Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 15

CHAPTER VI

"So Anjy," Santvoort said as they followed the escort to their new lodging which stood apart from the barrack-like group of houses under the walls. "So ... we are his Lordship's guests."

It was the escort who answered. "Yes," he said. "I no longer attend you; but I will come from time to time to see that you want for nothing."

"And what are we to do?" asked Santvoort.

"What you will," said the other. "You may not open doors. But all doors already open you may enter, with welcome. And those who wait upon you you may command to do your bidding; for they are not soldiers but servants."

He left them at their new lodging's door.

They inspected their house, seeing the tub of water which would be hot from coals in a cylinder in the middle of it whenever they should be minded to take a bath. They saw a man stooping busy over pots and pans on the kitchen hearth, one who smiled and indicated that whenever they should clap their hands together he would come. In the cupboards of the centre room they found cotton drawers and tunics, straw-hats, paper napkins and sleeping coverlets.

"It looks," said Santvoort, "as though they expect us to stay." From the door they could see a battlemented wall and a postern manned by an armed sentry.

Adams considered the landscape; it was the pale ochre of bare trampled earth in the courtyard, the warm grey of the wall and its shadow, toothed into the sky with tufts of herbage; and above it the empty distance of the sky.

"Yes," said he. "But there are steps up the side of that wall, Melchior."

"Are you minded to run away then?" asked the Dutchman. "For me it is sleep. Hours and hours and nights and days of sleep since we are not to be crossed, as per the padre. Does the thought not make you sleepy, too, instead of looking for ways to climb through or over a wall a mile thick and a league high?"

"Aye, it makes me sleepy. And there is no running away. But I could make an observation from that wall-top these nights while the sky is good. If I had seen the cross-staff with the Emperor I would have asked him for it."

"When he had given us our lives," said Santvoort, "you would have asked him for your cross-staff?"

Adams shrugged his shoulders. "I do not think he ever had a serious mind to kill us. He is no slaughterer of men. He had no cause."

"Cause! He had the padre's word and the evidence of those two bastards that we are thieves and enemies."

"He had our evidence that they are rogues and liars. Yes, I would have asked him for the cross-staff to make my observations. I'll ask him yet. It may come to him as the other things came—God knows how. And I'll ask him if he has my almanac. I'll ask our little talker. He is a fair man."

"Fair!" said Santvoort smiling. "Fair indeed he is. Every man is fair who did not set us upon those crosses."

Adams said, "I was confident all the time that they were not for us."

"Oh, you-" Santvoort snorted. "Confident! It is easy to talk now when you have had the Emperor's word; and set yourself up. Confident—but you were confident that you could sail the world, and bring a ship round it to Japan!"

"And, by God!" Adams exclaimed, staring at the fellow incredulously, "didn't I?"

"Yes—you did indeed——" Santvoort laughed. "Was it you, Will, that brought us? Or was it the sea and the winds and the tides that shook us and drove us and dismasted us and drifted us into an ants' nest of fishermen and gibbering monkeys who towed us into a harbour? It was you, I suppose, who spared us our lives too?"

Adams consigned him to hell and again consigned him to hell. "Aye, to hell! and to sleep!" He strutted off with what dignity he could in the unfamiliar straw sandals, and paced about the courtyard in a fume, cursing the Dutchman for the kind of stupidity that so well suited the squareness of his cropped head and the way his large ears were adjusted to it— at an angle of some seventy degrees.

In his fuming and mumbling to himself in his own tongue it did not occur to him as any particularly worthy or tremendous achievement that he had brought the boat to Japan. But it was a fact so self-evident that the denial of it by anyone was enough to make anyone else, who was not a fool, angry. And Santvoort's impudent questioning of the other fact set him mumbling with the same indignation; for it, too, was one of the patently self-evident kind. If Adams had not got them off with their lives, who—or what—had? Santvoort himself— perhaps and indeed! Santvoort standing inert and stupid like a sack of damp powder that might—or might not—blow up! Then he remembered how the oaf had jibed at him, too, for his contention that the other Dutchman, Lintschoten, had done peculiar and fantastic things to the position of Japan on his charts.

This, at any rate, he knew he would be able to make quite clear even to Santvoort. An Emperor who had been able to get globes and charts and some books out of the rabble that had filched them from the boat would, by the same powerful and mysterious means, be able to get the other books, the cross-staff, the astrolabe and ship's compass. Or, given enough time and a length or two of marlin and some straight laths of wood and a knife, he himself would make a cross-staff sufficient for his purpose. . . . And if that would not get facts into the thick head of the (now, no doubt, snoring) Hollander, nothing would.

That was the way things went between them for some days, now that the weight of apprehensiveness was lifted from their minds, and their bodies were growing sound again.

Adams tried and tried again to draw fire from the drowsy Dutchman, to rouse him to the point of having the matter properly out; but Santvoort's fire was not to be drawn. The fellow merely smiled at Adams with a smile that was an irritating grin, enjoying some joke so private and of such a kind that Adams was sure he would continue to nurse it to himself and to enjoy it even when there should be evidence to prove him a pig-head and a fool.

So he consigned him to hell again, joke and all, in English and in growling Dutch and in Portuguese. He left him behind —excommunicating him from his thoughts even when he persisted in putting on sandals and straw hat and accompanying him—and went about the courtyards of the inner castle and the barracks, looking vaguely about him for the materials out of which he could make the cross-staff. In the end, the volume of conversation he addressed to the boy who attended them resulted in a visit from their interpreter. Adams wanted to see the Emperor again to ask for his books and instruments. The Emperor, said the soldier, had other and pressing affairs at the moment; but he should have his audience as soon as possible. In the meantime he thought he could provide the lengths of wood that Adams sought, with the line and knives he wanted for fashioning his cross-staff.

The boy brought them next morning, and Santvoort thriftily took the two small ends that Adams cut off from the smoothly planed battens. This action, and the Dutchman's apparently aimless whittling at them, were faintly irritating to the more purposeful Adams. He took the one batten through which he was carving a mortice to slide upon the staff, and went out of the room to do his work at peace in the shade outside.

When the boy came to tell him with smiling chatter and gestures of ravenous eating that a meal was ready for them, the mortice was nearly done. Adams licked and sucked the blister made on his thumb by the slender knife-handle, and went in.

Santvoort was very solemnly collecting together the chips and shavings which he had spent the morning in producing on the floor.

Adams, now that a start had been made towards the objective of measuring angles between stars and the moon, was willing to be a little amiable. But it was Santvoort who was now morose.

Adams therefore ignored him. He drank the bowl of broth and set to work on the rice, prodding at it, coping with it as best he could with the chopsticks.

When he saw that the Dutchman was grinning again he would have asked him what tickled him now, but Santvoort held up his hand for silence and then produced from his shirt, with a gesture of magnificence, two pieces of wood carved and scooped into shapes that were easily recognizable as spoons.

"Permit me, Mineheer Anjy," he said.

Adams saw then that he had been wasting choler on him. "Melchior, you fool," he said, but the Dutchman's good humour had caught him. "If I'd known you had the patience and the skill, I'd have set you to cutting out the mortice in the second cross-piece."

"My patience and my skill are both limitless," said Santvoort, "when it is a matter of making tools to convey food more readily from a full and helpless dish to an empty and lively stomach. When it is a matter of conveying information from a distant star to an empty head, the work is yours. And perhaps it was you that kept us off the crosses, Will. I am but a stranger to these people, but you they seem to know of old, calling you by your name of Anjy."

"It is An-jin they call me," Adams corrected him, "the Japan word for Pilot. Not Anjy. Our old guard told me."

"He shall tell us the Japan word for spoon-maker then," Santvoort grinned. "I, too, must have a name. Now that we have spoons to eat our rice with and Japan to eat it in, all we lack for our complete comfort is—our exact latitude."

"And you'll have that," said Adams, "as soon as you've cut a mortice through the second cross-piece while I, somehow, get the bar marked off."

"Without your proper latitude," the Dutchman said, "you are like a bereaved widow."

The remark moved the thoughts of Adams far away.

"That uncle of yours, Melchior," he said, "—you spoke of me to him so that he will remember?—in a month it will be two years since we sailed, and my wife will be able to claim my wages according to the indenture."

"He will remember," said Santvoort. "He, too, seemed to know you of old, as these Japonians do. As I myself did, now I come to think of it. When old Tim Shotten brought you along in tow that day in your well-named Gravesend, it was as though I was meeting again with some old schoolfellow who had just forgotten me and my language. Why is it, Anjy?"

Adams knew now that huffiness was a silly response to the Dutchman's nonsense. "Probably," he said, "because your brains differ from other men's. But God knows how my wife will get her claim pressed on the company."

The thought, now that he had put it into Dutch words, set up an uneasy stirring in his mind. He had been pondering, till then, the matter of graduating the sticks for his cross-staff; no easy matter since he had neither protractor nor divider but only string and a straight-edge—straight as he could make it with his eye and careful scraping with his knife. The unease made active by Santvoort's casual use of the word "widow" threw the problem into disorder.

His wife was apt, one way or another, to make a mess of that claim. She could not help it; it was no blame to her; but there it was. She could not herself ship to Rotterdam, as he could have shipped, to make her claim on the copy of the indenture he had left with her and explained to her. Nor could he—now that old Timothy Shotten was undoubtedly lost and the bones of Tom Adams his young brother left ashore in Peru —think of any suitable emissary. The kind of vague thought that kept revolving in his mind was the ease with which he himself could have settled the whole matter in a week or within a fortnight . . . and after settling it he would have returned with a free mind to the making of his cross-staff and the reading of his observations.