Shōgun

The English, Dutch, and French had rutters for their own waters, but the waters of the rest of the world had been sailed only by captains from Portugal and Spain, and these two countries considered all rutters secret. Rutters that revealed the seaways to the New World or unraveled the mysteries of the Pass of Magellan and the Cape of Good Hope—both Portuguese discoveries—and thence the seaways to Asia were guarded as national treasures by the Portuguese and Spanish, and sought after with equal ferocity by their Dutch and English enemies.

But a rutter was only as good as the pilot who wrote it, the scribe who hand-copied it, the very rare printer who printed it, or the scholar who translated it. A rutter could therefore contain errors. Even deliberate ones. A pilot never knew for certain until he had been there himself. At least once.

At sea the pilot was leader, sole guide, and final arbiter of the ship and her crew. Alone he commanded from the quarterdeck.

That’s heady wine, Blackthorne told himself. And once sipped, never to be forgotten, always to be sought, and always necessary. That’s one of the things that keep you alive when others die.

He got up and relieved himself in the scuppers. Later the sand ran out of the hourglass by the binnacle and he turned it and rang the ship’s bell.

“Can you stay awake, Hendrik?”

“Yes. Yes, I believe so.”

“I’ll send someone to replace the bow lookout. See he stands in the wind and not in the lee. That’ll keep him sharp and awake.” For a moment he wondered if he should turn the ship into the wind and heave to for the night but he decided against it, went down the companionway, and opened the fo’c’sle door. The companionway led into the crew’s quarters. The cabin ran the width of the ship and had bunks and hammock space for a hundred and twenty men. The warmth surrounded him and he was grateful for it and ignored the ever present stench from the bilges below. None of the twenty-odd men moved from his bunk.

“Get aloft, Maetsukker,” he said in Dutch, the lingua franca of the Low Countries, which he spoke perfectly, along with Portuguese and Spanish and Latin.

“I’m near death,” the small, sharp-featured man said, cringing deeper into the bunk. “I’m sick. Look, the scurvy’s taken all my teeth. Lord Jesus help us, we’ll all perish! If it wasn’t for you we’d all be home by now, safe! I’m a merchant. I’m not a seaman. I’m not part of the crew. . . . Take someone else. Johann there’s—” He screamed as Blackthorne jerked him out of the bunk and hurled him against the door. Blood flecked his mouth and he was stunned. A brutal kick in his side brought him out of his stupor.

“You get your face aloft and stay there till you’re dead or we make landfall.”

The man pulled the door open and fled in agony.

Blackthorne looked at the others. They stared back at him. “How are you feeling, Johann?”

“Good enough, Pilot. Perhaps I’ll live.”

Johann Vinck was forty-three, the chief gunner and bosun’s mate, the oldest man aboard. He was hairless and toothless, the color of aged oak and just as strong. Six years ago he had sailed with Blackthorne on the ill-fated search for the Northeast Passage, and each man knew the measure of the other.

“At your age most men are already dead, so you’re ahead of us all.” Blackthorne was thirty-six.

Vinck smiled mirthlessly. “It’s the brandy, Pilot, that an’ fornication an’ the saintly life I’ve led.”

No one laughed. Then someone pointed at a bunk. “Pilot, the bosun’s dead.”

“Then get the body aloft! Wash it and close his eyes! You, you, and you!”

The men were quickly out of their bunks this time and together they half dragged, half carried the corpse from the cabin.

“Take the dawn watch, Vinck. And Ginsel, you’re bow lookout.”

“Yes sir.”

Blackthorne went back on deck.

He saw that Hendrik was still awake, that the ship was in order. The relieved lookout, Salamon, stumbled past him, more dead than alive, his eyes puffed and red from the cut of the wind. Blackthorne crossed to the other door and went below. The passageway led to the great cabin aft, which was the Captain-General’s quarters and magazine. His own cabin was starboard and the other, to port, was usually for the three mates. Now Baccus van Nekk, the chief merchant, Hendrik the third mate, and the boy, Croocq, shared it. They were all very sick.

He went into the great cabin. The Captain-General, Paulus Spillbergen, was lying half conscious in his bunk. He was a short, florid man, normally very fat, now very thin, the skin of his paunch hanging slackly in folds. Blackthorne took a water flagon out of a secret drawer and helped him drink a little.

“Thanks,” Spillbergen said weakly. “Where’s land—where’s land?”

“Ahead,” he replied, no longer believing it, then put the flagon away, closed his ears to the whines and left, hating him anew.