“Thank you!” he called. “And could I have another beer?” The room was not absolutely dark, and Doyle managed to improvise a good enough bed in his coffin; and as he was about to climb into it he was surprised to hear the beer can chain rattle as it was drawn up—the sluicing of the beer itself was inaudible over the wind shrilling through the harp of the rigging—and then a clank as it fell back into position, full.
He stood up and hurried over to it, and as he stood braced against the wall trying to drink the sloshing beer without spilling any of it he wondered why he was not too alarmed by his position as captive with torture and death in store. Partially, of course, it was the unthinking self-confidence he’d never entirely been without since finding himself in a body so much better than the one he’d been used to; and the balance of his stubborn optimism was based on being, as he was now willing to concede, William Ashbless, who wouldn’t die until ‘46. Watch yourself there, son, he thought. You can be fairly sure you’ll survive, but there’s no reason to assume Ashbless won’t get thoroughly stomped a time or two.
In spite of his predicament he smiled as he searched for a comfortable position, for he was thinking about Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy, whom he would somehow marry next year—he’d always thought she looked pretty in her portraits.
The voyage—during which the furious winds never once let up, so that after a couple of days the shambling mariners Doyle could see through his window seemed to have achieved a stunned indifference to them—lasted fifteen days, and in that time Doyle never once saw either Romanelli or the weightless vestige of Doctor Romany. Until an old and overstressed beam in the ceiling of his room developed a long crack on the fourth day, all the captive had done was eat, sleep, peer out the window and try to remember the all too few known facts of Ashbless’ visit to Egypt; after the beam split, he occupied his time pulling down a three-foot splinter and trying, with his teeth and nails, to trim a one-foot length of it into something like a dagger. He considered wrenching the beer can from the bars and flattening it to make a tool, but decided that not only would that deprive him of beer for the rest of the trip, but that anything so noticeable would earn him a search when they arrived.
Only once had anything nearly as disquieting as the arrival of the Shellengeri occurred. Sometime before midnight on Saturday, the eleventh night of the voyage, he’d thought he’d heard a wailing over the eternal wind scream, and he’d tried to see out, a trick as difficult as trying to see while riding a motorcycle at seventy miles per hour without goggles. After ten minutes he’d gone back to bed, more than half convinced that the black boat he’d seemed to see, visible because it shone a much deeper black than the waves behind it, had been nothing more than a retinal misfire caused by straining his eyes to see through the blast. After all, what would a boat be doing out there?
CHAPTER 11
“… Nothing could be more horrible: its head and shoulders were visible, turning first to one side, then to the other, with a solemn and awful movement, as if impressed with some dreadful secret of the deep, which, from its watery grave, it came upwards to reveal. Such sights became afterwards frequent, hardly a day passing without ushering the dead to the contemplation of the living, until at length they passed without observation.”
On the morning of the tenth of October Doyle came blearily awake and realized that he was out on the deck… and that the planks under his bearded cheek were hot, and when he opened his eyes bright sunlight made him squeeze them shut again… and then it came to him that he could hear talking, creaking cordage, the slap of water against the gently rocking hull—the wind had stopped.
“—Drydock somewhere,” a man’s gruff voice was saying, “though not in this godforsaken outpost.”
Another voice said something about Greece.
“Sure, if it’ll get to Greece. Every damn seam is leaking, just about every sail is shredded, the goddamn masts are—”
The second voice, which Doyle now recognized as the one that was nearly identical to Doctor Romany’s, interrupted with some brief harshness that shut the other up.
Doyle tried to sit up, but only managed to roll over, for he was tightly bound with thick, tarry-smelling ropes. They’re not taking any chances with me, he thought; then he smiled, for he realized that the splintery object biting into his knee was his makeshift wooden dagger, overlooked by whoever had bound him.
“We were none too soon tying him up,” said the harsher voice. “He’s got a sound constitution—I’d have thought the drug would keep him under until this afternoon, at least.”
Though it made his temples throb even more severely, Doyle lifted his head and blinked around. Two men were standing by the ship’s rail, staring at him; one seemed to be a pre-time-jump version of Doctor Romany—that would be Romanelli, he thought, the original—and the other was evidently the captain of the ship.
Romanelli was barefoot, and he padded across to Doyle and crouched beside him. “Good morning,” he said. “I may want to ask you questions, and we probably won’t meet anyone who speaks English, so I’m going to leave the gag off. If you want to yell and make a commotion, though, we can tie it on and conceal it under a burnoose.”
Doyle let his head clunk back onto the deck, then closed his eyes and waited until the throbbing abated a little. “Okay,” he said, opening them again and blinking up at the empty blue sky beyond the tangle of spars and riggings and reefed sails. “We’re in Egypt?”
“Alexandria.” Romanelli nodded. “We’ll row you ashore, and then it’s overland to the Rosetta branch of the Nile, and we’ll sail you upriver to Cairo. Savor the view.” The sorcerer stood up with a loud popping of the knees and an imperfectly concealed wince. “You men,” he called irritably. “The boat’s ready? Then get him over the side and into it.”
Doyle was lifted up, carried to the rail, and after a hook was snugged in under the rope that went under his arms he was lowered like a bundled-up rug into a rowboat that bobbed and banged against the hull in the emerald water twenty feet below. A sailor in the boat grabbed his bound ankles and guided him down to a sitting position on one of the thwarts while Romanelli descended a rope ladder and, after swinging about for a minute on the end of it, waving a free foot and swearing, did a sort of half-slide into the boat. The sailor helped him to another thwart and then the last passenger came swinging wildly down the ladder—it was the Luck of the Surrey-side Beggars himself, the time-ruined Doctor Romany, with two big metal spikes tied to his shoes for weight. After placing this grinning, winking creature on the narrow bow, where it sat like a trained cormorant, the sailor wiped his hands and sat down himself, impassively facing Romanelli and Doyle; he picked up the oars and set to work.
Doyle immediately toppled over against the starboard gunwale, and from this position watched the ship’s hull slide past and eventually give way, as they rounded the high arch of the bow, to a view of Alexandria, half a mile away across the glittering water.
The city was a disappointment to him—he’d expected the labyrinthine Oriental city Lawrence Durrell had written about, but all he saw was a small cluster of dilapidated white buildings baking in the sun. There were no other ships in the harbor, and only a few boats lay moored to the weathered quays.
“That’s Alexandria?” he asked.