Cloud Atlas: A Novel Read online

  The crew stood around a man lying prone at the base of the midmast. By the lurching lantern light I recognized one of the Castilians. (I own that my first emotion was relief, that not Rafael but another had fallen to his death.) I overheard the Icelander say the dead man had won his compatriots’ arrack ration at cards & drunk it all before his watch. Henry arrived in his nightshirt with his doctor’s bag. He knelt by the mangled form & felt for a pulse, but shook his head. “This fellow has no need of a doctor.” Mr. Roderick retrieved the Castilian’s boots & clothes for auction & Mankin fetched some third-rate sackcloth for the cadaver. (Mr. Boerhaave will deduct the sackcloth from the auction’s profits.) The Jacks returned to their fo’c’sle or their stations in silence, every man made somber by this reminder of the fragility of life. Henry, Mr. Roderick & I stayed to watch the Castilians perform their Catholick death rites over their countryman before knotting up the sack & committing his body to the deep with tears & dolorous adíos! “Passionate Latinos,” observed Henry, bidding me a second good night. I yearned to share the secret of the Indian with my friend, but held my tongue lest my complicity infect him.

  Returning from the melancholy scene, I saw a lantern gleam in the galley. Finbar sleeps there “to ward off pilferers,” but he too was roused by the night’s excitement. I recalled that the stowaway may not have eaten for a day & a half, fearfully, for what bestial depravity might a savage not be driven to by an empty stomach? My act might have stood against me on the morrow, but I told the cook a mighty hunger was robbing me of sleep & (at double the usual expense “on account o’ the unseason’ble hour”) I procured a platter of sauerkraut, sausage & buns hard as cannonballs.

  Back in the confines of my cabin, the savage thanked me for the kindness & ate that humble fare as if it were a Presidential Banquet. I did not confess my true motives, viz., the fuller his stomach, the less likely he was to consume me, but instead asked him why, during his flogging, he had smiled at me. “Pain is strong, aye—but friends’ eyes, more strong.” I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

  The wind rose higher as the middle watch wore on, making the timbers moan & whipping up the seas & sluicing over the decks. Seawater was soon dripping into my coffin, trickling down the walls & blotting my blanket. “You might have chosen a drier hidey-hole than mine,” I whispered, to test the stowaway’s wakefulness. “Safe better’n dry, Missa Ewing,” he murmured, alert as I. Why, I asked, was he beaten so savagely in the Indian hamlet? A silence stretched itself out. “I seen too much o’ the world, I ain’t good slave.” To ward off seasickness during those dreary hours, I teazed out the stowaway’s history. (I cannot, moreover, deny my curiosity.) His pidgin delivered his tale brokenly, so its substance only shall I endeavor to set down here.

  White men’s ships bore vicissitudes to Old Rēkohu, as Mr. D’Arnoq narrated, but also marvels. During my stowaway’s boyhood, Autua yearned to learn more of these pale peoples from places whose existence, in his grandfather’s time, was the realm of myths. Autua claims his father had been amongst the natives Lt. Broughton’s landing party encountered in Skirmish Bay & spent his infancy hearing the yarn told & retold:—of the “Great Albatross,” paddling through the morning mists; its vividly plumaged, strangely jointed servants who canoed ashore, facing backwards; of the Albatross servants’ gibberish (a bird language?); of their smoke breathing; of their heinous violation of that tapu forbidding strangers to touch canoes (doing so curses the vessel & renders it as unseaworthy as if an ax had been taken to it); of the pursuant altercation; of those “shouting staffs” whose magical wrath could kill a man across the beach; & of the bright skirt of ocean-blue, cloud-white & blood-red that the servants hoisted aloft a pole before rowing back to the Great Albatross. (This flag was removed & presented to a chieftain, who wore it proudly until the scrofula took him.)

  Autua had an uncle, Koche, who shipped aboard a Boston sealer, circa 1825. (The stowaway is unsure of his exact age.) Moriori were prized crew amongst such vessels, for in lieu of martial prowess, Rēkohu’s manhood “won their spurs” by seal hunting & swimming feats. (To claim his bride, as a further example, a young man had to dive to the seabed & surface with a crayfish in each hand & a third in his mouth.) Newly discovered Polynesians, it should be added, make easy prey for unscrupulous captains. Autua’s uncle Koche returned after five years, garbed in Pakeha clothes with rings in his ears, a modest pouch of dollars & réals, possessed of strange customs (“smoke breathing” amongst them), discordant oaths & tales of cities & sights too outlandish for the Moriori tongue to delineate.

  Autua swore to ship on the next vessel leaving Ocean Bay & see these exotic places for himself. His uncle persuaded a second mate on a French whaler to ship the ten-year-old (?) Autua as an apprentice. In the Moriori’s subsequent career at sea, he saw the ice ranges of Antarctica, whales turned to islets of gore, then barrels of sperm oil; in the becalmed ashy Encantadas, he hunted giant tortoises; in Sydney, he saw grand buildings, parks, horse-drawn carriages & ladies in bonnets & the miracles of civilization; he shipped opium from Calcutta to Canton; survived dysentery in Batavia; lost half of an ear in a skirmish with Mexicans afore the altar at Santa Cruz; survived shipwreck at the Horn & saw Rio de Janeiro, though did not step ashore; & everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.

  Autua returned in the summer of 1835, a worldly-wise young man of about twenty. He planned to take a local bride & build a house & cultivate some acres, but as Mr. D’Arnoq relates, by the winter solstice of that year every Moriori who had not perished was a slave of the Maori. The returnee’s years amongst crews of all nations did not elevate Autua in the invaders’ estimation. (I observed how ill-timed was the prodigal’s homecoming. “No, Missa Ewing, Rēkohu called me home, so I see her death so I know”—he tapped his head—”the truth.”)

  Autua’s master was the lizard-tattooed Maori, Kupaka, who told his horrified, broken slaves that he had come to cleanse them of their false idols (“Have your gods saved you?” taunted Kupaka); their polluted language (“My whip will teach you pure Maori!”); their tainted blood (“Inbreeding has diluted your original mana!”). Henceforth Moriori unions were proscribed & all issue fathered by Maori men on Moriori women were declared Maori. The earliest transgressors were executed in gruesome ways & the survivors lived in that state of lethargy engendered by relentless subjugation. Autua cleared land, planted wheat & tended hogs for Kupaka until he won enough trust to effect his escape. (“Secret places on Rēkohu, Missa Ewing, combes, pitfalls, caves deep in Motoporoporo Forest, so dense no dogs scent you there.” I fancy I fell into one such secret place.)

  A year later he was recaptured, but Moriori slaves were now too scarce to be indiscriminately slaughtered. The lower Maori were obliged to labor alongside the serfs, much to their disgust. (“We forsook our ancestors’ land in Aotearoa for this miserable rock?” they complained.) Autua escaped again & during his second spell of freedom he was granted secret asylum by Mr. D’Arnoq for some months, at no little risk to the latter. During this sojourn Autua was baptized & turned to the Lord.

  Kupaka’s men caught up with the fugitive after a year & six-month, but this time the mercurial chieftain evinced a respect for Autua’s spirit. After a retributive lashing, Kupaka appointed his slave as fisherman for his own table. Thus employed, the Moriori let another year go by until, one afternoon, he found a rare moeeka fish flapping in his net. He told Kupaka’s wife this king of fish could be eaten only by a king of men & showed her how to prepare it for her husband. (“Bad bad poison this moeeka fish, Missa Ewing, one bite, aye, you sleep, you never wake no mo’.”) During that night’s feasting, Autua snuck from the encampment, stole his master’s canoe & rowed across the current-prone, choppy, moonless sea to deserted Pitt Island, two leagues to the south of Chatham Isle (known as Rangiauria in Moriori & revered as mankind’s birthplace)
.

  Luck favored the stowaway, for he arrived safe at dawn as a squall blew up & no canoes made the crossing after him. Autua subsisted in his Polynesian Eden on wild celery, watercress, eggs, berries, an occasional young boar (he risked fires only under cover of darkness or mist) & the knowledge that Kupaka, at least, had met a condign punishment. Was his solitude not unbearable? “Nights, ancestors visited. Days, I yarned tales of Maui to birds & birds yarned sea tales to I.”

  The fugitive lived thus for many a season until last September, when a winter gale wrecked the whaler Eliza from Nantucket on Pitt Island Reef. All hands drowned, but our Mr. Walker, zealous in his pursuit of easy guineas, crossed the straits seeking salvage. When he found signs of habitation & saw Kupaka’s old canoe (each is storiated with unique carvings), he knew he had found treasure of interest to his Maori neighbors. Two days later a large hunting party rowed to Pitt Island from the mainland. Autua sat on the beach & watched them arrive, surprized only to see his old enemy, Kupaka, grizzled but very much alive & shouting war chants.

  My uninvited cabinmate concluded his tale. “That b——’s greedy dog stole moeeka from kitchen & died, not the Maori. Aye, Kupaka flogged me, but he’s old & far from home & his mana is hollow & starved. Maori thrive on wars & revenge & feudin’, but peace kills ’em off. Many go back to Zealand. Kupaka cannot, his land is no mo’. Then last week, Missa Ewing, I see you & I know, you save I, I know it.”

  The morning watch smote four bells & my porthole betrayed a rainy dawn. I had slept a little, but my prayers that the dawn would dissolve the Moriori were unheeded. I bade him to playact he had only just revealed himself & make no mention of our night’s conversation. He signaled comprehension, but I feared the worst: an Indian’s wit was no match for a Boerhaave.

  Along the gangway I stepped (the Prophetess was bucking like a young bronco) to the officers’ mess, knocked & entered. Mr. Roderick & Mr. Boerhaave were listening to Cpt. Molyneux. I cleared my throat & bade all good morning, at which our amicable captain swore, “You can better my morning, by b——ing off, instanter!”

  Coolly, I asked when the captain might find time to hear news of an Indian stowaway who had just emerged from the coils of hawser taking up “my so-called cabin.” During the ensuing silence Cpt. Molyneux’s pale, horny-toad complexion turned roast beef pink. Ere his blast was launched, I added the stowaway claimed to be an able seaman & begged to work his passage.

  Mr. Boerhaave forestalled his captain with the predicted accusations & exclaimed, “On Dutch merchantmen those who abet stowaways share their fate!” I reminded the Hollander we sailed under an English flag & put it to him why, if I had hid the stowaway under the coils of hawser, had I asked & asked again since Thursday night for the unwonted hawser to be removed, thereby begging for my putative “conspiracy” to be uncovered? Hitting that bull’s-eye fired my mettle & I assured Cpt. Molyneux that the baptized stowaway had resorted to this extreme measure lest his Maori master, who had vowed to eat his slave’s warm liver (I sprinkled a little “seasoning” on my version of events), directed his ungodly wrath towards his rescuer.

  Mr. Boerhaave swore, “So this d——d Blackamoor wants us to be grateful to him?” No, I replied, the Moriori asks for a chance to prove his value to the Prophetess. Mr. Boerhaave spat out, “A stowaway is a stowaway even if he sh——s silver nuggets! What’s his name?” I did not know, I replied, for I had not conducted an interview with the man but come to the captain expeditiously.

  Cpt. Molyneux spoke at last. “Able seaman first class, you say?” His wrath had cooled at the prospect of earning a valuable pair of hands he would not have to pay. “An Indian? Where did he salt his burns?” I repeated, two minutes was insufficient to learn his history, but my instinct considered the Indian an honest fellow.

  The captain wiped his beard. “Mr. Roderick, accompany our passenger & his instinct & fetch their pet savage afoot the mizzen.” He tossed a key to his first mate. “Mr. Boerhaave, my fowling piece, if you please.”

  The second mate & I did as bid. “A risky business,” Mr. Roderick warned me. “The only statute book on the Prophetess is the Old Man’s Whim.” Another statute book named Conscience is observed lex loci wherever God sees, I responded. Autua was awaiting his trial in the cotton trowzers I purchased in Port Jackson (he had climbed aboard from Mr. D’Arnoq’s boat in naught but his savage’s loincloth & a shark-tooth necklace). His back was exposed. His lacerations, I hoped, would pay testimony to his resilience & bestir sympathy in the observers’ breasts.

  Rats behind the arras spread tidings of the sport & most hands were gathered on deck. (My ally, Henry, was still abed, unaware of my jeopardy.) Cpt. Molyneux sized the Moriori up as if inspecting a mule & addressed him thus: “Mr. Ewing, who knows nothing about how you boarded my vessel, says you regard yourself a seaman.”

  Autua replied with courage & dignity. “Aye, Cap’n, sir, two years on whaler Mississippi of Le Havre under Captain Maspero & four years on Cornucopia of Philadelphia under Captain Caton, three years on an Indiaman—”

  Cpt. Molyneux interrupted & indicated Autua’s trowzers. “Did you pilfer this garment from below?” Autua was sensible that I, too, was on trial. “That Christian gent’man gave, sir.” The crew followed the stowaway’s finger to myself & Mr. Boerhaave thrust at the chink in my armor. “He did? When was this gift awarded?” (I recalled my father-in-law’s aphorism “To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom” & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.) Autua answered with primed percipience. “Ten minutes past, sir, I, no clothes, that gent’man say, naked no good, dress this.”

  “If you are a seaman”—our captain jerked his thumb aloft—”let’s see you lower this midmast’s royal.” At this, the stowaway grew hesitant & confused & I felt the lunatick’s wager I had placed on this Indian’s word swing against me, but Autua had merely spotted a trap. “Sir, this mast ain’t midmast, this mast the mizzen, aye?” Impassive Cpt. Molyneux nodded. “Then kindly lower the mizzen royal.”

  Autua fairly ran up the mast & I began to hope all was not lost. The newly risen sun shone low over the water & caused us to squint. “Ready & aim my piece,” the captain instructed Mr. Boerhaave, once the stowaway was past the spanker gaff, “fire on my command!”

  Now I protested with the utmost vigor, the Indian had received holy sacrament, but Cpt. Molyneux ordered me to shut up or swim back to the Chathams. No American captain would cut a man down, not even a nigger, so odiously! Autua reached the topmost yard & walked it with simian dexterity despite the rough seas. Watching the sail unfurl, one of the “saltest” aboard, a dour Icelander & a sober, obliging & hardworking fellow, spoke his admiration for all to hear. “The darkie’s salt as I am, aye, he’s got fishhooks for toes!” Such was my gratitude, I could have kissed his boots. Soon Autua had the sail down—a difficult operation even for a team of four men. Cpt. Molyneux grunted approval & ordered Mr. Boerhaave to replace his gun, “But d—me if I pay a stowaway a single cent. He’ll work his passage to O-hawaii. If he’s no shirker he may sign articles there in the regular fashion. Mr. Roderick, he can share the dead Spaniard’s bunk.”

  I have worn away a nib in narrating the day’s excitements. It is grown too dark to see.

  Wednesday, 20th November—

  Strong easterly breeze, very salty & oppressive. Henry has conducted his examination & has grave news, yet not the gravest. My Ailment is a parasite, Gusano coco cervello. This Worm is endemic throughout both Melanesia & Polynesia, but has been known to science only these last ten years. It breeds in the stinking canals of Batavia, doubtless the port of my own infection. Ingested, it voyages through the host’s blood vessels to the brain’s cerebellum anterior. (Hence my migraines & dizziness.) Ensconced in the brain, it enters a gestation phase. “You are a realist, Adam,” Henry told me, “so your pills shall be unsugared. Once the Parasite’s larvae hatch, the victim’s brain becomes a maggoty cauliflower. Putrescent gases cause th
e eardrums & eyeballs to protrude until they pop, releasing a cloud of Gusano coco spores.”

  Thus reads my death sentence, but now comes my stay of execution & appeal. An admixture of urussium alkali & orinoco manganese will calcify my Parasite & laphrydictic myrrh will disintegrate it. Henry’s “apothecary” holds these compounds, but a precise dosage is paramount. Less than half a drachm leaves Gusano coco unpurged, but more kills the patient with the cure. My doctor warns me that as the Parasite dies, its poison sacs split & secrete their cargo, so I shall feel worse before my recovery is compleat.

  Henry enjoined me not to breathe a word about my condition, for hyenas like Boerhaave prey on the vulnerable & ignorant sailors can show hostility to maladies they know not. (“I once heard of a sailor who showed the touch of leprosy a week out of Macao on the long haul back to Lisbon,” recalled Henry, “and the whole company prodded the wretch overboard without a hearing.”) During my convalescence, Henry shall inform the “scuttlebutt” that Mr. Ewing has a low fever caused by the clime & nurse me himself. Henry bridled when I mentioned his fee. “Fee? You are no valetudinarian viscount with banknotes padding his pillows! Providence steered you to my ministrations, for I doubt five men in this blue Pacific can cure you! So a fie on ‘Fee’! All I ask, dear Adam, is that you are an obedient patient! Kindly take my powders & withdraw to your cabin. I shall look in after the last dog.”

  My doctor is an uncut diamond of the first water. Even as I write these words, I am tearful with gratitude.

  Saturday, 30th November—

  Henry’s powders are indeed a wondrous medicament. I inhale the precious grains into my nostrils from an ivory spoon & on the instant an incandescent joy burns my being. My senses grow alert, yet my limbs grow Lethean. My Parasite still writhes at night, like a new babe’s finger, igniting spasms of pain & dreams obscene & monstrous visit me. “A sure sign,” Henry consoles me, “your Worm has reacted to our vermicide & seeks shelter in the recesses of your cerebral canals whence visions spring. In vain Gusano coco hides, dear Adam, in vain. We shall winkle ’im out!”