“Yes. Cheers.” We both take a drink, which I regret immediately. The liquor—it’s got to be liquor—is warm and has a chewiness that liquid shouldn’t have. I swallow hard, trying to suppress a cough. “God, that’s awful.”
“I know.” Saad peers down into his glass. “I think it’s supposed to be beer.”
“You think?” I repeat. We could have just drunk furniture polish. Based on the taste, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
He frowns at the bottle, like a label might appear if he only looks hard enough. “We don’t allow hard liquors on the Dey.”
“Why?”
“I’m Muslim—most of our sailors are. We’re not supposed to drink spirits.”
“But do you?”
Saad raises his mug for another sip, catches a whiff of the rancid beer, then seems to think better of it. “No. I can’t stomach them. If I had my choice, I’d drink sugar cane juice. Don’t tell anyone that.” He dumps the contents of his mug over the side of the boat. “It’s childish.”
“Well, you’re not exactly . . .” I scratch the back of my neck, something I must have been doing more than I realized, for I find the skin there already raw. “You’re not that old yet.”
Saad glowers out at the ocean, like age is a personal failing he’s been trying to correct. “No one ever misses an opportunity to remind me. ‘You’re so little!’ ‘You’re such a baby!’ ‘So much responsibility for someone so young!’ It’s condescending shite. I’ll wager no one told Usama ibn Zayd he was too young to lead an army for the Prophet, and he was only ten and eight when he did.” He tosses his empty mug into our swab bucket, and it clangs like a bell. “It’s not as though I don’t realize it,” he mutters. “I know I wasn’t the first choice.”
“First choice for what?”
“To take over the fleet. Sim was my father’s favorite. She always was. But after she and your sister mucked things up, he couldn’t make her commodore.”
I wedge my finger under a bubble of lacquer on the rail, sticky and taut. “Is it just the two of you?”
“No, I’ve got a whole handful of half brothers. They’re all older than Sim, even. But they have their own lives. None of them wanted anything to do with the Crown and Cleaver. One of them is married to a Moroccan princess. I’d take that over trying to run a struggling fleet. Maybe there were always problems. It just feels as though I’ve made everything worse.” He scrunches up his nose, then says, “If you tell anyone any of this, I’ll kill you.”
“Who would I tell?” My already shredded nail cracks again, and I bite the ragged edge. A tiny bead of blood rises up from under it. “If you could see your own death, would you want to?”
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. “Wouldn’t anyone? Wouldn’t you?”
His certainty disarms me, and maybe he’s right. God, wouldn’t it be nice? To know that nothing else could touch you. To know what was worth the fear. I wonder again whether, when my mother caught a glimpse through the spyglass before it broke, she saw herself stepping off that cliff in Scotland into the sea. Or maybe it had cracked before she could get a look and that was what had driven her deeper and deeper, that almost knowing. That half an answer always in her pocket.
Or what if she looked through it and saw something else? Was it inevitable if, instead of rolling the loaded dice fate offered you, you simply stood up and walked away from the table?
Saad clasps his hands and leans hard against the rail on his elbows, arching his back. “You’d never have to be afraid again. You’d never hesitate. If you don’t fear death, you fear nothing.”
I wasn’t sure I believed that.
“My father was fearless,” he continues. “He never met a foe who didn’t blink first. He should have died a thousand times, but nothing could kill him.”
“What did?” I ask.
Saad frowns. “He was old. His body stopped working.”
It’s the kind of thing you tell a child to try and explain death, and he sounds so young when he says it.
“I wish he could see it,” he says. “Me, strutting into Rabat after Sim has tried to turn all our men against me with a debt owed me by the Dutchman. I wish . . .” He stops and runs a hand over his chin. “I wish I had known the last time I spoke to him that it was the end. I would have asked him so much. Sometimes I don’t think I want him back so much as I just want one more day with him to ask him what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to be.”
I stare out at the sea, the waves foaming bone white against the black sky.
Maybe it’s not my own death I would want to see through the spyglass. Maybe it’s everyone else’s. The fear of losing someone else the way I lost my mother, sudden and unexpected. Tell me what the last day together will be. Tell me, so I know to write everything down. So I won’t spend years at sea without a heading, staring through a spyglass, praying for a shore.
“We only have one chance,” Saad says suddenly, “to catch the Dutchman. Then . . .” He raises his closed fist and then opens it, like a sudden puff of smoke.
I look down into my mug, consider another drink no matter how foul, but instead, I toss it out to sea. “Better make it count.”
Iceland
29
Saad and I arrive in Iceland in the early hours of the morning, though the light is bright as noon. The butter-yellow sky rattles my senses—I can’t make myself believe it truly is night, no matter how many times I’m told so. There are three days to the solstice, and this far north, the sun never sets. All the while we’ll be here, there will likely be no darkness at all.
We dock in less of a town and more of a bishopric, with several churches and farms, a small main street, and a water mill in the distance. The city is populated mostly by Danes, with some Dutchmen and Germans and a crew of English fishermen drinking and talking loudly at a bar we pass, mixed in with the native Icelanders.
I’ve already scraped my palms raw with my fingernails, the movement anxious and unconscious, and there’s blood beneath my fingernails from it.
It’s going to be over soon, I keep telling myself. There is an end to this. There is an end in sight. The light-soaked days are coming. Just look at all this sun.
Three days and then . . . what? I wake up a new man, with new habits and new ways of thinking? I return to England and everyone finds me changed and assertive and calm and not strange? I walk straight from the harbor to the House of Lords, where I read my pamphlet myself in a loud, clear voice and do not fear the judgment of my peers? I cannot imagine my life without this constant, battering tide. I’ve spent my whole life building up fortifications against it, and suddenly I wonder who I’ll be without it.
Someone who does not cover himself with leeches. Someone who does not sweat and stammer and struggle to look people in the eyes. Someone who can sit down and eat a meal without his ability to digest it reliant upon his mood. Someone who doesn’t look off the edge of a sea cliff and think, What would happen if I just stepped off?