The Aftermath

“Over here,” Hardy shouted. “What’s up?”

“Captain Nordstrom and your father want to see you—right away. There’s been a problem with one of the fishing boats. The fishermen are in the captain’s headquarters giving some kind of report. It’s all hush-hush, but they want you there right away to take notes.”

“We were feeling too comfortable,” Wilson said to Sarah.

“The gods are displeased,” she replied with a smile and gave him a light kiss on his cheek.

Wil dashed back to their hut, picked up his pencil and notebook, and hurried to see what was happening.

The survivors’ fishing fleet, which had been established just a week earlier, and endorsed that very day by the Joint Planning Subcommittee, consisted of several of the Queen of Africa’s lifeboats, each one with a crew of seven, six at the oars. The boats also sported such jerry-built sails as the bosun and his men could improvise. The crews were comprised of seamen from the cruise ship, along with Inlanders who had knowledge of the local waters. After sailing a short distance off shore—never more than an ordained ten miles—the crews dropped nets for trawling, along with lines and hooks. They had been having moderate luck, which is much better luck than anyone had at first expected. It was such a crew of seven that was meeting with Dr. Wilson Hardy, Sr., and Captain Johan Nordstrom.

Moments after the younger Hardy arrived, Richard and Deborah Frost entered the meeting area, somewhat disheveled and winded, as if they also had been summoned hurriedly.

“Thank you, all three of you, for coming right over,” the elder Hardy said. Without further introduction he addressed a question to the Frosts: “Deborah and Richard, do you know anything about Madagascar?”

“Why, yes, we’ve studied the island, visited it, know a fair bit about it. A forbidding and beautiful place, I can tell you that much right off the bat,” Frost said.

“Good.” Dr. Hardy glanced at Nordstrom, who called in the crew of the fishing boat.

The mate in charge was Harry McIntosh, a Scot who later confessed to Wil Hardy that he had been a lot happier angling for salmon in the streams of his home country than he was bobbing about in these strange waters, wrestling with nets. But at this moment he was not talking about the salmon streams of Scotland, which probably did not exist any more. He had been telling a tale that Hardy and Nordstrom obviously found unsettling—and which he was asked to repeat for the newcomers, starting from the beginning.

McIntosh was about five five and built like a barrel, with huge forearms and a brown, sea-weathered face, with a shock of white-gray hair that stood stiffly at attention.

Just a few hours earlier, in midafternoon, the fishing boat had been drifting slowly before the wind about five miles offshore. Having made a satisfactory catch, McIntosh decided it was time to head back. Just then, one of his men tapped him on the shoulder and pointed toward the east. There, clearly limned against the horizon, brilliantly illuminated by the sun now setting in the west, was a sloop, perhaps fifty feet long, speeding through the waves.

“Her sails were bright red, seemed to be on fire, if you want my view. Anyhow, we were paralyzed, at least for a moment. Up to then we had assumed there were no other survivors on the face of the earth, and surely no other ship on the surface of the sea.”

McIntosh went on, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. We were all convinced at first that this must be some sort of mirage.” The mate stopped and shook his head as if still in a state of disbelief. “But the sloop was real enough,” he continued. “Suddenly, she tacked and started flying straight toward us. There was no way to avoid her even if we had wanted to. She could literally sail rings around us.”

“Excuse me, Harry,” Dr. Hardy interjected. “Just what is a sloop?”

Captain Nordstrom, impatient, gave the answer. “A single-masted vessel, Wilson, with two sails, a mainsail plus a jib. The jib is the small one in front. This could have been your typical pleasure yacht. There used to be plenty of them sailing between Durban and Madagascar—it’s only about two hundred fifty miles across. The waters are called the Mozambique Channel. Of course, yachts are one thing. Red sails are another. That’s something I’ve never come across.”

“I thought it was an optical illusion,” McIntosh said. “You know, red sails in the sunset, that sort of thing. But they were red, all right—painted, I guess, by that crazy bitch.”

“What?” Wil Hardy blurted. “Who?”

“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” the mate continued. “Within minutes, it seemed, the sloop was upon us, and without a hail or a hello, came right up alongside and grappled fast. And that’s when the crazy bitch appeared. She’s a youngish woman, not bad-looking, not bad-looking at all. She was wearing a red shirt and some kind of a wild bandanna around her head. At first I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice, here’s a bit of company.’ But when I noticed she was holding a gun, my mood changed mighty quick. Then I started to look at the crew. I don’t think I scare easily, but I have to tell you that those nasties fairly spooked me out of my shoes. They were Malays. Malay pirates, all loaded down with knives and guns.”

“How do you know they were Malays?” Captain Nordstrom asked.

“Begging your pardon, Captain,” McIntosh replied, “but I’ve been sailing the Seven Seas for a lot of years, and I know a Malay when I see one. I could have sworn we were in Malaysia, or Borneo, or Java, except that those places are a few thousand miles away. Anyhow, just as I’m trying to figure out how these villains could have gotten to the coast of Africa, the woman speaks up and says, loud as you please, that she is Queen Ranavolana. I know I’ve got the name right, because I asked her twice and later wrote it down. Although I never heard such a name, and as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t make any sense. So she says she’s this queen, and it’s then I noticed that the boat’s name, painted in black, was the King Radama. Also, that’s no king I ever heard of.

“Now here’s the queerest part of all. The moment she started to talk, I knew she was an American! I also knew she wasn’t a sailor. You can tell by the way a person moves and by the terms they use whether they’re boat people or not, and believe me—she’s a landlubber. But she talked like she owned the ocean. Like I said, she says she’s Queen Ranavolana, and for good measure she is related in some way to Captain Kidd. Crazier and crazier, and I have to say that I didn’t like the way she waved her gun around. After telling us we were in waters that belonged to her, and that we had no right to be there, she ordered my men to transfer our catch of fish onto her boat. I was happy to find that this is what she wanted, and told the men to do what she asked—and in a hurry.

“‘I’m letting you off easy this time,’ she said, ‘but you’d better tell your people that I’m out here and that this is my territory. I may drop by your home base one of these days, just to see what you’re up to. And if you’re collecting any goodies, you’d better be ready to turn them over to me and my crew.’

“I assured her that we were just poor folk trying to survive after the disaster, and that we didn’t have anything worth her trouble. Some of my men tried to make conversation with members of her crew, but they were a pretty surly bunch, and when they did say something it was in a lingo so strange that even Victor Lupupa here”— pointing to one of his Inlander crewmen—“couldn’t understand a word. And Victor is familiar with practically all the South African languages.”

“So what do you make of it, Harry?” Captain Nordstrom asked calmly and directly.

“That woman is an American, I’m quite sure of it,” McIntosh answered. “And she hasn’t spent much time at sea. I can’t begin to guess who she is or what she’s doing here. She’s off her rocker, that’s for sure—possibly as a result of the floods and fires. She may think she’s a pirate, but she’s just play-acting. She doesn’t look like the real thing from where I stand. Of course, that doesn’t mean she isn’t dangerous, far from it. What I really can’t figure out, though, is where those damned Malays came from, or Polynesians, or Indonesians, or whatever the hell they are. They sure aren’t South Africans. And they aren’t Arabs or North Africans, either.”

“Can you folks shed any light on this?” asked the captain, turning to the Frosts.

“I think we can,” said Richard with a wry smile. “Mr. McIntosh may have been all over the world, but he obviously has never been to Madagascar. It’s that big island to the east, just two hundred fifty miles away, as Captain Nordstrom said. But even though it’s just a stone’s throw away geographically, it’s light-years away in racial, cultural, and historical terms. Most of the residents of that island are what we call Malayo-Indonesians or Austronesians, and yes indeed, they came originally from Indonesia. Actually, if you go far enough back, we believe their forebears came from the South China coast around 3500 B.C., migrated through Taiwan and the Philippines, and arrived in Indonesia and the Malaysian peninsula about two thousand years later. Presumably they traveled