Chapter 181

The first thing I hear is not a cheer, it is a curse that someone lets loose at some point along the port rail.

And that curse, which has probably escaped its owner without meaning to, is what breaks the silence, because the moment it sounds there is another voice that answers something, and then a third, and then nothing can be distinguished anymore because seventeen people set about shouting at once in what now truly is a cheer.

An enormous cheer, disorderly and joyful, of those that carry no word inside them and that consist above all of people making noise because they need to make noise, and that rises from the deck of this ship toward the mass of branches we have above us with the force of people who were convinced that today they could die.

But I don’t shout, what I do is stay where I am while I realize that I have both hands closed and that I am not capable of opening them entirely on the first try.

But that I think afterward, because just when the cheer is at its highest, Shen Fei’s voice cuts it in half.

“STILL!” he shouts.

And it is impressive how fast an entire ship falls silent.

“Nobody approaches!” he continues, and now he no longer shouts, but he speaks with that command voice of his that reaches the bow the same as the stern. “Everyone still where they are and hands where they were!”

And I, who am a scant six or seven paces from the creature, understand perfectly why he says it.

Because in front of me, in the exact center of this deck, there is a level seven serpent lying on top of a branch, and that serpent has been still for what has seemed to me like ten minutes and has probably been twenty seconds.

And twenty seconds is nothing.

A large animal does not die when it stops moving, a large animal dies a fair while after it stops moving, and between those two things there is a spell in which it still has inside it all the capacity in the world to tear off the arm of the first optimist who approaches it to check whether it is dead.

That is known by anyone who has ever seen someone work with real animals, and it is known, evidently, by a man who has spent half his life on a river full of spirit beasts, so nobody moves.

And in that silence, Lianhua passes in front of me.

She says nothing, doesn’t look at me and makes no special gesture. She simply crosses the six paces that separate her from the body with both blades still in her hands, positions herself at one of its sides and from there, without any ceremony and without any haste, does what has to be done.

I see how she puts the right blade in below the jaw, at the exact point where the head joins what in an animal like that serves as a neck, and from there on she works downward with both hands, with that absolutely tranquil constancy of someone who is doing a disagreeable task in the correct manner and doesn’t intend to do it in any other.

It takes her almost a minute.

And in that minute absolutely nothing is heard on this deck, save the water against the hull and a wet noise I prefer not to pay attention to because I want to keep having supper tonight.

Afterward Lianhua steps aside a pace, stays looking at her work, and turns toward Shen Fei.

“It is dead”, she says.

After her words, the entire ship comes apart, and this time nobody cuts the noise because Shen Fei himself has raised both arms and is shouting with the others while I permit myself, at last, to let out the air.

And the moment I let it out, I begin to look around me, and what I see is a disaster.

I begin from above, which is where it all began. The mainmast is still standing, which is much better news than it seems, but it is bent and the yard is split, with the two halves each hanging toward one side like the two broken arms of something, held only by the remains of the sail and by a tangle of ropes that has been left snarled in a manner I am not capable of deciphering from here.

One of the two halves sways a bit every time the ship moves, and that swaying is accompanied by a creak I don’t like at all.

Afterward I lower my gaze, and here is where the problem intensifies, since the branch entered the deck as if it were an axe, and it did not settle for opening a hole, but rather it sank the entire surrounding area.

From where I am seated I see the planks split inward in an enormous circle, I see two of the beams that hold up the deck broken and poking out of the wound with the wood opened in long white splinters, and I see, at the bottom of all that destruction, a good meter of branch stuck below the level of the floor.

And on top of the branch, occupying the rest of the hole, is the serpent.

Dead, beheaded and still coiled around its own point of support, as if the creature had decided to take the tree with it out of pure stubbornness.

But upon seeing the hole, I right away think that we are on a ship, and the moment I finish thinking that, there is a question that imposes itself above all the others and that leaves me fairly worried.

The question of whether we are taking on water.

I surprise myself searching with my gaze, very quickly, for the spot where the water would come out if we were taking it on, until I remember the conversation of the first day, the one in which Shen Fei showed me his ship from inside with a pride he didn’t bother to disguise for a single second and explained to me, tapping with his knuckles on each partition, how the internal bulkheads divide the hold into watertight compartments.

And I relax a bit, although only a bit, because the bulkheads serve to keep a leak in one compartment from sinking the whole ship.

But I am in the middle of those thoughts when I hear footsteps coming toward me.

Lianhua arrives first, and she arrives considerably faster than the other two, because by the time Shen Fei and Chen Mo are still crossing the deck she has already crouched at my side.

And without saying absolutely anything, she reaches out both hands and takes my face.

“Lianhua”, I begin to tell her.

“One moment, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

And she turns my head to one side, and then to the other, and then goes on to examine my whole face.

And since apparently my face is not enough for her, she lets go of me and goes down to my arms.

“It didn’t manage to touch me”, I tell her.

“I can see that”, she answers me without stopping looking at my hands.

“I am fine”, I insist. “It didn’t touch me because the shield held until the end.”

There she does lift her gaze, and she holds my gaze exactly a second before answering me.

“You have had the head of a level seven beast a handspan from your face”, she tells me.

And she says it with the same voice as always, flat and polite, without going up or down a single tone, which is precisely why it brings back to me, for a moment, that memory.

“I know”, I answer her with a shiver.

Lianhua says nothing more, she simply finishes checking that I am fine, gets to her feet, and takes her place again at my side.

And just then the other two arrive.

Shen Fei arrives with an appearance that, for what has happened here, is almost insulting, because save for his loose hair and his clothing soaked from top to bottom he looks exactly like the same man who came up this morning from the hold to tell me I had done him a favor getting him out of the inventory.

Chen Mo, on the other hand, arrives with a much worse appearance.

He arrives walking, and he arrives walking on his own two feet, but he carries his left arm pressed against his body in a manner that is not natural, has that whole sleeve destroyed and beneath it his skin can be seen in a very unnatural color, and above all he arrives slowly, with that strange and thick slowness I saw in him a while ago and that he still has even if it is no longer so evident.

He stops two paces from me, and the first thing he does, before saying anything, is put his right hand into his clothing, take out a small flask, remove the stopper with his teeth and swallow whatever is inside in a single go.

Afterward he makes a considerable grimace.

“Is it for the venom?” I ask him.

“It is for the venom”, he answers me, and he puts away the flask. “And it tastes exactly as bad as the last time I had to take it.”

And it is Shen Fei who speaks next, and he does it looking directly at me.

“It was a good idea”, he tells me.

And he adds nothing more, doesn’t adorn the sentence, doesn’t wrap it, which, coming from him, I have already realized is the way he has of saying things when he says them seriously.

But I answer him with what I consider to be the truth.

“It wasn’t of so much use either, Captain”, I tell him.

Shen Fei raises his eyebrows.

“I say it seriously”, I continue. “It was the two volleys of fire arrows that killed it. If I had not opened my mouth, the branch would still be whole, your deck too, and the creature would be just as dead.”

And here is where Chen Mo intervenes.

“No”, he tells me.

And he says it without any softness, and without the slightest intention of consoling me, which is what makes me pay attention to him immediately.

“That is not certain by a long shot”, he continues. “And this is told to you by someone who was underneath.”

He rests his right hand on his hip.

“For those seventeen talismans to do what they did, they had to hit it all at once and all in the same spot”, he tells me. “And for them all to hit it at once and in the same spot, the creature had to be still. And that creature, while it was anchored to the branch, was not still for a single second in the whole combat.”

He raises a finger.

“So there are three things that could have happened”, he goes on. “The first is that they threw the arrows at it while it was swinging, and then half would have missed and the other half would have hit it in spots where they did nothing to it, exactly the same as happened to yours.”

He raises the second.

“The second is that it dodged them”, he says. “Which is what it would have done, because from up there it saw them coming.”

And he raises the third, and this one he leaves raised a while.

“And the third is the bad one”, he tells me. “And it is that it decided to come down on its own account.”

And I, upon hearing that, understand perfectly where he is going, but I let him finish.

“Because an animal like that is not hanging for pleasure, it is hanging because it suits it”, he continues. “And the moment it stopped suiting it, the moment it got tired of the three of us or got truly hungry, it would have come down to the deck on its own, with all its strength and all its mobility, and on that deck there were seventeen people who are not warriors.”

He lowers his hand.

“And then yes, then we would have killed it all the same”, he finishes. “But I can assure you that right now we would not be talking about how many talismans have been spent, we would be counting the dead.”

And after that sentence he falls silent, and I do too, because I have absolutely nothing to say.

“You are right”, I tell him at last after assimilating his explanation.

“I am”, Chen Mo answers me with all the tranquility in the world.

And at some moment of that conversation, without my having heard her arrive, Xia has come up to the deck.

I see her out of the corner of my eye when she is already here. She has come out through the hatch, has crossed half the deck, has gone around the hole and now is standing beside Lianhua, a scant pace from my right shoulder in silence.

And that, in Xia’s case, is a thing worth noting, because this girl is eleven years old and has a quantity of questions per minute that I would sometimes like to have myself. But she has come up, has seen that we are talking and has positioned herself to one side without opening her mouth.

So I don’t say anything either, because there is no need, and instead I return to what we were on.

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“Good”, I say, looking at the two of them. “Well then the question that is due is what do we do now.”

And Shen Fei, who evidently already has it thought out, answers without hesitating.

“The first thing is to dismantle the serpent”, he tells me.

“Dismantle it?” I ask him.

“Dismantle it”, he confirms to me. “Skin, meat, fangs, glands, bones and core. Everything. And it has to be started today, because a beast of that level begins to spoil much sooner than people believe.”

And then, while he says it, one corner of Shen Fei’s mouth lifts.

And it is not an entire smile, not by a long shot, it is rather the beginning of one that has decided not to come out entirely, but I have spent two weeks looking at this man and I have seen him argue, order, negotiate and fight, and this is the first time I see on him the expression of someone who is enjoying themselves.

“And I am going to confess something to you”, he tells me. “Two hours ago I was thinking about the face my employer was going to make when I presented him the report of this voyage.”

He makes a vague gesture toward the destruction.

“And now it turns out that in that same report there is going to be a level seven spirit beast, whole and well preserved”, he continues. “So, with a bit of luck, instead of shouting at me they are going to congratulate me.”

And there, at last, the smile escapes him entirely, for a scant second, before he puts it away again and looks at me in a considerably more serious manner.

“But precisely because of that we have to talk about something else”, he tells me.

“Go ahead”, I answer him.

“You have participated in both tasks”, he tells me, and he says it slowly, marking the words. “In the defense against the salmon, in which you spent the afternoon taking animals out of the water so they could be killed, and in the business of the serpent. And you have not participated with words, you have participated by spending part of what was clearly your capital.”

He crosses his arms.

“So your share has to be set”, he finishes. “And it has to be set now, before we begin, because these things are agreed beforehand and not afterward, since if it is done afterward it almost always ends badly.”

I listen to him, and the first thing that comes out of me is the most evident thing for me.

“Captain”, I tell him. “I thank you very much for the offer, but there is no need.”

Shen Fei furrows his brow.

“A while ago I had the mouth of that thing around my head”, I continue, and I point with my chin toward the hole. “And right now I am sitting here, talking with you and without a single broken bone. To me that seems more than sufficient payment, I tell you completely seriously.”

And I don’t say it to look good. I say it because I have spent a while with the image of the interior of that mouth stuck in my head, and because there is a part of me, the one that went blank for three seconds, that at this moment keeps thinking that being alive is a bargain and doesn’t feel like haggling with anyone.

But it is Chen Mo who picks up the conversation, and he picks it up with that way he has of taking a matter and turning it around.

“Xiaojie”, he tells me. “I would love it if everyone were as sensible as you, I assure you, because it would save me two out of every three arguments I have in life.”

He separates a bit from where he was.

“But that is not sensibleness, that is giving things away”, he continues. “And I am not talking to you about what you did, which also counts, but about what you spent. Nineteen people had three talismans each in their pocket. And those fifty-seven talismans were not paid for by the captain, nor by me, nor by the Tower. They were paid for by you, and on top of that you made them, which is worse, because that is paper, ink and time.”

And then, without any kind of transition, he lets loose a question I did not expect.

“Tell me one thing”, he tells me. “Do you have the Earth Gate open?”

I stay still for a second after that question, because I have spent the whole conversation thinking that the discussion was about money, and suddenly this man asks me a question about my cultivation with the same naturalness with which he would ask me my shoe size.

“No”, I answer him. “I don’t have it.”

And I don’t tell him which ones I do have, on the one hand because he has not asked me and on the other because I still remember the advice Song Yan gave me.

Chen Mo, upon hearing my answer, sighs.

It is a short sigh of administrative annoyance, exactly the same one my department secretary used to let out when you brought him a well-filled-out form that was not the one he needed.

“Well that leaves me without half of what I was going to offer you”, he tells me.

“Explain it to me”, I ask him.

“It is very easy”, he answers me. “The meat is of no use to you.”

He raises a finger.

“And it is of no use to you because the meat of a level seven beast is not food, it is a medicine in the shape of food”, he continues. “It is loaded with Qi to the bursting point, and a body that does not have the Earth Gate open is not capable of assimilating that. And at your age and with your cultivation, it could even harm you.”

He raises a second finger.

“The skin neither”, he says. “And the skin is the second most valuable thing that animal has, because with that skin light armor is made that stops things that nothing so thin should stop. But you have no way of using it, so in your hands it is not a payment, it is a bundle you would have to carry to Sanjiang to sell it there to whoever wanted to pay you whatever they felt like.”

And he raises the third, and this one he lowers almost immediately.

“And then there is the core”, he tells me. “Which is the only thing that would truly be of use to you.”

“Why?” I ask him, although I imagine it.

“Because a beast core is pure Qi”, he answers me. “And that, for someone who is opening gates, is exactly what is needed and would save you months.”

He shrugs, and with that gesture he throws the idea in the trash himself.

“But it is the core of a level seven beast”, he finishes. “It is the most expensive piece of the whole animal, by an enormous difference, and giving it to you for what you did today would not be paying you, it would be a disproportion so great that it would do you a disservice. Because the day someone found out that the owner of the House of the Long Journey was given a level seven core for a handful of fire arrow talismans, the one who would come off badly would be you.”

I listen to everything he tells me, and stay a moment silent, processing it.

Because he has just given me three options and all three are bad, and when all the options they offer you are bad it is normally because you are choosing from the wrong list.

And besides there is one thing I have been thinking about since yesterday and that right now weighs on me much more than a piece of serpent skin, and it is that within a few weeks I am going to arrive at a city I don’t know, with three mouths to feed, without any income of my own beyond what the company may have managed to accumulate and without the remotest idea of what a room, a sack of rice or a sheet of talisman paper costs there.

So I do what I have been doing all my life when I don’t like any of the options, which is to propose another.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “Can payment be made in money?”

Chen Mo tilts his head.

“Payment can be made in whatever you want”, he answers me.

“Then let us do it this way”, I tell him. “The two of you calculate how much my share is worth, with whatever criterion you consider fair and without my getting involved, because of the prices of this side of the world I have not the least idea and I don’t intend to pretend that I do.”

I settle myself a bit on the coil of rope.

“When we arrive at Sanjiang, instead of giving me merchandise, that quantity is deposited into the accounts of the House of the Long Journey at the Tower’s branch”, I continue. “And there it stays, in my name, until I need it.”

And I explain the reason, because it seems to me he deserves it.

“Because I have not the remotest idea how I am going to arrive at that city in terms of funds”, I tell him. “I prefer, by far, to arrive with a figure written in a book that someone keeps for me than to arrive with a pile of expensive things I would have to sell myself.”

And there Chen Mo laughs with a brief laugh, but it is a real laugh.

“It is a good solution”, he tells me. “It is clean, there is nothing to carry and it enters your account as company income, which besides suits you better for increasing your reputation.”

He nods once, and with that it is settled.

“Well then that is what we will do when we arrive”, he finishes.

And at that moment I notice two little taps on my shoulder.

Two, in a row and fairly short, given with that exact amount of force used to call someone without interrupting them, and I have no need whatsoever to turn around to know whose they are.

And the moment I notice them, I remember the only truly practical question I had been asked on this deck before the whole matter of the attack, so I smile and turn toward the two men.

“Before you go, I have one more question”, I tell them. “And it is not mine, so I ask it on behalf of whom it corresponds to.”

And Shen Fei, who evidently has not the remotest idea where I am going, makes a gesture for me to continue.

“The spirit salmon”, I tell him. “Can they be eaten?”

And Shen Fei blinks.

“Whether they can be eaten?” he repeats.

“That’s it”, I confirm to him.

“Well of course they can be eaten”, he answers me, and by his tone, the question has struck him as as strange as if I had asked him whether water is wet. “And not only that, they are considered a delicacy. A well-prepared spirit salmon, in a decent eating house in Sanjiang, costs what an entire week of work would cost one of my sailors.”

And to my right, without saying absolutely anything, I hear how Xia takes in air, but Shen Fei, the moment he finishes the sentence, twists his expression.

“Which, be it said in passing, is a shame”, he adds.

“Why a shame?” I ask him.

“Because we have no way of preserving them”, he answers me, and he makes a gesture toward the river with his chin. “Out there are more than two hundred bodies floating, and right now, with the heat there is, each one of those bodies is a small fortune that is going to rot before we reach even halfway.”

He shrugs.

“We will take what we can to eat these days and the rest the river will carry off”, he finishes. “And if I am honest with you, that is what most infuriates me about the whole afternoon.”

And I, while I listen to him say that, am no longer entirely listening to him, because at that precise moment the solution to that problem occurs to me.

“Captain”, I tell him. “I believe I can fix that.”

Shen Fei stays looking at me after I pronounce those words.

“What do you mean you can fix it?” he asks me.

“I know how to make Freezing Talismans”, I answer him.

And I say it like that, without adornment, because that is what there is.

“They are not simple and I don’t make them by the dozen”, I continue. “But I know how to make them, I have made them many times, and right now I have material in the backpack to make quite a few. And one of those talismans freezes close to a Dan of water all at once.”

And here I raise a hand, because I want to say the important part before anyone gets enthusiastic.

“And now the drawback”, I say. “The ice melts, so it will have to be replenished throughout the whole trip. So this only makes sense if what is made by selling the fish covers what the paper, the ink and the time cost while leaving a profit that makes the effort worthwhile.”

I lower my hand.

“If it doesn’t come out worth it, we don’t do it”, I finish. “And I am not going to be offended, because its not working would be nobody’s fault.”

And Shen Fei, the moment I finish speaking, does something I like a lot, because he turns toward Chen Mo.

“That is more your thing than mine”, he tells him.

But I see that Chen Mo is already on it, one can tell because he has his eyes set on a point of the rail where there is absolutely nothing to look at, and because he has begun to move his right hand very slowly, as if he were placing things on top of a table that exists only inside his head.

He takes about ten seconds to come back.

“The salmon must not be frozen”, he says.

“No?” Shen Fei asks him.

“No”, he answers him. “Freezing a whole salmon is freezing close to eighty catty, of which half is head, bones, guts and skin. And the ice you spend cooling some guts costs exactly the same as the one you spend cooling a fillet.”

After those words, he looks at me.

“They get processed”, he tells me. “Here, on the ship and while they are fresh. They are opened, cleaned, and only what is truly worth money is kept, which in a spirit salmon is the fillets, the roe if they have it, and the fins, which are paid for separately and fairly well. Everything else is thrown away or eaten, and what is kept takes up a fifth of the space.”

And then he moves his hand again, twice, as if he were counting something.

“And with that proportion, the numbers work out”, he tells me. “Besides with an enormous margin. Calculating on the high side what the material for your talismans costs and on the low side what a spirit salmon fillet is paid for in Sanjiang, we are talking about making seven or eight times what it costs to freeze it. And that counting on the ice having to be replenished three times along the way.”

Shen Fei lets out a low whistle.

But Chen Mo has not finished, because now he turns entirely toward me and changes his tone to a considerably drier one.

“But there is a variable”, he tells me. “And it is you.”

“Tell me”, I answer him.

“All that calculation rests on two things”, he tells me. “The first is your success rate. If out of every ten talismans you begin six come out, the number I have just given you is real. If three come out, the burned paper eats up the profit and we would be working fifteen days for nothing.”

He raises a finger.

“And the second is consistency”, he continues. “It is no use to me if some freeze a lot and others a little. If the load is irregular, there are holds that are going to thaw before others, and by the time someone realizes it, the merchandise in that hold is no longer worth anything. I need to know that a talisman of yours always does the same thing.”

After those words he falls silent and waits, but I, at that, smile, because he has just asked me, in two sentences, exactly the only two questions that had to be asked, and because it so happens that about those two concrete questions I am very calm.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “As long as I have enough paper and ink, I could keep half the ship frozen if it were necessary.”

And Chen Mo stays looking at me for a couple of seconds, and then passes his right hand over his head, from his forehead to the nape of his neck, very slowly.

And then he smiles in a way I had not yet seen from him.

“How curious”, he tells me, and his tone comes out with an absolutely shameless mocking edge. “Because I understood that you, Master Mu, only knew.”

I hold my composure after those words, although to me it is clear that he has realized my relationship with Master Mu after I revealed my familiarity with talismans.

“And I did not lie to you”, I answer him, smiling as well. “I knew her, what happens is that I knew her very well.”

Chen Mo laughs after my words, and he laughs out loud, with his head thrown back a bit, and it is the first time in a month and a half that I have seen this man laugh without any kind of control, and at some moment of that laugh a gesture of pain escapes him because of the business with his arm that makes him swallow that laugh immediately.

Shen Fei, meanwhile, looks at the two of us alternately with the face of one who knows perfectly that he has missed something and has decided not to ask, so I yield him the floor with a question.

“Captain”, I tell him, and I turn serious again. “All this that we have just said is not decided by me, nor decided by Chen Mo. The ship is yours and you are the captain.”

I point at the destruction with my chin.

“And what we are proposing are three jobs at once”, I continue. “Repairing all that, dismantling a serpent and processing more than two hundred salmon. So it is you who has to tell me whether that is feasible.”

Shen Fei, upon hearing that, does not answer right away, what he does is turn entirely around, put his hands on his hips and look at his ship slowly, beginning with the bent mast and ending at the hole, and I have the fairly clear sensation that in those twenty seconds that man is making a list much longer than mine.

And when he speaks again, he does it while still looking at the deck.

“It is feasible”, he says, and then he turns to look at us.

“The mast can be straightened and the yard can be replaced, because we are moored under a forest and we are not exactly short of trees”, he tells me. “The deck is more work, but it is carpentry, and in the hold I carry spare planks because only an idiot sails without them. What I cannot do is do it fast.”

He shrugs.

“And for eating we are not going to have any problem”, he adds, and there the corner of his mouth lifts again. “We are going to eat spirit salmon for breakfast, lunch and supper, which is a fairly luxurious way of getting bored of food, although I am clear that you and the girl will still need normal food.”

After those words, I hear how to my right Xia makes a little noise.

It is a very small little noise that comes out through her nose, and I am reasonably sure that what she has meant by it is that she has a fairly firm opinion about the business of getting bored eating the same thing every day, and that the opinion implies that nobody here is going to eat the same thing every day if she has anything to say about it.

But Shen Fei is already looking at me again, and now seriously.

“But that is going to delay us”, he tells me. “And not by a day. We are talking about several, and I cannot tell you how many until tomorrow with light I stick my head in that hole and see what is underneath.”

And then he does something that, coming from him, does not surprise me at all and still strikes me as notable all the same.

“And you are the passenger”, he tells me. “I have a commission and some merchandise, but you have paid for passage to Sanjiang. So the question I have to ask you, do you have to be somewhere on a concrete date?”

And I, at that question, have to make a conscious effort not to let out a guffaw.

Because no, I have absolutely nothing to do, not an appointment, nor a date, nor an obligation, nor anyone waiting for me anywhere in the known world. Because the only thing there is at the end of this river is a city in which I don’t know a single person and a counter behind which there is a person who probably doesn’t even know I exist.

“None, Captain”, I answer him. “As far as I’m concerned, you can stay here a month.”

And I make a pause.

“Although a month eating salmon would indeed be too monotonous”, I add.

Shen Fei laughs upon hearing my last statement.

“It won’t take that long”, he tells me.

Afterward he turns toward Chen Mo, and there his tone changes, because now he is speaking with the other one who commands.

“What do you say?” he asks him.

And Chen Mo, who has spent a while with his gaze lost and who evidently already had the answer ready three sentences ago, gives it to him without any kind of ceremony.

“I say that I have seven men who have to be paid whether we are stopped or navigating”, he answers him. “And that neither they nor I have ever said no to an unexpected profit in our entire lives.”

He shrugs with his good arm.

“And besides everything is going to have to be counted, as well as weighed and recorded”, he adds. “And it so happens that that is exactly what we do.”

After listening to Chen Mo, Shen Fei gives a dry, loud clap, so out of place on a deck full of destruction that two sailors who were ten paces away lift their heads all at once to look at us.

“Well then it is decided”, he says.

Next he looks at the three of us, one after another, with a face very different from that of a man whose ship was sinking an hour ago.

“Gentlemen and young lady”, he says. “It is time to make a lot of money together.”