The Saskiad by Brian Hall

Author:Brian Hall [Hall, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

20

Patience.

There comes an evening when Thomas, poring over the map, swivels the legs of a compass only once, twice, before stopping to tap. Perhaps the looming of the end of their quest makes him want to tie up other affairs, clear the slate for the righteous work that will be demanded of them by the river’s side. Have you wondered, he asks, what happened to Lila and Lila?

“Yeah, sort of,” Saskia says.

“I never gave up looking for the Green.” Through all those years he searched far and wide, the scar across his stomach tingling. But the oceans are huge. While he painted pups and opened cocks, brooding, the Green had successful seasons, psychotically killing everything that moved. One day he got a tip on Green’s whereabouts. He had gotten dozens of such tips before, and had chased them down only to find nothing. This one was no more or less promising than the others. He dutifully sailed from port, Lila straining forward in the bow. When he arrived at the suggested stretch of sea, he soon found evidence of Green’s depredations. Some spoor was so fresh that hope quickened in him. Perhaps this time . . .

“Two ships can spend weeks in the same area, only a few miles apart, and never sight each other.” His scar was throbbing painfully. They were close, he felt, so close this time.

Lila crisscrossed the sea, day after day, encountering nothing but albatrosses in the troughs, feasting on gruesome flotsam. Thomas’s crew began to grow unruly. The old man’s obsessed, they said. When off watch, they gathered on the foredeck to whisper darkly. But Thomas was patient. It had been so many years. He had his sextant and his compass and he knew they would not fail him this time. He looked up one day from his charts and his blue eyes sparkled in their depths, separating the true direction from the false. He pointed off the starboard beam: “She is over there.”

Lila fixed a new course. Half an hour later the call came down from the crow’s nest: “Ship ahoy!” A smudge of vile smoke lay on the horizon. His men were wide-eyed, ashamed they had ever doubted him.

On seeing Lila, the Green turned and ran. “As it happened, they had filled the last of the lockers the day before. They were heading for port.” But the whaler, wallowing low in the water with its cargo of death, was no match for the smaller Lila. Thomas opened her throttles and she tore eagerly after her prey. Within an hour she was a quarter mile from her target. This is where he would take out the Zodiacs and—

“No, that’s for when they’re hunting whales. The Green wasn’t whaling. Don’t interrupt.”

What did he have in mind, then? He kept Lila close to the bigger ship, but otherwise did nothing. Night came, and in the darkness the Green tried to lose him, cutting its lights, changing course, drifting silently. But in the morning Lila was still there, an unshakable watchdog.

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