ELEVEN

The Storm Bottle

The Captain’s Tale

The troubles began, as they almost always do at sea, with an omen. There is always an omen. The difficulty is spotting it and determining its meaning in time to anticipate whatever it is it happens to be foretelling.

The children of the captain of the schooner called the Fate often argued over omens. It seemed to the captain’s young daughter, Melusine, that her still-younger brother, Lowe, had a very solid instinct for spotting them, but that he tended to get exactly wrong whether they were good or bad. Some of this might’ve been because Lowe and Melusine had different mothers and had been raised with different tales and traditions, and moreover Lowe hadn’t been at sea for quite so long as Lucy had. Still, everyone knows that corposants coming down a mast are bad luck. Everyone except for Lowe, who staunchly insisted that it was when they moved up the mast that you were in for it. And he couldn’t keep straight when you ought to whistle and when you shouldn’t under any circumstances so much as think of it. Whistling might be permissible if, for instance, you needed a wind and had already stuck a knife in the mast and the sailing master was safely out of earshot, but you ought never to whistle at almost any other time aboard ship, ever, or that same sailing master would find some particularly unpleasant and probably smelly bit of busywork to occupy the rest of your natural life.

Then came the matter of Lowe and the storm bottle, and this time, for once, they were in complete agreement. Breaking the storm bottle was bad luck for certain, if for no other reason than it had belonged to the captain’s steward and he would be furious, and he had the power to make certain Melusine and Lowe ate nothing but stewed millers for a month if that was the punishment he deemed fair. And if stew sounds nice enough, it might change your mind to know that millers is the polite way of referring to rats if you have to eat them, which is not an unheard-of thing aboard a ship after months at sea, or as proper punishment for a particularly grievous offense.

The steward, Garvett, had bought his storm bottle from a glassblower in Venice. It was a narrow vessel full of liquid and some pale fluffy stuff that got cloudy or snowy or formed crystals, apparently according to what weather was coming. He had taken a bit of ribbing from the rest of the crew, who had scoffed at the idea that any sailor worth his salt needed a flask of milky water to tell him what he ought to be able to deduce from the sky and the sea and the plenitude of other signs the Good Lord had given him for interpreting the world. But then one day the storm bottle predicted snow on a perfectly mild and pleasant day in latitudes where snow had no business falling. Everyone laughed, until the sky began to cloud over. The steward sat, smug and vindicated, as the snow began to come down from on high. After that, the bottle was treated with more respect—until Lowe broke it.

Lowe thought the stuff in the bottle was camphor, which was a substance he knew well, since Lowe had a passion for fireworks, and some fireworks call for it as an ingredient. And while no one else particularly cared how the bottle worked so long as it did, Lowe became obsessed with figuring out whether he was right, and if he was, how camphor could not only make fireworks more brilliant but also foretell a storm. The steward, who had the good sense to be wary of seven-year-olds toying with treasured glass objects, took to hiding the storm bottle. But you couldn’t conceal things from Lowe for long. He was observant and curious, and he was small and light enough to climb anywhere. Nothing was safe. But the steward kept trying, finding new places to hide the bottle, only for Lowe to locate it anyway and then be caught because he could never quite get around to putting the bottle back before the steward returned from wherever he’d gone. This went on and on.

And then came the day the Fate put in for a brief stop at Valletta, which is a port town on the island of Malta. That very morning, Lowe came sprinting into Melusine’s little cabin as she was preparing to go ashore, a look of panic on his face and two bits of broken glass in his hands. “What do we do?” he whispered.

Melusine gasped. “You didn’t.”

Lowe brightened. “I know what was in it now, at least. I was right. There was water and alcohol and camphor. I could make him another one.”

Melusine looked down at the remnants of the beautiful Venetian glass bottle. “He’ll know, Lowe.”

“I’ll make him a better one,” Lowe insisted. “You find a bottle. I’ll get what goes in it.”

He dropped the broken glass on Melusine’s tiny table and darted out again, leaving her to wonder how he’d managed so quickly and efficiently to make her an accessory to his crimes in addition to ruining her chances for going into Valletta that morning.

If they had anything going for them, it was that they had some time. A third of the hands had already gone ashore, and Melusine had seen the steward and the cook row away from the Fate with the purser. They had to replenish the ship’s stores, and they wouldn’t be back for hours. The surgeon had left with them too, which was convenient because Melusine thought he might have a bottle among his medicines that would do, even if it wouldn’t be as pretty as the broken one.

She found a suitable flask and emptied it, glancing briefly at the label and hoping paregoric wasn’t anything particularly important. Then she hurried back to her own cabin, nodding at the hands who tapped their foreheads in salute as she passed and trying to come up with a likely answer to give to the shipmate who would inevitably notice that she’d just come out of the surgeon’s quarters and want to know was she feeling all right. Miraculously, however, no one stopped her.

In her cabin, she found Lowe waiting with two mugs sitting before him on her table. “There’s a problem,” he said. “We have no camphor, on account of I made that nice bunch of exploding stars, and that was about the same time Cook wanted camphor when he was practicing that lovely dessert he learned from that ship’s cook from Goa, and then the surgeon took the last bit to make up some of that pear-gory stuff he uses when someone’s belly goes off. We shall have to improvise.” He took a jar from one pocket, handling it with unusual reverence. “Hard snow,” he said.

“Hard snow?” Melusine repeated warily. “Is there such a thing? Is it to do with fireworks?”

“There is, but no, not for fireworks. And I haven’t made it exactly in the proper way—really it’s not the sort of thing you can just whip up in the powder magazine, but we don’t have time to refine the stuff. Still, it has a bit of mercury in it, which is also in the ship’s barometer, and the barometer does nearly the same thing as the storm bottle did. And it sounds like how the camphor crystals looked, so I thought it might do.”

He took the surgeon’s bottle and poured in the contents of the two mugs, which turned out to be water and rum, and then tipped in a spoonful of the stuff called hard snow, which was syrupy and vaguely metallic. He corked the surgeon’s bottle, and Melusine helped him seal it with wax. At last they sat back and considered their handiwork. It didn’t look like much: just a round, wide-mouthed medicine vial—nothing at all like the narrow and graceful Venetian storm bottle—with a lump of thickish stuff at the bottom and watery grog filling the rest of the bottle up to the top.

They stared at it for a moment. Nothing happened, of course. They kept watching. “How will we know if it works?” Lowe asked, twisting the end of his braided pigtail.

Melusine, who couldn’t imagine how it possibly could, shrugged. “This is your commission, Lowe. I haven’t got the foggiest idea.” And then something stopped her cold.

The thickish stuff in the bottle was moving. And not settling down to the bottom the way, say, stray tea leaves or grounds of coffee might do. No, it was hard to see—it was happening slowly—but Lowe’s hard snow was climbing up the walls of the bottle.

“What does that mean?” Melusine and Lowe asked each other at the same time, both jabbing index fingers at the bottle.

And then the wooden world around them rocked under their feet. It was a small motion, but the Fate had been Melusine’s home for most of her life, and there was no shift, no change, no matter how small, that the ship could’ve made that she wouldn’t have felt. She grabbed Lowe’s hand and, with her brother in tow, ran for the companionway ladder that led up to the weather deck.

The world beyond the Fate had changed. Valletta Harbour was gone, replaced by a shocking sight: a wide expanse of deep red sea.

“I’ve heard of waters like this,” Melusine whispered. “I’ve heard sailors talk about them, but I’ve never seen one.”

“Look.” Lowe tugged her arm, and Melusine turned to follow his pointing finger across the expanse where, if Valletta had been where it ought to have been, the Mediterranean Sea would’ve met the Ionian. But Lowe was pointing not at whatever sea was there, but at what was creeping out across it toward them: a thick white fog, borne on a cold wind that told Melusine they were no longer anywhere near Malta. Lowe whispered, “I can hear it; can’t you?” Melusine cocked her head into the silence and listened, and yes, she could hear it—or she could hear something, just barely, in the sea smoke: a rustling, clinking, almost like ice when it fell from the rigging. As if concealed within the fog were bits of solid matter that clinked and clattered quietly as the mass rolled across the red waters toward them.

This is when Melusine realized that, under normal circumstances, she should never have been able to hear anything so quiet, not at that distance. She could hear it only because the ship was silent. No voices, no footfalls, no whistles or bells. As far as Melusine knew, the Fate had not been empty of sailors since the day she’d been launched, and probably not even before that. There would never, not ever, be less than a skeleton crew aboard, and in any case, she could think of no circumstances under which their father, the captain, would have left the ship without passing word to her and Lowe. But Melusine knew, abruptly and certainly, that despite the impossibility, despite the fact that mere minutes before, there had been at least seventy-odd sailors aboard, somehow she and Lowe were now alone on the ship.

“What’s happening?” she whispered, fighting down terror. The silent ship was more than she could process. Nothing else—not the disappearance of Valletta Harbour, nor the nightmarish color of the sea, nor the strange creaking and tinkling sea smoke—was as frightening as the sudden emptiness of the Fate.

Lowe lifted his storm bottle in both hands. Inside, the oily, metallic hard snow was weaving impossible, branching patterns like frost on a window as it climbed the sides of the glass. “I don’t know,” he whispered back. “I don’t know what the bottle means to say.”

“It’s saying something, that’s certain.” Fear would get them nowhere, so Melusine folded hers up and mentally shoved it in a pocket. The cold sea smoke rolled closer. Lowe shuddered. “Go and get yourself a jacket,” Melusine said. “And get Papa’s glass from his desk.”

Lowe nodded once and darted away. While she waited for him to return, Melusine walked the length of the vacant ship and back to the low rise at the stern that passed for a quarterdeck, and as she did, the mist reached the Fate and wrapped everything above the red sea in cold, pale gray. Somewhere out there, the crystalline tinkling was coming closer, too, but not quite at the same rate as the fog. Melusine leaned over the starboard rail and stared out, looking for . . . well, she wasn’t sure what. For something. Anything.

Her brother came scrambling awkwardly up the ladder, with their father’s spyglass under one arm and the homemade storm bottle still clutched in his fist. He had forgotten the jacket. “Papa’s not there,” he said softly. “Where have they all gone?”

Melusine said nothing. Her eyes had picked out a smudge of rose in the fog, something riding above the water and reflecting its scarlet color. She held out a hand, and Lowe put the glass into her palm. She stared through it, following the sound and searching—and there. There it was, and it was a ship. A xebec, she thought. In that case, perhaps they were still somewhere in the Mediterranean. Its hull was red, but everything else, from the gunwales to the tops of the masts, was shadow and shroud. And it carried no lights that Melusine could see, despite the thickness of the fog. She passed the glass to Lowe and pointed.

“A ship?”

“A xebec.” Now she could see it without the glass, with its unusual forward-sloping mast and the strange angle of its bowsprit. And she could hear that the tinkling noise was definitely approaching with the xebec, as if the other ship was parting not water, but shards of ice. And yet she still could see no lights, and she could hear no voices.

She glanced down at Lowe’s storm bottle, which he’d passed her when he’d taken the spyglass. The hard snow lay all over the inside of the glass in patterns like sharp-horned, haloed moons. Wind and rain, the sailors would say to that, if they’d been there. But what would they say about the strange ship? Melusine didn’t really have to wonder. She knew.

Phantom. Ghost ship.

It came closer, and Lowe took the spyglass from his eye. “There’s no one on her deck or in her rigging,” he whispered. “She’s empty as the Fate is.”

Emptier, Melusine thought. Because at least the Fate has Lowe and me.

Her brother fiddled with the end of his pigtail. “Will she ram us?”

“Not unless the wind shifts quite a bit. Not that there’s much we could do if it did.”

“And perhaps she can’t, anyhow,” Lowe said.

“Perhaps.”

They watched the ghostly ship approach, making as if to cross the stern. And then, just as it drew level with the Fate, the xebec drifted to a halt. The cold wind that had brought both it and the sea smoke toward them kept on blowing, but the sails of the xebec hung slack, as if the wind had suddenly discovered how to slide right through the canvas.

As Melusine was trying to work out how any of this was possible, Lowe tugged at her arm again. “Remember you told me once that a ship was meant to have a coin under the mast, so as to be able to pay a pilot if it had to cross a river to enter the courts of the dead?”

“A ferryman to cross the river Styx, yes.”

“Well, what if they haven’t got one?”

Lowe, in his practical little-boy fashion, had somehow moved past the question of whether it was a ghost ship to what they were supposed to do about it now that it was there, drifting just beyond the Fate’s stern. Melusine passed Lowe the storm bottle and took back the spyglass. Somehow looking through it didn’t make the ship appear any larger.

“Well, I don’t know the route to . . . what did you call it? The courts of the dead? I don’t know what we can do about it.”

“If you didn’t have a pilot who knows the channel—a ferryman, if that’s the word—” He looked across the red water at the lightless ship. “You’d need a lamp, at least. To try to see where you were going.”

They glanced at each other. Lowe held the storm bottle up between them. It was glimmering faintly now from within with violet light, the glow slipping out through the gaps in the pattern that had climbed the glass the way candlelight slips out the holes in a punched-tin lantern.

“How would you do it?” Melusine asked, and then, before Lowe could reply, she added, “Because you’re not boarding her. Not for all the world.”

Lowe shook his head. “I have an idea.” And he disappeared down the companionway ladder again. When he came back this time, he had a folding stand under his arm and a firework in one hand. A small rocket, one of the many he made himself and was emphatically not allowed to shoot from the ship any longer.

But those were rules for worlds without red waters and tinkling-crystal sea smoke and ghost ships. “Carry on, then,” Melusine said helplessly.

Lowe lashed the glowing storm bottle to his rocket and set the rocket in the stand. He took a cylinder of homemade matches from his pocket, lit one, and whipped it across the fuse. The spark climbed the cotton line, and a moment later, the rocket burst from the deck of the Fate and shot skyward.

It sailed up and arced over the other ship’s sloping foremast, and then, like a fly caught mid-flight in a spider’s web, it stopped as if trapped at the top of the mainsail. It hovered there for a moment, and then it began to descend: a violet glow moving slowly down the vertical length of the mast. And as the plum-colored light from Lowe’s storm bottle spilled out across the deck, Melusine saw them. She saw the shadows first, and then the men they belonged to: scores of sailors, on the deck and in the rigging, all of them ghostly, and all of them looking across at Melusine and Lowe.

Some bad omens—like, for instance, a whole crew of the dead—weren’t hard to spot. Ordinarily Melusine would’ve reached out instinctively to scratch the nearest bit of rigging, but there was nothing right in reach, so without thinking, she hawked up a mouthful to spit for luck. But before she could do it, Lowe whacked her arm urgently. “Ghosts are afraid of human saliva,” he whispered.

She swallowed. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Everybody knows that,” Lowe hissed. Melusine stared. “Or maybe that’s just back home—back in my mother’s homeland, I mean. But just in case, be polite.”

“I don’t want to be polite.” But just in case he was right—​after all, dead or not, they had a full crew and Melusine didn’t—she raised one hand in a shaky salute.

One by one, the ghostly crew returned the gesture.

“See?” Lowe said, pleased. “And I told you lights coming down the mast were good.”

But the ship didn’t move.

“Why aren’t they going?” Melusine asked after a moment. “They have their light.”

Lowe scratched his head. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they still need a pilot.” He looked meaningfully from Melusine to the Fate’s tiller. “We could lead them.”

“But I can’t do it,” Melusine sputtered. “I don’t know where to go! I can’t steer a ship this size! And anyhow, we have no crew!” But even as she said it, she heard her own thoughts from earlier playing again in her mind: Those were rules for worlds without red seas and tinkling-crystal sea smoke and ghost ships, and to be fair, in this place and at this moment, with only two children aboard, even their own schooner might be considered a ghost ship.

Lowe shrugged. “If they’ve been lost at sea for long, perhaps any harbor will do. What is the saying about harbors and weather?”

“Any port in a storm.” Melusine looked across at the phantom crew, then back at Lowe. “I’ll try.”

She took the tiller in both hands, and to her surprise and endless relief, it felt real. Nothing else in this place, in this moment, was as it should be, but the vibration coming through the tiller, the hum of the Fate itself, felt right. Melusine and the ship that had been her companion for her entire life could still speak to each other—even, apparently, at the boundary between the lands of the living and the dead.

She hauled on the tiller, and miraculously, the Fate answered Melusine’s request, and even without crew to work the sails, she came about and turned her bows toward Valletta, or at least toward the thick bank of sea smoke where, in the other world, Valletta Harbour had been. They sank into the fog.

“Is she with us?” Melusine asked, meaning the xebec. “There’s not much light for them to see us by.”

Lowe, standing at his sister’s side but looking back over their shoulders, nodded. “I think so.”

Melusine never knew how far they sailed, or how long it took. There seemed to be no time and no distance on that foggy red sea. But the xebec, with its glowing violet light, stayed with them the whole way, and the two ships sailed in company for what seemed like hours.

At long last, something changed. It took Melusine a while to figure out what that something was, but at last she realized it was the color of the water. The sea had gone from red to purple, and now it was darkening to a much more ordinary indigo. Something about the sea smoke had changed as well. The breeze was warmer, and it had a familiar tang to it, a scent Melusine’s senses instantly identified as one of the base notes of the odor of any harbor anywhere. Up ahead there were shadows in the murk: the hills, spires, and masts of Valletta Harbour.

“Oh, thank heavens.” Melusine sighed.

Lowe said, “Look.” She turned and followed his pointing finger. The fog was melting away, and with it, the violet glow of the storm bottle in the rigging of the ship behind them was fading too. It dwindled as the final remnants of the cold wind carried the xebec into the harbor. The phantom crew saluted again as they drew abreast of the Fate. Melusine and Lowe stumble-ran forward the entire length of their ship as the xebec sailed on past to vanish into the much more ordinary mist that drifted across the waterfront.

They ran as far forward into the bows as they could, leaning over the gunwales to catch a last glimpse of the red-hulled ghost ship as it swirled into nothingness, a last glimpse of the storm bottle before it vanished. Then they looked at each other as they became aware of sounds on the deck behind them, rising out of the silence: the shouts of sailors and the slapping of bare feet on the floorboards, the flap of sails, and all the ordinary sounds of a ship at anchor in a harbor.

The Fate’s crew, wherever it had gone—well over a hundred souls—had come back, and everyone was going about his task as if nothing strange had happened at all. “Or did we come back?” Melusine murmured, confused.

Lowe, whether thanks to his age or to his ancestry, was much more comfortable with the miraculous and not inclined to waste time discussing matters of the uncanny when there were more pressing things to worry about. “Melusine!” He pointed across the harbor, and from the tremor in his voice, his sister half expected to see the xebec or some other ghostly craft pulling toward them again.

But no, it was only the cutter returning with the cook, the purser, and . . . oh, dear . . . the steward.

“What do we do?” Lowe fretted. “I haven’t time to find more hard snow now.”

“We?” Melusine shook her head decisively. “Lowe, I’ll follow you to a ghost ship and back, but as far as telling Garvett his storm bottle’s gone, you’re positively on your own.”

INTERLUDE

Captain Frost harrumphed, blushing a bit through the applause that followed his tale, then turned his half-hour glass and hurried out of the parlor. Masseter, thoughtful, made as if to follow him, then seemed to remember the captain would be going out into the rain, and instead went to refill his glass.