Van Hoek rose and excused himself, for from the point of view of ship's captain the story was finished. There was no point in hearing the details. The others remained and listened.

"Now, many ponderous sermons could be written about the rich pageant of greed and folly that played out over the next days. The correct action would have been to man the pumps and drench everything in the hold with sea-water. But this would have ruined all of the silks, and caused incalculable losses, not only for the merchants but for the ship's officers, and various of the King's officials in Manila and Acapulco who had bales of their own in the hold. So the captain delayed, and the fire smoldered on. Men were sent below with buckets of water to find and douse the fire. Some returned saying that the smoke was too thick—others never came back at all. Some argued that the hatches should be opened and bales brought out onto the deck, but others who had more knowledge of fires said that this would allow an in-rush of air that would cause the fire to billow up and consume the Galleon in a moment.

"We sighted your ship in a mirage, and fired a signal-cannon hoping you would come to our aid. There was disagreement even concerning this, for some supposed you were Dutch pirates. But the captain told us that you were a merchant-ship loaded with quicksilver, and confessed he had made an agreement with you in secret, that he would guide you across the Pacific and grease the path for you in Acapulco in return for a share of your profits."

"Was everyone shocked and dismayed?"

"No one batted an eye. The signal cannon was fired forthwith. No answer came back to our ears: only the silence of the Pacific. At this, madness descended on the Galleon like a Plague. There was an insurrection—not merely a mutiny but a three-sided civil war. Again, someday it will make for a great allegory-tale that preachers may recite from pulpits, but the way it came out was that those who wanted to unload the cargo-hold prevailed. Hatches were opened—smoke came out, which you must have seen on the horizon—a few bales were hoisted out—and then, just as some had predicted, flames erupted from below. I saw the very air burning. A boiling flame-front came towards me, trapping me against the rail, and I toppled overboard rather than be roasted alive. I climbed onto one of the bales that had been thrown overboard. The ship crept downwind, slowly getting farther away from me, and I watched the final catastrophe from a safe distance."

Edmund de Ath bowed his head slightly, so that arcs of reflected candle-light gleamed in the tear-filled channels beneath his eyes. "May Almighty God have mercy on the hundred and seventy-four men and the one woman who perished."

"You may scratch the one woman off that list, at least for the time being," Jack said. "We plucked her out of the water fifteen minutes after you."

There was a long pause, and then Edmund de Ath said: "Elizabeth de Obregon survived?"

"If you call this surviving," Jack answered.

"HE SWALLOWED!" SAID MONSIEUR ARLANC the next day, having cornered Jack up at the head. "I saw his Adam's apple move."

"Of course he swallowed—he was eating dinner."

"Dinner was finished!"

"All right, he was drinking sugar-water then."

"It was not that sort of a swallow," said Monsieur Arlanc. "I mean he was perturbed. Something is not right."

"Now Monsieur Arlanc, consider it: What could de Ath possibly find troubling about the poor lady's survival? She's half out of her mind anyway."

"People who are half out of their minds sometimes forget discretion, and say things they would normally keep secret."

"All right, then, perhaps he and the lady were having a scandalous affair de coeur—that would explain why he's been sitting at her bedside ever since."

Jack was sitting in a hole, his buttocks dangling over the Pacific, and Monsieur Arlanc was standing next to him; together they gazed down the length of the ship for a few moments. The several divisions and subdivisions of the current watch were distributed among the masts and sail-courses, running through a drill that every man knew in his sleep, trimming the sails for new weather that was bearing down on them out of the northwest. Their limbs were swollen from beri-beri and many of them moved in spasmodickal twitches as their feet and hands responded balkily to commands from the mind. On the upperdeck, in the middle of the ship, a dozen Malabaris were standing around a corpse stitched up in a sheet, joining in some sort of heathenish mourning-chant prepatory to flinging it overboard. A scrap of cordage had been lashed around its ankles and made fast to an empty drinking water jar packed with pot-shards and ballast-sand, so that the body would be pulled smartly down to David Jones's Locker before the sharks who swarmed in the ship's wake could make sport with it.

"We gained two mouths from the Galleon, and fretted about going hungry on that account," Jack mused. "Since then three have died."

"There must be some reason for you to sit there and tell me things of which I am already aware," said Monsieur Arlanc, mumbling pensively through swollen gums, "but I cannot fathom it."

"If strong sailors are dropping dead, what chance has Elizabeth de Obregon?"

Monsieur Arlanc spat blood over the rail. "More chance than I have. She has endured a voyage that would slay any man on this ship."

"Are you trying to tell me that there is a worse voyage in all the world than this one?"

"She is the sole survivor of the squadron that was sent out from Acapulco years ago, to find the Islands of Solomon."

Now Jack was glad in a way that he was sitting on the head, for it was a pose well-suited to profound silent contemplation. "Stab me!" he said finally. "Enoch told me of that expedition, and that the only survivor was a woman, but I had not drawn the connexion."

"She has seen wonders and terrors known only to the Spaniards."

"In any event she is very sick just now," Jack said, "and so it is no wonder that Edmund de Ath sits at the lady's bedside—we'd expect no less of a priest."

"And nothing more of a blackguard."

Jack sighed. The corpse went over-board. Several Filipino idlers—which meant tradesmen not attached to any particular watch—were arguing about ducks. A flight of ducks had been sighted in the distance this morning and several were of the opinion that ducks were never seen more than a few miles from land.

"It is in the nature of men cooped up together aboard ship that they fall to infighting at some point," Jack finally said.

Monsieur Arlanc grinned, which was an unspeakably nasty sight: his gums had peeled back from his mandibles to show blackening bone. "It is some sort of poetic justice. You turn my faith against me by arguing that I am predestined to distrust Edmund de Ath."

MONSIEUR ARLANC DIED a week later. They held on to his corpse for as long as they could, because a fragment of kelp was sighted in the water almost at the moment of his death, and they hoped that they could make landfall and bury him in the earth of California. But his body had been well decayed even while he'd been still alive. Dying scarcely improved matters, and forced them to make another burial at sea. It was just as well that they did. For even though kelp-weeds continued to bob in the waves around Minerva's hull, it was not for another ten days after they threw the Huguenot's corpse overboard that they positively sighted land. They were just below thirty-nine degrees of latitude, which meant they'd missed Cape Mendocino; according to the vague charts that van Hoek had collected in Manila, and a few half-baked recollections of Edmund de Ath, the land they were looking at was probably Punto Arena.

Now the so-called idlers, who really had been idle for most of the last several weeks, worked night and day re-making Minerva for a coastal voyage. The anchors were brought up out of the hold and hung on the ship's bow. Likewise cannons were hoisted up from storage and settled on their carriages. The longboat was re-assembled and put on the upperdeck, an obstruction to the men of the watch but a welcome one. While these things were being done Minerva could not come too near the coast, and so they put the distant mountains of California to larboard and coasted southwards for two days, sieving kelp up out of the water and trying to find some way to make it palatable. There were clear signs of an approaching storm, but as luck had it, they were just drawing abreast of the entrance to the great bay of California. As the wind began to blow hard off the Pacific they scudded between two mighty promontories that were lit up by golden sunlight gliding in beneath the storm-clouds. Changing course to the south, they were then able to navigate between a few steep rocky islands and get through a sort of bottle-neck. Beyond it the bay widened considerably. It was lined with salt-pans reminiscent of those at Cadiz, though of course no one was exploiting these. They dropped anchor in the deepest water they could find and readied the ship to wait out the storm.