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.
Chapter 45
I shuddered as I’d never shuddered in my life, from cold, exhaustion, anxiety, sorrow. Harry! I couldn’t stop shaking.
I looked dimly about. There lay a great still form, almost as dark and massive as a sea lion. It was Jubal, lying on his side on the beach.
Blowing sand made a horizontal hail that stung like insects. I couldn’t stand, or even properly crawl on hands and knees; the strength required was beyond me. So I bellied toward him, pitted by grit, dreading the vacancy I might find on his other side.
But no, there was little Horus, coughing and shivering as the great black hero kneaded his chest and served as human windbreak. Jubal’s staring eyes bulged from exhaustion, like stones of quartz and obsidian. He was enfeebled as I was, but he gave a weary grin. “Alive.”
The Negro had saved my son. And me.
I dragged myself around so we formed shelter on both sides of Harry. The beach was dark volcanic sand. Just yards behind us mountainous surf was crashing, but I couldn’t bear to look at it. I dreaded that it might give up the corpse of my wife.
So the three of us fell unconscious.
When I woke, it was late day. The sun was lost behind black cloud to the west, where I presumed the hurricane had gone, but the sky to the east was clearing. The sea was pitching chaos, and I was stiff with cold in this tropic clime. We were pimpled with blown sand, and surf had thrown so many great white drifts of foam upon our strand that it looked as if it had snowed. Palms had been stripped of most of their fronds. No bird dared fly yet. The world had been scoured.
Groaning, I sat up. I felt completely hollowed: of strength, of emotion, of purpose. I’d presided over catastrophe. I’d failed in what I now realized was the only important task in my life, to love and be loved, and to preserve that love by all means possible and necessary.
Love, the mambo had said, that was the basis of faith.
My wife was gone for jewels and glory, the vanity of my being important, the nudging of world affairs. She’d suspected her fate when we first crossed the Atlantic. We’d tried to steer destiny a different direction. Futility.
And yet she’d gone with me onto Pelee in the end, never breathing a word of fear. Somehow she thought it would save Harry. Somehow she still loved me, she’d said. I clung to those words with wonder.
It took a while to steel myself to squint up and down the beach. Yes, there were bodies there.
None looked like that of a woman.
Jubal was stirring, too.
“Can you take the boy up into the scrub while I check for survivors?”
He followed my gaze; we both knew there wouldn’t be any. Why expose Harry to a line of corpses?
“Oui. I’ll look for uncontaminated water and meet you at that shattered palm.” He pointed, and I nodded. My mouth was cotton, too.
I stood, bent as an old man, and staggered down to where the drowned rolled at the edge of the surf. Out beyond the waves still boomed on the reef, and a thousand fragments of wood had been cast ashore from Pelee. Enough to build a warm fire, if I could figure out a way to light it.
I fingered my chest. The magnifying glass was still around my neck.
Maybe tomorrow, if the sun came out.
Astonishing how quickly we begin to think of the future, even when defeated by the past. We close ranks like a Roman legion stepping over its own dead.
The beach was a quarter mile long between headlands. I found five corpses. Two blacks, three whites.
One had his mouth set in a rictus of a snarl. It was Martel.
Napoleon’s agent seemed smaller and deflated in death, his clothes shredded by coral, his shoes missing, his feet wrinkled and white. Our nemesis would have only one aerial flight, it seemed, a glide down to hell. His eyes were open and staring with horror as if he’d seen that descent.
Yet was he really a tool of the first consul? Could his last act have been to lie about Napoleon simply to torment me, to mislead me that the political Prometheus I’d been tied to for years, the great Bonaparte, had betrayed me and my family for a miniature model of what might or might not be a flying machine? I still had one of the toys in my pocket and reached to finger it.
With horror I felt a chain as well. Astiza’s pendant, with Napoleon’s cursed N, had not sunk in the ocean. It had perversely fallen back into my vest like a curse I couldn’t get rid of.
Was Martel laughing from Hades right now, amused to think he’d left me trusting nothing?
I nudged with my foot to roll over his body. As I did so an arm flopped free, its sleeve disintegrated. The skin was so laced with coral cuts that for a second I didn’t even spy the design on the inside of his bicep. Then it startled me. I leaned closer.
It was a tattoo.
Burned into his skin was a N, surrounded by a laurel wreath, the mark of Bonaparte that the villain could tuck privately against his body. Leon Martel hadn’t lied. He had not been a renegade policeman, a refugee from the criminal underworld, or at least not just that. He’d truly been Napoleon’s agent.
As if on God’s cue I doubled over then, my gut wrenched, and I scampered up the beach to answer nature’s urgent call at the edge of the scrub. A gush of waste and seawater came out of me, the filthy torrent leaving me
