of Carthage, I return my oar!” But it all comes to the one in the end.’ He wiped his beard, which gave Sulinor his chance to cut in.

  ‘Yes, we were on the edge of the Prayer when – do you remember, Quabil? – he clawed his way up the ladders and said: “No need to call on what isn’t there. My God sends me sure word that I shall see Caesar. And he has pledged me all your lives to boot. Listen! No man will be lost.” And Quabil said: “But what about my ship?’” Sulinor grinned again.

  ‘That’s true. I had forgotten the cursed passengers,’ Quabil confirmed. ‘But he spok
e as though my Eirene were a fig-basket. “Oh, she’s bound to go ashore, somewhere,” he said, “but not a life will be lost. Take this from me, the Servant of the One God.” Mad! Mad as a magician on market-day!’

  ‘No,’ said Sulinor. ‘Madmen see smooth harbours and full meals. I have had to – soothe that sort.’

  ‘After all,’ said Quabil, ‘he was only saying what had been in my head for a long time. I had no way to judge our drift, but we likely might hit something somewhere. Then he went away to spread his cookhouse yarn among the crew. It did no harm, or I should have stopped him.’

  Sulinor coughed, and drawled:

  ‘I don’t see anyone stopping Paul from what he fancied he ought to do. But it was curious that, on the change of watch, I—‘

  ‘No – I!’ said Quabil.

  ‘Make it so, then, Red, Between us, at any rate, we felt that the sea had changed. There was a trip and a kick to her dance. You know, Spaniard. And then – I will say that, for a man half-dead, Quabil here did well.’

  T’m a bosun-captain, and not ashamed of it. I went to get a cast of the lead. (Black dark and raining marlinspikes!) The first cast warned me, and I told Sulinor to clear all aft for anchoring by the stern. The next – shoaling like a slip-way – sent me back with all hands, and we dropped both bowers and spare and the stream.’

  ‘He’d have taken the kedge as well, but I stopped him,’ said Sulinor.

  ‘I had to stop her! They nearly jerked her stern out, but they held. And everywhere I could peer or hear were breakers, or the noise of tall seas against cliffs. We were trapped! But our people had been starved, soaked, and half-stunned for ten days, and now they were close to a beach. That was enough! They must land on the instant; and was I going to let them drown within reach of safety? Was there panic? I spoke to Julius, and his soldiers (give Rome her due!) schooled them till I could hear my orders again. But on the kiss-of-dawn some of the crew said that Sulinor had told them to lay out the kedge in the long-boat.’

  ‘I let ’em swing her out,’ Sulinor confessed. ‘I wanted ’em for warnings. But Paul told me his God had promised their lives to him along with ours, and any private sacrifice would spoil the luck. So, as soon as she touched water, I cut the rope before a man could get in. She was ashore – stove – in ten minutes.’