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THIRTY-THREE

"So, Brother Bartholomew, is all in readiness?" the archbishop said. 

"If you mean, have I done your dirty deed, the answer is yes, Your Excellency." 

"Good, good, my son. Consider that on this occasion, all you have done is to have some of the outsiders' stolen property returned to them. If your soul still troubles you, go to confession when you are done here. Only, please go to the cathedral confessor, rather than the one in your order." 

"So that word of your deeds will not be bandied about the church? And if you must make me kill, why must you make me kill in such a long, drawn out, and painful manner?" 

"Because it will be better if the deed takes place off our island. Bartholomew, you are becoming rude, undisciplined, and impertinent! Any more of that and you will be in line for some serious disciplining, boy! Now, be off with you!" 

* * *

* * *

It was grey dawn again, twenty-four hours after the fire that killed The Brick Royal. Our ladies were lined up on the shore of the island, surrounded by their servants and employees, all of them looking tired. Getting ready to go had cost us all a night's sleep. The small sails of The Concrete Canoe were drawing well, and Adam and I were at sea once more.

We weren't exactly running away between two days, but early dawn was close enough. We were waving good-bye to our women on shore. All three of them had wanted to come with us, but that was plainly impossible. For one thing, there wasn't much room on The Concrete Canoe, and most of what there was was taken up by food, three barrels of water, and the three crates of agricultural oddities that the chief gardener had given us. For another, well, they were all good, warm, and tolerant women. They were intelligent, learned, and competent. They were beautiful, loving, and sexy. But they weren't tough women, and we had one hell of a tough trip ahead of us.

Because of good luck and absentmindedness, I had never gotten around to having the agricultural crates sent down to our warehouse, and thus they were saved from the disastrous fire. We'd managed to scrounge up a few pounds of Super-Hemp thread, and along with several changes of clothing and the strong nets that our fishermen had used; well, it would have to do. The huge drift net that Adam had ordered months before wouldn't be done for weeks, and had to be left behind. Making a fuss and taking delivery before it was completed might have tipped our hand.

We were bugging out, and neither of us liked it. It isn't easy to leave a fight unfought, and it isn't easy to leave a woman you love behind, but it had to be done, so we were doing it.

Whoever the bastards were, they had tried to kill us, but they had failed, and they hadn't stopped us from going ahead with our plans. Then they tried arson, and while that had worked all too well, they still hadn't stopped us, although they sure had slowed us down. We were worried that their next attempt would have something to do with our ladies, a kidnaping attempt or some such, and we couldn't let that happen. Our women were just too fragile, too naive, and too trusting of their world. Being exposed to reality's raw side would be a soul-shattering experience for them.

We could see no practical way to guard and protect our ladies, not while we were there on the Western Islands, and the targets of some unknown organization's hate. We were vastly outnumbered, and while they knew who and where we were, we knew absolutely nothing about them.

However, without us, the girls should be perfectly safe. We ourselves had to be the threat that the bad guys were reacting against. Nobody would have any reason to touch our ladies once we were gone. Still, just to be on the safe side, we had retained the services of the fishermen and of Adam's porters, we had paid them each three years in advance, and we had made them each swear to defend Roxanna and the Pelitier sisters with their lives.

We'd left all the silver we had with the girls, which was enough to make them independently wealthy for life, even though it really wasn't worth much to the two of us out in the real world. The gold we took back with us, since we'd need it in the weeks to come. Depending on the market, it was worth something like a hundred seventy-five thousand dollars, money that we'd need to prepare the way for our return.

Because we most definitely intended to return, even if we did have to sail across the Pacific Ocean in a twenty-foot open boat.

Once, before the fire, we'd owned a complete set of navigational charts, showing every square foot of salt water in the world. What with our electronic gear, we'd never used anything so crude as paper charts, except a few times to show people where we'd been and where we were going. Now that we really needed them, they were gone. Murphy's Law still rules.

Our electronic navigation gear was gone, along with all of the radios, telephones, and faxes. We had no sonar, no radar, and no satellite weather hookups. Hell, we didn't even have running lights!

We lacked even a pocket calculator, and the sole bit of electronics available to us was my wristwatch. Adam had lost his in the fire. We had debated fastening my watch to the binnacle, but we finally decided that leaving it on my wrist would keep its temperature more stable, and thus help maintain its accuracy. We did have a compass, mounted on the binnacle, and Adam's antique brass sextant had survived the fire, though its mirrors were a bit scorched. Most importantly, the one man on the island that we were sure that we could trust, the chief gardener, Master Maimonides ibn Tibbon, had managed to obtain a Westronese ocean navigational chart for us, and he was able to give us a fix on our position. Thus, we knew where we were, and from that, we could figure out how to get to where we wanted to be.

Or perhaps I should say, we thought we knew where we were. The Western Islands drifted around one of the loneliest areas in all of the oceans, not too far from the equator and a few thousand miles west of South America. Get a globe, find the place where the manufacturer has chosen to put his company logo, and you're likely to be near the spot where the Western Isles are.

Not that we had a globe. We had a strange, hand-drawn chart. The Westronese did not use degrees North and South for latitude, or East and West for longitude. They used hours west of a reference point (the original location of the islands off the coast of France), for longitude. If noon at your present location happened eleven and a half hours later than noon happened at the original location of the Western Isles, then your longitude was eleven and a half hours.

The distance from the North Pole to the South Pole was divided into twelve latitude hours, which were just a tiny bit shorter than the hours of longitude. This difference in length was due to the way that the spin of the Earth bulges the equator and flattens out the Earth at the poles, changing it from a perfect sphere into an oblate spheroid. Theirs was as rational a system as any, I suppose, except for the way that their fixed reference point no longer existed.

In medieval fashion, the world map that we were given had East at the top, at zero hours, and Europe at the bottom. What wasn't medieval was that the rest of the world was now charted out in between.

The North Pole was stretched out to a vertical line on the left, while the South Pole was another line to the right. Their arrangement greatly distorted the areas around the poles, but then the Westronese never went near the Arctic or the Antarctic, so to them it didn't matter. Theirs was a very pragmatic technology, with little foundation in the way of theoretical science. For the tropical waters that they were interested in, their maps were more than adequate.

Their system put the latitude numbers across the top of the sheet, going from zero to twelve hours, left to right, and the longitude, going from zero to twenty-four, top to bottom. Which, I suppose, seemed normal enough to them. To us, it was turned sideways. Furthermore, it was written in Westronese, and the spelling and phonic value of the letters in Westronese are at least as random as they are in English.

Another peculiarity of the map, to our eyes, anyway, was that the land masses were almost blank, while the oceans were thoroughly charted. The notations on ocean currents were particularly extensive. Still, we knew vaguely where we were, and once we turned the map sideways, the coastlines of North and South America were easily recognizable.

When we started doing the math to translate the Westronese system into something that we could think in, we discovered that we did not have a single writing instrument aboard. Not a pen, not a pencil, not a piece of burned stick. Not an auspicious beginning.

"Well, we left in an awful hurry," Adam said. "I just wonder what else we forgot to remember."

Still, we were engineers, and nobody gets good with machinery without having a good sense of visualization. We sat down and worked it out in our heads. After a few hours, we both actually managed to come up with the same answers.

"About twenty-two hundred miles west of the Galapagos Islands, and about three hundred north of the Equator," I said.

"Yeah. That puts us just about due south of San Diego," Adam said, "but I don't think that we should try for it. It's too far away. Actually, the islands of French Polynesia are our closest landfall, but we're in the Equatorial Counter Current, and getting there might be rough."

"Not to mention the problems of hitting a small island in a big ocean. I don't have that much faith in our navigation. The same argument holds for trying for the Galapagos Islands."

"Nah, I could do it. I can come to within a couple of minutes of the right latitude easy enough with the sextant, and then we could just drive along that line of latitude until we got there. You can watch for land birds, too, and the skies above an island are supposed to look greener than those above the ocean."

"You've got to be pulling my leg. You don't know a land bird from a penguin, and the only green thing I'm likely to see will be your throat if the weather gets rough."

"You have very little faith, Treet."

"I have none at all, as you've often noted. No, we have to make for the nearest large body of dirt we can find, namely the coast of Mexico, and our course is due northeast. That keeps everything easy."

"Or as easy as a twenty-three hundred mile long trip in an open boat is likely to be."

I said, "At our best speed, say maybe three miles an hour in this tubby boat with its little sails, we might be able to do that in a month or so. We've got all of five weeks worth of supplies aboard, so what's to worry about? Have faith, my friend. Trust in God."

Adam was looking for something that he could throw at me, something that we could afford to lose. He couldn't find anything in that category, and eventually he gave up on it.

 

A little before noon by my watch, I handed Adam his sextant, and we went through the drill of shooting a noon sighting.

After twenty minutes of fiddling with the ancient contraption, and another hour of doing arithmetic in our heads, we decided that our latitude seemed to be about right, from what we remembered of what the sun should be doing at this time of the year. We could check it with greater accuracy at night, assuming that we could find the North Star.

The big problem was with the longitude. After much mental juggling with numbers, we came to the annoying conclusion that either we had been given a longitude reading that was four hundred seventy-one miles off, or that my wristwatch was wrong by twenty-seven minutes, or that our math was screwed up something fierce. We both did the math all over again, and we both came up with the same bad answer.

"Screw it!" I finally said. "It doesn't really matter where we actually are! Knowing precisely where we are won't change our actual arrival time one bit. If we just keep going northeast, we'll hit land eventually."

"Yeah, but will we still both be reasonably alive when we hit it?"

"If we're going to die, do you really want to know about it in advance?"

"Yes, actually, I certainly do. I, at least, have a soul, and it would be nice to have the time to get it in order," Adam said.

Adam seemed to prefer conning the boat, and since it didn't make much difference to me, I let him do it. I was content to trim the jib, bail the bilge, and break out stores as required. I took over and manned the tiller when Adam got sleepy, but that didn't happen in the first three days. Neither of us could sleep for the first seventy-two hours, what with the way a small boat bounces around on the Pacific ocean.

Even when the weather is nice.

 

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Framed