The Bird King(62)
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you thick? I’ve just explained it all. You should get up. That monk is too polite to come and wake you, and it’s after midday.”
“I’m already up,” said Fatima.
“You’re so funny,” said Vikram.
Fatima opened her eyes. The hold murmured around her as the boat shifted from side to side, as if it, too, had been resting, and was stretching and rousing itself now in the bright sun. Across the narrow width of the hold, Hassan was still asleep, his breathing regular, his lips parted slightly. His color looked better. For a moment, Fatima was happy. The way they had left each other intruded on her thoughts slowly, like a child dragging its feet. Averting her eyes, Fatima kicked off the rough blanket under which she had slept and stumbled across the gently swaying floor to the stairs.
A rush of cold, wet air pummeled her as she emerged onto the deck. Above her head, Gwennec clung to the mast like a great black crow, his cloak and habit flapping about him. It was an unsuitable garment for ship work. Every few moments, he was forced to interrupt the complicated operation he was performing on the rigging to curse and push his skirt down over his legs, which, in contrast to his reddened face and hands, were blue-white, as if he had been stitched together from two entirely different skins. Fatima couldn’t help herself: she laughed, leaning against the last stair for support. Gwennec twisted up his face at her, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the cloudless glare.
“Laugh now, madam,” he said, “but you’ll miss me when you’ve got to do all this by yourself.”
Fatima let her gaze wander across the ship to the series of ropes that connected parts of the deck she couldn’t identify to pieces of the sail and rigging that were likewise inscrutable. She adopted an aloof expression, determined not to let Gwennec see her uncertainty. He clambered down the mast and presented himself with a lopsided smile, shaking out his scapular.
“Let’s start with pointing the boat the right way,” he said. “There’s a treasure on board you didn’t know about. I’ve set it all up. Look.” He led her up the steps to the stern castle. Fatima could see nothing but sail and water, a field of royal blue unfurling in every direction. A thin ribbon of land lay off their right flank, the sky above it discolored with smoke: this was the only sign of human life.
“A sane man would stick closer to shore than this,” said Gwennec. “But you don’t want to be spotted, so.” He gestured toward the tiller. Beside it stood a little table, upon which lay Hassan’s map, weighted by stones on three corners and by a small oil lamp on the fourth. Next to that sat an instrument Fatima had never seen before: a hemisphere of brass suspended between two slender halos of similar metal. The face of the hemisphere was a wind rose with arrows to mark each of the cardinal directions; smaller lines marked the degrees in between. The compass lay still between its twin satellites, which orbited around it slowly, keeping it flat as the ship rocked back and forth.
“What is it?” asked Fatima. She didn’t dare touch the thing, which seemed to move through some delicate, internal volition, like a living being.
“It’s a dry compass,” said Brother Gwennec with a hint of pride in his voice. “Suspended in a pair of gimbals to keep the needle from grounding. It was a gift from the Portuguese to Queen Isabella, who lent it to the lady Luz for her journey. It’s worth more than this boat and all our lives put together. She’ll be wanting it back, I’ve no doubt.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Fatima. More beautiful, perhaps, because it had been Luz’s and now belonged to her.
“Aye,” said Gwennec, who looked at her approvingly. “It’s very beautiful. Better than the old water compasses—a child could make a water compass, but one big wave and the needle goes sloshing out on your shoes. And the dry ones as they use on land ground like hell aboard a ship for the same reason. Too much back-and-forth. This—” He reached out and tapped the edge of one gimbal; it responded silently, sending its sibling rotating in the opposite direction. “This is as pretty to me as a painting in a church or a sleeve of the best silk brocade. If a man can dream up a compass like this, we must not have forfeited God’s grace just yet.”
Fatima realized she was smiling at Gwennec and looked away. She heard him clear his throat.
“Anyway,” he said. “Here’s what you must know: you align the compass with the keel of the boat, as I’ve done. That way, when the ship turns, the wind rose’ll tell you which direction the keel is pointed in. That’s your heading. You must keep the joints of the gimbals oiled so that they have free motion, otherwise the needle inside the compass may ground, and then you’re blind. And whatever you do, by God, don’t get anything made of iron within five feet of this table. Now, your map.” He smoothed the corners and traced the edge of the Iberian Peninsula with one finger. “These rhumb lines, here, are like a compass that doesn’t move. You pick out where you are on the map as best you can with your dead reckoning, then you choose the rhumb line that most closely gets you where you want to go.” He traced one, a long arc that began just inside the Strait of Jebel Tareq and continued toward the lone island that hung silently in the middle of the Dark Sea. “You turn the tiller until the keel of the boat lines up with that rhumb line. If we were here, say, which we’re not, it’d be four degrees west-southwest. Then your job is to keep the boat on that heading with all the wind and the currents and the tides working against you.” He grinned wolfishly. “That’s the hard part.”