LYING in his berth, Coy listened to the sound of water against the hulL The Carpanta was sailing northeast again, with a favorable wind. And the castaway was rocked to sleep and cozy in a sleeping bag and warm layer of blankets. They had pulled him on board at the stem—after tossing him the bight of a line beneath his arms— exhausted and clumsy in his life jacket and dripping clothes, and with the light that kept flashing at his shoulder until once on deck he himself yanked off the jacket and threw it into the water. His legs gave way by the time he reached the cockpit. He had begun to shake violently, and between them, after throwing a blanket around him, El Piloto and Tanger got him to his cabin. Dazed and docile as a baby, devoid of will and strength, he let them undress him and towel him down. El Piloto tried not to rub too hard, to prevent the cold that had numbed Coy's arms and legs from rising toward his heart and brain. They had stripped off his last clothing as he lay on the bunk, lost in the mist of a strange daydream. He had felt the rough touch of El Piloto's hands, and also Tanger's smoother ones on his naked skin. He felt her fingers taking his pulse—which beat slow and steady. She had held his torso as El Piloto pulled off his T-shirt, his feet as they took off his socks, and finally his waist and upper legs when they eased off his soaked undershorts. At one moment, the palm of Tanger's hand had held his buttock, just where it joined the leg, resting there, light and warm, a few seconds. Then they zipped up the sleeping bag and pulled blankets over the top, turned out the light, and left him alone.
He wandered through the green darkness that called from below, and stood interminable watch through a daze of snows and fog and echoes on the radar. With his wax pencil he traced straight routes on the radar screen while up on deck horses ate wooden containers marked "Horses" and silent captains strode back and forth without a word for him. The calm gray water looked like undulating lead. It was raining on seas and ports and cranes and cargo ships. Seated on bollards, motionless men and women, soaked by the rain, were absorbed in oceanic dreams. And deep below, beside a bronze bell silenced in the center of a blue sphere, sperm whales slept peacefully, their mouths curving in something like a smile, heads down, tails up, suspended in the weightless dreams of whales.
The Carpanta pitched slightly and heeled a bit more. Coy half-opened his eyes in the darkness of the cabin, cuddled in the comforting warmth that was gradually restoring life to his stiff body, rolled tight against the hull by the list of the ship. He was safe. He had escaped the maw of the sea, as merciless in its whims as it was unpredictable in its clemency. He was on a good ship steered by friendly hands, and he could sleep whenever he wanted without worrying, because other eyes and other hands were watching over his sleep, helping him follow the ghost of the lost ship that waited in the shadows into which he had nearly sunk forever. The woman's hands that had touched him as they removed his clothes returned to turn back some of the blankets and then feel his forehead and take his pulse. Now, at the recollection of that touch, that palm against his naked buttock, a slow, warm erection swelled in the haven of warming thighs. That made him smile, quiet and drowsy, almost with surprise. It was good to be alive. Later he went back to sleep, frowning because the world wasn't as wide as it had been, and because the ocean was shrinking. He dreamed of forbidden seas and barbarous coasts, and islands where arrest warrants, and plastic bags, and empty tin cans never washed ashore. And he wandered at night through ports without ships among women accompanied by other men. Women who looked at him because they weren't happy, as if they wanted to pass their unhap-piness on to him.
He wept silently behind closed eyes. To console himself-he rested his head against the wooden side of the ship, listening to the sea on the other side of the thin planking separating him from Eternity.
XI
The Sargasso Sea
"... the sun-resorts of Sargasso where the bones come up to lie and bleach and mock the passing ships."
THOMAS PYNCHON, Gravity's Rainbow
When he went up on deck, the Carpanta was becalmed in the windless dawn, with the sheer coastline very near and a cloudless sky shading from blackish gray to blue in the west. The sun's rays shone horizontally on the rock face, the sea to the east, and the Carpanta's mast, painting them red. "It was here," said Tanger.
She had a nautical chart unfolded on her knees, and beside her El Piloto was smoking a cigarette and holding a cup of coffee. Coy went back to the stern. He had put on dry pants and a T-shirt but his lips and tangled hair still had traces of salt from the nocturnal dip. He looked around him at the circling gulls that cawed and planed before alighting on the waves. The coast stretched not much more than a mile to the west, and then opened in the form of a cove. He recognized Punta Percheles, Punta Negra, and the island of Mazarrdn in the distance. Some eight miles to the east rose the dark mass of Cabo Tinoso.
He went back to the cockpit. El Piloto had gone below to get a cup of warm coffee for him, and Coy gulped it down, his face screwing up as he tasted the last drops of the bitter brew. On the chart Tanger pointed to the landscape that lay before her eyes. She was wearing the black sweater and was barefoot. Blond strands of hair escaped from beneath Piloto's wool cap.
"This is the place," she said, "where the Dei Gloria sprang her mast and she had to fight."
Coy nodded, eyes fixed on the nearby coast as Tanger described the details of the drama. Everything she had researched, all the information gathered from yellowed files, manuscripts, and Urrutia's old nautical charts, was woven together in her calm voice, as if she had been there herself. Coy had never listened to anyone with so much conviction. Listening to her as his eyes searched the semicircle of dark coast stretching to the northeast, he tried to reconstruct his own version of the facts. This is how it was, or more precisely, how it could have been. To do that, he called on the books he'd read, his experience as a sailor, and the days and nights of his youth, when he was borne by silent sails across this sea she had brought him back to. That was why it was easy to imagine it, and when Tanger paused and looked at him, and El Piloto's blue eyes also turned to him, Coy bunched his shoulders a little, touched his nose, and filled in the holes in the narrative. He gave details, ventured situations, and described maneuvers, placing them all in that dawn of February 4, 1767, when the lebeche veered to north as the sun rose, making hunter and prey alike sail close to the wind. In those circumstances, he said, the apparent wind was added to the true wind, and the brigantine and the xebec would have been sailing close-hauled, making seven or eight knots—driver, mainsail, jibs, topsails, and the yards braced well to leeward on the Dei Gloria,. lateens on the fore- and mizzenmast sharp as knife blades on the corsair, and sailing closer to the wind than her prey. Both heeling to starboard, with water pouring through the lee scuppers, helmsmen alert at the tiller, captains focused on wind and canvas, knowing that the first to commit an error would lose the race.
Errors. At sea—as in fencing, Coy had heard somewhere—everything turned on keeping your adversary at a distance and anticipating his moves. The black cloud forming flat and low in the distance, the slightly dark area of choppy water, the almost imperceptible foam breaking around a rock just beneath the surface—all augured deadly thrusts that only constant vigil could parry. That made the sea the perfect metaphor for life. The moment to take in a reef, went the sensible seafaring saying, was precisely when you asked yourself if it wasn't time to take in a reef. The sea hid a dangerous and stubborn old scoundrel, who lay waiting in apparent camaraderie for the chance to bare his claws at the first sign of inattention. With ease but no pity, he killed the careless and the stupid, and the best good sailors could wish for was to be tolerated and not harassed. To pass unnoticed. Because the sea had no sense of remorse and, like the God of the Old Testament, never forgave, unless by chance or by whim. The words "charity" and "compassion," among many others, were left behind when you cast off. And in a certain way, Coy believed, it was fair.
The error, he decided, had in the end been committed by Captain Elezcano. Or maybe it wasn't
an error, and it just so happened that the law of the sea tilted in favor of the corsair. With the enemy drawing nearer, preventing her from reaching safe haven beneath the guns of the Mazanon tower, the brigantine had set her topgallants despite the damage to the topmasts. It wasn't difficult to picture the rest: Captain Elezcano staring upward, apprehensive, while sailors, swaying on the footropes and overhanging the sea to starboard, untie the gaskets securing the upper sails, which snap free with a brief flap, straining to lift them to the yards and haul the sheets. The ship's boy approaching the poop with the latitude and longitude obtained by the navigating officer, and the distracted order to enter them in the logbook from the captain, who never shifts his gaze from on high. Then the boy by his side, gazing upward as he tucks the paper with the penciled coordinates into his pocket. Suddenly the sinister creaking of the wood as it splits, and halyards and canvas dropping to leeward, tangled by the wind, and the suicidal lurch of the ship and all men aboard with their heart in their mouth, knowing at that instant their fate is sealed.
There must have been sailors aloft, cutting the useless rigging and throwing the wreckage of the topmast and sail into the sea, while on deck Captain Elezcano gave the order to open fire. The gun ports would have been open since first light, loaded and ready, gunners waiting. Maybe the captain decided suddenly to swing and surprise the approaching pursuer, undoubtedly giving him the starboard broadside, with men bent behind the guns, waiting for the hull and sails of the xebec to bear across before them. Battle waged almost yardarm to yardarm, said the report written by the maritime authorities from the ship's boy's testimony. That meant that the two ships would have been extremely close, the men on the corsair ready to fire and board, when the Dei Gloria showed her starboard beam with open gun ports spouting smoke from lit fuses, letting fly a cannonade at point-blank range—five guns spitting four-pound balls. It had to have caused some damage, but at that moment the corsair must have come around to starboard, unless the lateen sails allowed her to maintain her course, sailing close to the wind, and cut the wake of the brigantine, in turn loosing a mortal broadside in retaliation, sweeping the Dei Gloria's deck from stern to stem. Two long six-pounders and four four-pounders; some twenty-eight pounds of ball and shot shattering line, wood, and body parts. Then, as the gunners aboard the corsair yelled jubilantly, seeing the wounded and dying enemy drag themselves across decks slick with blood, the two ships would have approached each other, more slowly each time, until they were nearly motionless, firing ferociously at each other.
Captain Elezcano was a tenacious Basque. Resolved not to offer his neck to the butcher's knife without a price, he must have run through the brigantine, urging on his desperate gunners. There would have been guns blown from their trucks, wood splinters, roundshot and musket balls and fragments of metal flying in every direction, pieces of line, masts, and sails dropping from overhead. By that time the two Jesuits would have been dead, or maybe they had gone below to the captain's cabin to defend to the last breath the coffer of emeralds—or to throw it into the ocean. The last broadsides from the corsair were undoubtedly devastating. The Dei Gloria's foremast, its sails ripped like winding sheets, would have split before falling onto the bloody butcher's shop of the brigantine's deck. Perhaps by then Captain Elezcano, too, was dead. The ship was adrift, crippled and without her helm. Maybe the terrified fifteen-year-old ship's boy awaited the end huddled among coils of rope, boarding sword in his trembling hand, watching the masts of the Chergui approach through the smoke, preparing for boarding. But then he saw a fire aboard the corsair. The point-blank gunfire from the brigantine, or that from the xebec herself, had set alight one of the lower sails, which had not been taken in because of the unexpectedness of the maneuver. Now that sail was blazing and falling onto the deck of the corsair, it may have been near a cartridge of gunpowder, or the open hatchway of the magazine. Hazards of the sea. Suddenly there was a flash, and a brilliant explosion struck the dying brigantine with a fist of air, toppling the second mast and filling the sky with black smoke and pieces of wood and embers and human flesh that rained down everywhere. Standing on the rail of the blood-covered deck, deafened by the explosion, eyes bulging with horror, the ship's boy could see that the nothing remained of the corsair but smoking wood sputtering as it sank into the sea. At that moment the Dei Gloria heeled over in her turn, water pouring into the belly of her shattered hull, and the ship's boy found himself floating through the wreckage of wood and cordage. He was alone, but near him floated the boat Captain Elezcano had ordered jettisoned to clear the deck minutes before the battle began.
"IT must have happened more or less like that," said Tanger.
The three of them were silent, regarding a sea as still as a tombstone. Somewhere below, half-hidden in the sand of the ocean floor, were the bones of nearly a hundred dead men, what was left of two ships, and a fortune in emeralds.
"The most logical conclusion," she continued, "is that the Chergui disintegrated in the explosion, and that her remnants are scattered. The brigantine, however, went down intact, except for the masts. Since it isn't too deep here, you'd expect to find her on her keel, or on one side."
Coy was studying the chart, calculating distances and depths. The sun was beginning to warm his bade
"The bottom is mud and sand," he said. "With some rocks. It's possible she's so deeply buried that we can't dig."
"It's possible." Tanger bent over the charts so dose her hair brushed the paper. "But we won't know until we go down. The part that's covered will be in better shape than what has been exposed to the waves and currents. Shipworms will have done their work, boring into the wood. What hasn't been protected by sand will be gone. The iron rusted. It also depends on how cool the water is. A ship can remain intact at low temperatures, or disappear in short order in warm waters."
"It isn't very cold here," El Piloto put in. "Except for an occasional current."
He was showing interest but staying a little apart, his face showing no expression. His calloused fingers were mechanically tying and untying knots in a section of halyard, his fingernails as short and ragged as Tanger's. His eyes, tranquil and faded by years of Mediterranean light, moved back and forth between them. It was a stoic gaze that Coy knew well—that of a fisherman or sailor who expects nothing more than to fill his nets with a reasonable catch and return to port with just enough to go on living. He wasn't a man of illusions. Everyday life on the sea watered down chimeras, and deep down the word "emeralds" was as nebulous as the place where the rainbow meets the sea.
Tanger had pulled off the wool cap. Now one hand rested carelessly on Coy's shoulder.
"Until we've located the hull with the help of the plans, and we know where each part of the ship lies, we won't be sure of anything. The important thing is whether the area of the stern is accessible. That's where the captain's cabin will be, and the emeralds."
More and more her attitude was different from her mood on dry land. Natural, and less arrogant. Coy felt the light pressure of her hand on his shoulder, and the nearness of her body. She smelled of the sea, and of skin warmed by the slowly rising sun. You need me now, he thought. Now you need me more, and it shows.
"Maybe they threw the emeralds overboard," he said.
She shook her head. Her shadow on chart 463A was gradually shortening. For a while she was silent, but finally she said, "Well, maybe." That was impossible to know just yet At any rate, they had a perfect description of the chest, a wood, iron, and bronze box twenty inches long. The iron wouldn't have aged well under water, and by now it would be a blackish, unrecognizable mass. The bronze would have fared better, but the wood would be gone. Inside, the emeralds would be crusted together. They would look more or less like a block of dark stone, a little reddish, with greenish veins of the bronze. They would have to search for it among all the wreckage, and it wasn't going to be easy.
Of course not. Coy yearned for it to be difficult. A needle in a haystack, as Lucio Gamboa, between laughs and cig
arettes, had suggested in Cadiz. If the wreck was buried, they would need hoses to suction off the mud and sand. No way to be discreet.
"Well, now it doesn't matter," Tanger concluded. "First we have to find it."
"What about the depth finder?" Coy asked.
El Piloto finished a double bowline knot.
"No problem," he said. "We'll get that hooked up this afternoon in Cartagena, and also a GPS repeater for the cockpit." He observed Tanger with suspicious gravity. "But all that will have to be paid for."
"Of course," she said.
"It's the best fish-sounding equipment I could find." El Piloto was talking to Coy. "A Pathfinder Optic with three beams, like you asked. The transducer can be installed on the stern without much trouble."
Tanger looked at Coy, inquisitive. He explained that with that sounder they could cover a 90-degree area beneath the Carpanta's hull. The machine was generally used to locate schools of fish, but it also gave a clear and very detailed profile of the bottom. Most important, thanks to the use of different colors on the screen, the Pathfinder differentiated bottoms according to density, hardness, and composition, detecting any irregularity. An isolated rock, a submersed object, even changes of temperature, showed up quite clearly. And metal, say the iron or bronze of the guns if they projected above the sand, would be seen in intense, darker color. The fish sounder wasn't as precise as the professional systems Nino Palermo had at his disposal, but it would do in a depth of sixty-five to one hundred seventy feet. Navigating slowly until they had combed the search area and assigned coordinates for each submersed object that caught their attention, they could trace a map of the zone, determining possible sites for the wreck. In a second phase they would explore each location with the aquaplane, a towed wooden sled that would keep a diver within view of the bottom. "Strange," said El Piloto.