The wall hit them broadside.
It wasn’t wind and it wasn’t water.
It was both, fused into one white, screaming mass that came across the deck at the height of a man’s chest and kept coming.
Kofi felt it hit the hull before it hit him.
The whole ship lurched sideways like a struck animal.
Then the water was on him, warm as blood, and full of rain, and it tore his feet off the deck.
The rope around his waist snapped tight.
It nearly cut him in half.
He hung from it with his hands still locked on the wheel, the sea pouring past him, and the Morning Star went over.
She went over and over.
The deck tilted until it was a wall.
Kofi saw the mainmast lean down toward the sea, sails flogging, and saw the black water rise up to meet it, and thought, This is it.
This is where she rolls.
Beside him, Titus roared something with no words in it and threw his whole weight against the wheel.
Kofi threw his with him.
The rudder bit.
The bow swung.
The ship hung there on her side for one long, sick moment, water pouring over her lee rail, every timber in her groaning at once.
Then she came back up.
Slowly.
Shuddering.
Shaking the sea off her deck in great sheets.
She came upright and lurched the other way and settled, wallowing, her bow pointed downwind.
Kofi gasped.
Salt water poured out of his nose.
“Hold her there!” he screamed.
He could barely hear himself.
“Keep her stern to it! Don’t let her come broadside again!”
Titus didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
He had his shoulder against the spoke and his feet braced against the binnacle, and his face in the white glare of the lightning was a mask of pure stubbornness.
The lightning.
Kofi saw it now.
It came in sheets, not bolts, lighting the whole world at once in a flat, dead white.
In each flash he saw the sea.
He wished he hadn’t.
The waves had stopped being waves.
They were hills.
Moving black hills with white crests torn off their tops by the wind and flung sideways in sheets.
They came up behind the Morning Star out of the dark, taller than her mainmast, and lifted her stern so high that the bow pointed straight down into the trough.
Then the ship ran down the face of the wave like a sled down a slope, faster and faster.
And then the crest broke over the stern and buried them.
Again.
And again.
And again.
“Lead!” Theo’s voice came from forward, thin through the shriek of the wind.
“Eight fathom! Sand and shell!”
Kofi turned his head.
In the next flash, he saw Theo at the bow rail, lashed by the waist, swinging the lead line out ahead of the ship into the boiling water.
His hat was gone.
His hair streamed sideways.
He hauled the line in hand over hand, reading the marks by feel in the dark.
“Seven fathom! Shoaling!”
The banks.
They were coming onto the banks.
Shallow water, where the great seas would break and lose their height.
Where the ship could ride easier.
Or where she could strike bottom in a trough and break her back.
“Six! Sand!”
“How far?” Kofi screamed.
“I don’t know! I can’t see anything! I’m reckoning from where we were at sundown!” Theo hurled the lead out again.
“Six! Still six! Bear away! Two points to larboard!”
Kofi didn’t question him.
He and Titus hauled the wheel over together.
“Five and a half!”
The ship ran down the face of another wave.
At the bottom of the trough, she didn’t climb the next one.
She hesitated, shuddering, and something under the keel thumped.
Every soul on deck felt it.
“Theo!”
“I know! I KNOW! Hard over! Larboard!”
They hauled.
The bow swung.
The next wave lifted them.
When they came down again, nothing struck.
“Six fathom!” Theo was laughing.
A high, cracked, half-mad laugh that came across the deck in snatches.
“Seven! Seven, you beautiful ugly mud! Seven!”
Titus turned his head toward Kofi.
Water poured off his face.
“Does he always laugh like that when he’s terrified?”
“Yes.”
“Good to know.”
In the hold, Clementine had stopped being afraid twenty minutes ago.
She didn’t have the room for it.
They were all down there.
Ezinne with the children wrapped in blankets and tied to the stanchions so they wouldn’t be thrown across the hold.
Toby, still weak, braced against the mainmast’s heel with Obi wedged against his chest.
Bess on her knees in two inches of filthy water, bailing with a bucket, bailing, bailing.
The hens screaming in their crate.
Ration the goat bleating on and on.
And the ship.
Clementine could hear the ship.
Not with her ears.
With something else.
She’d felt it first when she put her palm flat on the deck planking to steady herself.
The wood under her hand had been talking.
Not words.
A long, low, straining moan, like an old woman lifting something too heavy.
Every board.
Every rib.
Every knee and beam.
It was wood.
It had been trees once.
And she was Gran Bwa’s now.
She knelt in the black water with her staff across her lap and laid both hands flat against the hull planking and closed her eyes.
She felt the whole ship around her.
Felt where the wood was holding and where it was screaming.
There.
Forward.
Low on the larboard side.
A plank, sprung.
Water was coming through the seam in a thin, hard jet.
And there.
Aft.
A rib.
Thick.
Strong.
Doubled with a second timber fixed alongside it.
Taking more strain than anything else in the ship.
Groaning.
But holding.
Somebody had built that rib to hold.
Kofi came down the ladder in a waterfall.
He’d given the wheel to Titus and Mary together.
He’d felt the change in the hull through the soles of his feet, a new shudder low in the bow, and he knew what it was before he reached the bottom of the ladder.
The hold was a black, swaying cave full of water and screaming animals and the stink of bilge.
Lantern light swung wildly from a hook.
In it, he saw Bess bailing, saw Toby holding Obi, saw Ezinne’s white face.
Saw Clementine on her knees with her hands on the hull.
“The bow,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“Larboard. Low.”
“I know.”
He went forward on his hands and knees.
The water was waist deep there.
The jet was coming through a seam between two planks, hard as a fist, black and cold.
He put his palm against it.
The force of it nearly broke his wrist.
He knew this plank.
He’d laid it.
Sixty-seven years ago and three months ago.
He knew how it was fastened, where the treenails sat, how far the frames on either side were spaced.
He’d never seen it fail in his first life.
The Deliverance had never been in a storm like this one, not her first season.
But he knew where every plank would go if the strain got bad enough.
“Bess! The spare timber. The oak!”
Bess dropped her bucket and ran.
She came back dragging a short length of thick oak plank and a mallet.
Kofi braced the oak across the sprung seam, over the jet of water, and hammered a wedge in behind it with three hard strokes.
The jet slowed.
It didn’t stop.
“It won’t hold,” he gasped.
“The frame’s working. Every time she rolls, it’ll spring again.”
Clementine was beside him.
He hadn’t heard her come.
She knelt in the black water and laid her staff flat against the oak and the planks around it.
“Oka-rima.”
Her voice was low and calm.
Under Kofi’s hands, the wood moved.
Not the oak.
The hull planks.
The dead, sawn, tarred planks of the ship’s side.
Something stirred inside them.
Something long asleep.
He felt it through his palms, the faintest quiver of life, as though the trees they’d been cut from had, for just a moment, remembered being trees.
From the seam between the planks, thin pale tendrils crept out.
Roots.
Fine as hair at first, then thicker.
They wove across the gap.
Over the oak.
Into the grain on either side.
They spread like veins and knotted themselves tight.
The water stopped.
Kofi stared at it.
Clementine took her hand off the staff.
She swayed.
He caught her elbow.
She was breathing hard, and her face in the swinging lantern light had gone grey.
“How long will it hold?”
“Till morning.” She pulled the little knife from her apron, cut the pad of her thumb, and pressed a bead of blood against the nearest root.
“For what I took,” she whispered.
“For what I took.”
She was shaking.
Kofi looked aft, down the length of the black hold, to the rib she’d felt.
The doubled one.
He waded back to it.
The water sucked at his legs.
He reached the rib and laid both hands on it.
It groaned under his palms.
Deep, straining.
Every wave that lifted the stern drove a long shudder through it.
But it held.
He knew this rib.
In his first life, the Deliverance had come limping home into Brook’s Reach after her third voyage with her hull half open.
A storm off the Main.
This exact rib had split along the grain, right where the knots had been clustered too close, and taken three planks with it.
Forty people in the hold below it had drowned before the crew could pump her out.
He’d rebuilt that rib with his own hands after.
He’d stood in the bilge water, holding the broken halves, and seen the knots.
Three months ago, in this life, on his first morning back, he’d crouched in the shipyard with Thorne watching him and pointed at those knots.
Weak point.
Double planking, here to here.
He’d fastened the second timber himself.
He ran his hand along it in the dark.
Down near the bottom, where nobody would ever look, his fingers found a shape cut into the wood.
Small.
Smooth-edged.
A bird with its head turned back over its own shoulder.
He’d carved it the day he fastened the timber.
Without thinking.
The way he’d carved one into every ship he’d ever built, hidden where only he would know.
The old people on the row had called it Sankofa.
It’s not wrong to go back for what you forgot.
The rib groaned again.
And held.
Kofi pressed his forehead against the wet wood and closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
He heard them at the top of the ladder.
He’d come up out of the hold into the screaming dark, and he was reaching for the rope at the mainmast to clip himself on, when the sound reached him.
It came under the wind.
Under the roar of the sea.
Under the thunder.
Voices.
Hundreds of voices.
They came out of the south, out of the black, on the wind.
Crying.
Not words at first.
Just the sound people make when they’ve been in the dark too long and the water is coming up.
Then words, in languages he didn’t know, and a few he did.
Calling.
Calling for mothers.
Calling for help.
Calling for home.
He stood frozen at the mast with the rope in his hand and the rain beating his face.
They were drowning.
Right now.
Tonight.
Two hundred people chained in the hold of a ship at anchor in Savanna-la-Mar, on the far side of Jamaica, a hundred miles away across this same storm.
The water was coming up through the hatches.
Nobody was coming to unlock the chains.
In his first life, he’d heard sailors tell it as a ghost story.
Now he was hearing it happen.
And they weren’t stopping.
The voices weren’t falling silent.
They were moving.
Coming.
He could feel them, the way he’d felt the drowned in the graveyard.
Coming up out of the drowned ship and out into the sea and across the water, toward the only thing in all that dark that could hear them.
Toward him.
Never refuse a soul that asks to be carried home.
His hand went to the skull on his cane.
Titus saw him go to the rail.
Titus had the wheel with Mary.
His arms were screaming.
His whole body was one long ache of holding the ship stern-to while the sea tried to slew her round.
In the flash of the lightning he saw Kofi come up out of the hatch, saw him stop at the mainmast, saw his face.
Then saw him walk, slowly, across the heaving deck to the larboard rail.
He clipped his rope to the rail.
He drew the cane-sword.
Fog came off the blade.
That wasn’t possible.
Titus stared at it.
The wind was screaming across the deck hard enough to tear the skin off a man’s face.
It should have ripped any fog to shreds before it left the steel.
Instead it poured.
Thick, grey, cold.
It flowed off the dark blade and down over the rail and onto the water as if the wind didn’t touch it at all.
And Kofi began to talk.
Titus couldn’t hear the words.
He could only see Kofi’s lips moving.
See him nod.
See him turn his head, slowly, from one side to the other, as if he were looking at faces.
Many faces.
Standing all around him on the water.
In the rain.
In the dark.
There was nobody there.
“Mary,” Titus said hoarsely.
“I see him.”
“What is he doing?”
Mary didn’t answer.
She was staring at Kofi.
Her eyes had gone wet and bright, the way they did when she was using her spirit.
And whatever she saw on that rail made her face go white.
They came one at a time.
That was the worst of it.
Kofi had thought, in some small, frightened corner of himself, that it might be quick.
That he might raise the blade and say go home and they would all go at once, two hundred of them, with one great sigh, and be done.
It didn’t work like that.
They came up out of the water one at a time.
A man first.
Tall.
Gaunt.
Chain on his ankle.
He stood on the black water just past the rail, water pouring off him, and looked at Kofi with eyes that had stopped being afraid.
Home, he said.
Kofi felt it more than heard it.
Please.
Kofi raised the blade.
“Go home,” he whispered.
“You can go now.”
The man sighed.
The sound went through Kofi’s whole body.
Like something reaching into his chest and pulling a thread out of him, long and thin, and taking it away.
The man was gone.
Behind him, another.
A woman.
A baby in her arms.
Home.
“Go home.”
The sigh.
The thread.
Gone.
Another.
And another.
And another.
A boy younger than Obi.
An old man with a tribal mark cut into his cheeks.
Two women holding hands.
A man who looked like Titus, broad and scarred, who stopped in front of Kofi and stared at him a long time before he said the word.
“Go home,” Kofi said.
“Go home. You can go home.”
The thread pulled out of him.
And out.
And out.
By the fiftieth, he was on his knees.
By the eightieth, the rain on his face had gone warm, and he realized his nose was bleeding.
By the hundredth, he couldn’t feel his hands.
They kept coming.
They kept asking.
And every time one stood in front of him and said the word, his Law said the same thing back.
Never refuse.
He didn’t refuse.
The cold was in him now.
Not the cold of the fog.
Something worse.
The cold of the far side.
Every time he sent one home, it was as if he walked a step behind them toward the water.
Toward the line.
He could feel it under him.
The Kalunga.
The border.
Dark and wide and patient.
On the hundred and twentieth, he felt himself start to go across with them.
He didn’t stop.
He couldn’t.
Another face rose up out of the black.
A girl.
Fourteen, maybe.
She tilted her head.
It wasn’t Sabina.
But she tilted her head the same way.
“Go home,” Kofi whispered.
His voice was almost gone.
“You can—”
A hand closed on the back of his collar.
Hard.
Warm.
Alive.
“Not you,” Anne said in his ear.
“You don’t get to go with them, Captain.”
She’d seen them.
Anne had been forward at the storm sail with Theo when the fog came pouring off the rail, and something had made her turn.
And her eyes had gone grey on their own, without her asking, the way they did when there was death close by.
And she’d seen.
The water around the Morning Star was full of people.
Standing on it.
Hundreds of them.
Grey and thin and dripping, with iron on their ankles, waiting in a long, long line that stretched away into the dark toward the south.
Each one coming to the rail.
Each one stopping in front of Kofi.
Each one going.
And Kofi kneeling there, sending them.
One.
And one.
And one.
And with every one, a little more of him going too.
She’d seen the grey creeping into him.
Into his hands.
His face.
She’d seen him start to fade at the edges, the way the dying fade, the way Nell had faded on the mat in the terrace house before Anne got her hands on her.
She’d crossed the deck in five strides, the storm trying to rip her off her feet, and grabbed him.
Now she knelt behind him with her fist knotted in his collar and her other hand flat against his chest, over his heart, the way she’d held Nell.
She felt the cold coming off him.
Grave cold.
She held on.
“Vos-mari, kel tenebra,” she said through her teeth.
“Tenebra kel mari. Sta. Sta.”
Frost crept across the wet deck from under her knees.
It shouldn’t have been able to, not in this rain.
It did anyway.
“Keep going,” she said in his ear.
“Send them. I’ve got you. You do them, I’ll do you.”
Kofi didn’t answer.
He couldn’t.
But he raised the blade again.
“Go home,” he whispered to the girl who tilted her head.
She sighed, and was gone.
And this time, when the thread pulled out of him, something pulled back.
Anne’s hand on his chest.
Warm.
Stubborn.
Holding the door from the other side.
Yaw had seen it too.
Not the dead.
He couldn’t see the dead.
But he’d seen Anne cross the deck and drop to her knees behind Kofi, and he’d seen the fog, and the frost, and he’d seen Kofi’s face in the lightning.
He came along the lifeline hand over hand, the yellow dog plastered against his legs.
He reached the rail and dropped down beside them and put his hand on Kofi’s shoulder.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t know what to say.
He just stayed there.
Then Clementine came up out of the hatch, grey-faced and soaked, with her staff.
She crawled across the deck to them on her hands and knees and knelt on Kofi’s other side, and put her palm flat on his back.
“Oka-rima,” she breathed.
“Oka-rima.”
Something green and warm crept into the cold.
Mary had left Titus at the wheel alone.
She came last.
She knelt beside her sister and didn’t touch Kofi at all.
She just watched his face, eyes wet and bright, reading something none of the rest of them could see.
“How many?” Titus shouted from the wheel.
His voice was raw.
“How many are there?”
Mary looked down the long grey line stretching away across the water into the dark.
“Too many,” she said.
“And not enough. And he’s going to carry every single one.”
On the far side of the same storm, a hundred and fifty miles to the north, the Vigilant was dying.
Bell stood lashed to the quarterdeck rail with water to his waist and watched her die and did not move.
His hat was gone.
His coat was torn half off his back.
Rain hit him so hard it felt like gravel.
They’d lost the mizzen an hour ago.
It had gone over the side with a crack like a broadside, taking half the rigging and two men with it.
The main topmast had followed.
Now the frigate wallowed through seas higher than her masthead under a single scrap of canvas, rolling so far on every wave that her lee guns went under. This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
Behind her, the two sloops had been running in her wake, their stern lanterns bobbing.
Bell watched the starboard one.
He watched her climb a wave.
The lantern rose up, and up, and up, against the black.
Hung at the crest.
Then tilted.
Slowly.
Too far.
The lantern swung down, and around, and went out.
The wave rolled on.
When the next flash of lightning came, there was no sloop behind the Vigilant.
Just one.
Alone.
Running low and black through the boiling sea.
Twenty men.
Half the chain.
Gone.
Sterling Brook was wedged in the lee of the binnacle, his good arm wrapped around a stanchion, his face a white smear in the dark.
He was screaming something.
Bell couldn’t hear it and didn’t try.
Cross came along the lifeline hand over hand.
He reached Bell and grabbed the rail beside him.
His face was wild.
“Captain! The St. Andrew! She’s gone! Captain, she’s—”
“I saw.”
“We have to run for shelter! The pressed men are talking about cutting loose a boat. The bosun says we’ll lose the main next if we—”
“We hold our course.”
Cross stared at him.
Bell’s eyes were on the dark ahead of the bow.
His hand had gone, without his deciding it, to the front of his torn coat.
Under the wet cloth, against his chest, hung the tally ring.
He could feel it pulling.
Faint.
Steady.
North.
The storm couldn’t stop that.
The storm couldn’t stop anything that mattered.
“We hold our course, Mr. Cross,” he said.
“And when this blows out, we will be closer to him than we have ever been.”
The storm broke a little before dawn.
It didn’t stop.
It eased.
The roar dropped to a howl.
The howl dropped to a moan.
The rain thinned.
The great black hills of water shrank, slowly, to ordinary grey swells, still huge, still breaking white at their tops, but swells a ship could climb.
The first light came up grey and colorless over a flattened sea.
The Morning Star rode it with her decks swept bare.
No hen crate.
No water casks on deck.
Half her rail gone.
The storm sail hung in ribbons.
Her soil boxes had been battered flat under their sailcloth, and seawater stood in them in brown puddles.
But she was afloat.
Every soul aboard her was alive.
And on the larboard side, by the rail, five people sat in a heap on the wet planks.
Kofi lay with his head in Anne’s lap.
His eyes were closed.
His face was grey, and dried blood crusted his upper lip and chin.
The cane-sword lay on the deck beside him, the blade sheathed, the bone skull grinning up at the sky.
Clementine sat against the rail with her staff across her knees, asleep sitting up, leaves all through her hair.
Yaw lay stretched on the deck with his hand still on Kofi’s shoulder and the yellow dog curled on his chest.
Mary sat a little apart, knees drawn up, staring out at the empty sea where the long grey line had been.
It was gone now.
All of them.
Two hundred and eleven.
She’d counted.
Anne looked down at Kofi’s face in her lap.
Her hand was still on his chest.
His heart beat under her palm, slow and steady and warm.
“Stubborn,” she murmured.
“Stubborn, stupid, lovely man.”
Then she looked up and saw that Titus was standing over them.
He’d left the wheel to Theo.
He stood on the wet deck with his feet planted wide and his arms hanging at his sides, looking down at Kofi.
His face was unreadable.
Behind him, the rest of the crew had begun to come up out of the hold.
Bess.
Toby, leaning on Ezinne.
Obi.
The children, blinking at the grey light.
They stopped in a loose cluster around the hatch.
Nobody spoke.
Kofi opened his eyes.
He looked up at Titus.
It took him a moment to focus.
“Is she whole?” he croaked.
“She’s whole.” Titus’s voice was rough.
“Lost the rail. Lost the casks on deck. Garden’s half drowned. Theo says we’re somewhere east of the banks, and he’ll know where when he gets a sun sight.” He paused.
“Everybody’s alive.”
Kofi closed his eyes again.
Breathed.
“Good.”
“You were right.”
Kofi opened his eyes.
“You were right,” Titus said again.
“About the storm. About the night. About the course. If we’d held for Cat Island, we’d be on the bottom.” He swallowed.
“Theo said so. He said if we’d been in open water when that wall came, nothing would’ve saved us.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” Titus’s jaw tightened.
“That’s the trouble, Kofi. You knew. You knew the day and the hour and the direction of a storm nobody alive could know. And then you went and stood at that rail in the middle of it, with a dead man’s blade, talking to people who weren’t there. For hours. Till your nose bled and you went grey and Anne had to hold on to you like you were dying.”
The deck had gone very quiet.
“I watched it,” Titus said.
“I watched the whole thing from the wheel. And I don’t know what I watched.” His voice dropped.
“I don’t know what you are.”
Kofi pushed himself up on one elbow.
Anne’s hand slid off his chest.
He looked at Titus.
At the faces behind him.
Theo at the wheel, watching.
Toby.
Bess.
Ezinne with her arms around Obi.
All waiting.
“There was a ship,” he said hoarsely.
“At Savanna-la-Mar. A Guinea ship. At anchor. Two hundred people in her hold, in chains.” He swallowed.
“She went down in the storm. Last night. Nobody unlocked the hatches.”
Ezinne’s hand went to her mouth.
“They drowned,” Kofi said.
“And they came looking for someone to take them home. And I’m the only one who could hear them. So I did.” He looked down at the cane.
“That’s what I was doing. That’s all.”
“How do you know about a ship at Savanna-la-Mar?” Titus asked quietly.
“We were a hundred miles from Savanna-la-Mar.”
Kofi didn’t say anything.
“How did you know the storm?”
Nothing.
“Kofi.”
“I can’t,” Kofi said.
“Titus. I can’t. Not yet.”
Titus looked at him for a long, long time.
Then he looked at Yaw, lying on the deck with his hand still on Kofi’s shoulder.
Yaw met his eyes and didn’t look away.
And something passed across Titus’s face, something sharp and painful, as he understood.
“He knows,” Titus said.
Not a question.
Yaw didn’t deny it.
Titus nodded slowly.
He looked down at the deck.
At the frost that hadn’t quite melted where Anne had knelt.
At the blood on Kofi’s face.
“You carried two hundred people home last night,” he said.
“I watched you nearly die doing it.” His voice cracked.
“And I still don’t know who you are.”
He turned and walked away to the bow.
Nobody followed him.
Nobody knew what to say.
At the wheel, Theo stood with both hands on the spokes, staring out at the grey sea.
He hadn’t joked once since midnight.
He didn’t joke now.
When Kofi finally looked up at him, Theo met his eyes for a moment.
Then he looked away and checked the compass and corrected the helm half a point, carefully, as though it were the most important thing in the world.
They patched what they could that day and sailed the rest of it.
Toby lit the galley fire as soon as the swell let him and made a pot of rice and salt fish and put it in front of everyone and stood over them till they ate it.
Bess counted the casks they had left below and went silent and white and counted them again.
Nell knelt over the drowned soil boxes and lifted the sailcloth off one corner at a time, and found the ginger shoot still standing, bent but alive, and cried with her face pressed against the wet wood.
Cato found two of the hens alive in the hold.
The third was gone.
He didn’t talk about it.
Clementine slept most of the morning.
When she woke, she went straight to the bow, knelt by the larboard planks, and laid her hand on the roots she’d grown through the seam.
They were brown now, and withering.
But they’d held.
Theo got his noon sight.
He worked his figures in silence on the hatch cover with a stub of pencil, then went to Kofi with the chart.
“We’re here.” His finger tapped a spot east of the banks.
“Cat Island’s here. With this wind, we’ll raise her tomorrow by evening.” He paused.
“If your storm doesn’t have a brother.”
“It doesn’t.”
Theo looked at him a moment.
He opened his mouth, as if to ask how do you know.
Then he closed it again and rolled up the chart and walked away.
Kofi sat on the hatch cover by himself for a long time afterward with the cane across his knees.
Yaw sat down beside him.
The yellow dog put its head on Kofi’s boot.
“He’ll come around,” Yaw said quietly.
“Which one?”
“Both of them.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” Yaw scratched the dog behind its floppy ear.
“But I know them.”
They sat together without speaking while the sun went down red behind the battered ship.
A clean red, this time.
A good one.
They raised Cat Island the next evening, as Theo had said.
The long gray line of it came up out of the sea in the late afternoon, the cliffs on its eastern side catching the low sun.
As they drew closer, Kofi stood at the rail and watched for the fog.
Every time they’d come to this place, it had been waiting.
Phibba’s fog, low on the water off the cliffs, hiding the cave.
The sign that the old woman was watching.
That she knew they were coming.
That the Hollow was safe.
There was no fog.
The cliffs stood bare and gold in the evening light.
The sea at their feet was clear and blue and empty.
The black mouth of the sea cave showed plainly at the waterline, the swell sucking in and out of it.
Kofi felt the back of his neck go cold.
“Where’s the fog?” Ezinne said quietly beside him.
Nobody answered.
They came in close under the cliffs as the sun went down.
The tide was dropping.
Soon it would be low enough to take the ship in.
They hove to off the cave mouth and waited.
And listened.
Every night, every single night since Phibba had first brought them here, they’d heard it.
Faint.
Far off.
Coming up out of the rock, out of the cave, out of the heart of the island.
A slow, steady heartbeat.
Pa Cudjoe’s drum, under his breadfruit tree, beating so the old man below would know they were still there.
The sun set.
The light went from gold to grey to blue.
Kofi stood at the rail with his hand on the skull of his cane and listened with everything he had.
The sea hissed in and out of the cave mouth.
A gull cried somewhere on the cliffs.
The wind moved in the rigging.
That was all.
No drum.
The Hollow was silent.