FORTY-SIX
I
They reached the GPS co-ordinates, dropped anchor. The sea was getting frisky, but it wasn’t quite rough enough for Knox to call it off. He unpacked and prepared his equipment, checked it thoroughly before putting it on. The deck was rolling enough that he had to sit down to pull on his wetsuit and booties. He consulted his watch, made a note of the time, calculated a rough dive plan. He strapped his diving lamp and knife to his wrist, then sat on the rail, pulled on his flippers, held his breath and toppled backwards into the dark water in an eruption of bubbles. He’d weighted himself enough that it was an effort to stay afloat as he breast-stroked around to the stern. Then he let gravity go to work, the anchor chain running through his hand as he descended.
For all his experience, diving alone at night on such a macabre quest proved unnerving. There were shadows everywhere. At sea, as on land, predators were at their most dangerous in the darkness. A sudden memory of that bull shark looming up at him earlier: they were blessed with excellent eyesight, sharks, but they weren’t dependent upon it. They could track their prey instead through minute vibrations in the water, through their extraordinary sense of smell, through fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. His re-breather and other dive-gear would light up like fireworks in the electromagnetic field.
He sensed something behind him, spun round and lit up the darkness, but there was nothing there. The bottom came into view, ridged with canyons much like his earlier dive, though that had been a good distance away. His feet touched down, kicking up glowing emeralds of bioluminescence. The currents were strong, but the weights held him. He swam above gulches and canyons, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A shoal of shadows ahead scattered as he headed towards it, barracuda glinting like thin strips of silver foil. He swam down a canyon, overhangs of rock either side of him forming shallow grottoes. The floor was buried beneath white sand and dead coral, but also by vast quantities of pottery and porcelain shards. Ground Zero at last. He propelled himself along, probing crevices with light. A boulder lay half buried in sand ahead, covered not just in algae and barnacles, but also by a lattice of fine white veins. He drew closer and saw they were the filaments of a gillnet. Knox hated these wretched things with a passion, partly for the perverse cunning of their design, in which the mesh was almost-but not quite-big enough for their target species of fish to wriggle through. By the time the fish had realised for themselves the mesh was too narrow for them, it was too late for them to back out, their gills trapping them there like the barbs on a hook. But he also hated them because trawlers so often cut them loose when they got snagged on anything, leaving them to drift on the currents, or to lie on the sea-bed in deadly ambush for anyone unlucky enough to get tangled up in them.
He shone his lamp around, could see nothing save for a thin cascade of fine white sand falling in a steady stream to his right. It shouldn’t be falling like that, not unless something had recently happened here. He swam upwards to find a black gash in the rock, a tunnel into darkness. He looked back down at the boulder. Though it was hard to be sure, it certainly looked an almost perfect fit. If it had once plugged this mouth, and if it had recently fallen away, it would explain how come all this sand was leaking out, slowly burying it.
The tunnel was just wide enough to take him. He pulled himself along it. It opened up abruptly and he found himself in a vast underwater cavern. The water was exponentially stiller and clearer here, so his diving lamp just about illuminated the far wall and ceiling. It had, remarkably, the approximate shape and size of a great ship. And maybe that was more than coincidence: he could picture in his mind’s eye the great treasure ship sinking into one of these limestone canyons, or perhaps being nudged there by the tides and current. Sand and sediment and rock would soon have covered it, and coral would have grown atop it. And, as each generation of coral died, their husks would slowly have formed a great carapace above it, hermetically sealing everything inside, protecting the ship and its cargo from the surrounding currents. But the sea and its creatures would still have gone to work, decay inside a tooth, eating away all the wood and anything else organic, until there was nothing but minerals and metals left.
He swam into the cavern. Strange pillars protruded from the sand, reaching upwards like the buildings in a miniaturised city skyline. He drew closer and realised he was looking at stack after stack of dishes. With immense care, he picked up a bowl, tipped away the sand within. It was white with blue dragons around its rim, one of the most exquisite pieces of porcelain he’d ever seen; yet here it was, sitting on a tower of such pieces, surrounded by thousands of others, with who could guess how many more still buried in the sand. Presumably they’d once been packed in wadding in wooden chests in the cargo hold; but the wadding and the wood had rotted away around them, leaving them in a cocoon of sand instead. But that too was now trickling away, released by the fallen boulder, exposing these treasures for the first time in six hundred years.
The stacks of porcelain swayed as he swam between them, moved by the small eddies he was himself creating, leafless trees in a winter wind. He came across the golden statue of a giraffe, only its head and neck protruding from the sand. The Chinese had believed giraffes to be unicorns of myth, bringers of great good fortune. Not this one. He swam on, reached down for a gold bracelet set with rubies. Part of the ship’s great cargo, perhaps, or the treasure of some favoured courtesan. A great golden sphere glinted ahead. He swam over to it. It took his breath away: a globe of the world as the Chinese had seen it, lands enamelled upon it: China itself, of course; the scattered archipelago of the Spice Islands and then Australia; the fat daggers of India and Africa. Europe and the Mediterranean. He rolled it a little way to expose the Atlantic and then further underneath, his excitement intense. And there was America. The new and old worlds all captured together for the very first time, and on a globe too.
Movement caught his eye; he whirled around. But it was only the swaying of the stacks of porcelain. Their whiteness and their motion put him irresistibly in mind of ghosts, and that made him realise that this wasn’t just a shipwreck, it was a tomb too, the final resting place of perhaps hundreds of passengers and crew, for only a few would have made it into lifeboats and to shore. He felt a mix of privilege and guilt for intruding upon their rest. But it was also a salutary reminder of why he’d come down here; and it wasn’t for the wreck. That would have to wait for another time.
He turned, swam back to the tunnel mouth and out. The boulder had been the cork in this ship’s bottle. It was covered in netting and had recently fallen loose. It was certainly possible that it had no connection to Emilia’s disappearance, but the odds surely pointed the other way. Much of the sand that had been trickling from the cavern had been swept away by the currents, but enough had fallen on to the boulder to half bury it and anything lying around it. The sand was wet and packed; he had to sweep it away with his arm. He was starting to hope that he might be wrong when he felt something soft and yielding. He snatched his hand away, then steeled himself and dug back into the sand. His fingers met other fingers, bloated and cold. He brushed away sand until he’d uncovered a hand, wrist and then forearm. A woman’s. It had to be Emilia. He kept at it until he finally revealed her face and confirmed his fears. Her skin was discoloured and torn, her mouth gaping, sand trickling from it. But it was her. An angel fish darted in and gave her eyeball a little kiss. Knox tasted bile at the back of his throat and hurriedly turned away. Vomiting was lethal this deep underwater. He breathed in and out until he’d regained his calm, then he resumed the patient work of freeing her. He reached his arms around her chest and gently pulled, but there was no give at all. He felt around, touched some netting with his fingertips, unsheathed his diving knife and tried to cut through it, but it tangled in the mesh and he couldn’t get it free.
Emilia wasn’t wearing a wetsuit, only blue denim shorts and a disintegrating T-shirt, but she did have a buoyancycontrol device on, along with a scuba tank, regulator and gauges. He undid the buckles of her BCD, freed each of her arms in turn, then tried again. This time he felt a little give. He kept at it and at it until finally he pulled her out. Her body wanted to rise, though she was still held down by a packed weight-belt. He took firm hold of her, then began a measured ascent to four metres, where he decompressed before surfacing.
The night had clouded over and the sea had grown rougher while he’d been below. Another storm was coming. He rose on a swell, saw the lights of the Yvette a hundred metres or so away. Holding Emilia with one arm, he paddled across and around to the stern ladder. He let go of her then threw his flippers aboard and called out to Rebecca that he was back.
FORTY-SEVEN
