Nathaniel Holt
Chapter 4, Session 1 — The Morning After
Lieutenant Nathaniel Holt of the Royal Navy stood on the Trieste docks with a trunk at his feet and the particular expression of a man who had begged and pulled strings to get assigned as ship’s doctor to a vessel heading south and east, and was now confronting the reality of what he had begged for. The crew had requested a surgeon. The Navy sent an officer with First Aid and a sextant. La Speranza was ninety feet of salt-stained oak with blistering paint and rigging tarred nearly black, sitting low in the water with a chicken coop lashed to the foredeck and a leathery, nearly toothless Greek cook stirring something over a brick firebox that smelled of boiled onion and regret. Holt technically outranked everyone aboard except the captain, and could not set a bone. He spent his first evening aboard rather than at the Locanda Grande with the party, pitching in with the crew’s preparations, coiling rope and checking rigging with the habitual competence of a man who had spent years at sea and could not stop his hands from finding work. Petar, the Ragusan bosun with two missing fingers and the genuine regard of every sailor aboard, strung up a hammock next to his own and told Holt that anyone who wanted to bother him would have to go through him first. The alliance was immediate and uncomplicated, the kind of respect that passed between men who understood ships and said so with their hands rather than their mouths.
The next morning, when the party arrived to board, Holt directed Luka and Drago to load the supply crates and asserted quiet authority over Endicott’s fussing about the mysterious iron-banded crate in the hold. Endicott crumbled. The crew noticed. At dawn, the hawsers came off the bollards and Captain Zanier stood at the wheel, and Holt stood where sailors stand, watching the harbour mouth pass on both sides and the open Adriatic stretch ahead. He was heading for the Indian Ocean squadron by way of the longest possible route, aboard a merchant brig that smelled of tar and onion, in the company of English aristocrats who carried more weapons than their luggage could reasonably explain and a Greek cook whose culinary ambitions exceeded his abilities by a considerable margin. The voyage would take six weeks. Lieutenant Holt intended to make himself useful for every one of them.
Chapter 4, Session 2 — The Becalming
The first thing Holt did on the first full morning at sea was what any officer of his experience would do without being asked — he turned out at first light and fell in beside Petar for the dawn inspection of the running rigging. The Ragusan moved through the standing gear with the economy of ten thousand mornings, and Holt matched him in silence until he found it: a shroud seized with condemned worming that would have parted in the first real blow. He said so quietly. Petar said something in Ragusan that may have been an oath or a prayer and went to find a marline-spike, and the crew heard about it by noon in the way crews always hear about everything, and the quality of their reception of Lieutenant Holt changed in the particular way that has nothing to do with rank and everything to do with whether a man knows what a shroud is for. That evening he set up a game of Crown and Anchor on an upturned crate under the mainmast boom, ran the bank himself, and separated eight sailors from a proportion of their wages with the cheerful benevolence of a man whose mathematics were considerably better than his medicine. The crew enjoyed it. The house enjoyed it more.
The Strait of Otranto found them on a morning when the wind was wrong and had settled in to stay that way. The passage between the Italian heel and the Albanian mountains — narrow, opinionated, swept by a hard northwest blow and a current that did not negotiate — was precisely the kind of problem a Royal Navy lieutenant either made himself useful solving or did not bother returning to the quarterdeck. Holt went to Captain Zanier without waiting to be invited, because the feel of the deck under his feet and the look of the sky told him there was no time for waiting, and together they brought La Speranza through it. The work was neither elegant nor quick — it was patient and hard and the brig fell off twice before they found the angle — but they found it, and the grey mountains of Albania passed to starboard and fell away behind. Zanier did not say much afterward. He said enough.
On the eleventh day south of Crete, the wind died. Not eased, not backed — died, as sounds die when a door closes in a house where something has changed, and Holt stood at the rail and catalogued the silence the way a naval officer catalogues everything, without being asked and without finding an explanation he was willing to put to paper. La Speranza sat in water that had gone from blue chop to a black mirror between one watch and the next, and the stillness was the wrong kind of stillness — not the flat, usable emptiness of a genuine calm but an absence, as though the air had stepped back to observe. Then the phosphorescence appeared at nightfall, cold and green, tracing the full length of the hull below the waterline from stem to stern with a light that carried no warmth and no precedent, as though something on the far side of the planking had brought a lamp and was making a deliberate survey of what it found. Then the knocking began, slow and patient, felt through the soles of a man’s boots before it was heard anywhere else — rising through the bilge and the deck and the timbers with a regularity that had nothing to do with any meteorological cause and nothing in common with the sounds of a working ship. Holt had learned La Speranza’s voice in the first three days out of Trieste, the way a sailor always learns a ship’s voice, and he knew every sound she was capable of making. This was not one of them.
By the twelfth day The Drowned had gathered in numbers beneath the hull and their moan came up through the planking in the watches of the night, low and patient and sourceless. The crew did not name what was below them, in the way that sailors of long experience are careful about naming things in open water. Holt, standing the middle watch in a calm that had now held through a full rotation of the sky with no sign of shifting, was the worst possible man aboard to disbelieve what his crew refused to name. He had been at sea long enough to know what the sea was — what it kept, and what it remembered — and that knowledge, which had always been the foundation of every confidence he possessed, was precisely what made this so difficult.
Session 3 — Give Rest
When the mob formed, Holt was already in front of it. Not by calculation — by the instinct that puts a bosun between his hands and a fraying line — and he said, clearly and without heat, that there was no call to kill the man, that they could take Endicott out of the cabin, put him in irons, tie him to the mast and keep him there until morning, that restraint and murder were not the same choice and the sea had not yet asked them to make the latter. The mob heard him the way mobs hear reasonable arguments at moments of mass conviction, which is to say it heard him and moved him aside, and Holt stepped back into the position of a man who has done what he could do and is now watching the consequences arrive. He offered Captain Zanier his own pistol, handle first, while he made the case for abandoning the brig entirely — he had already worked the numbers, knew they were somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five nautical miles from Gavdos, had run the arithmetic on boats and bearing and the wind if the wind came — and Zanier looked at the pistol, looked at Holt, and told him that what he was proposing was mutiny, and that the conversation was finished. It was the correct legal answer and the wrong answer in every other way Holt could calculate, and he put the pistol back in his coat and did not say so.
The dead came at nightfall, which he had known they would, the way a man who has spent years reading skies and seas and the behaviour of things in open water knows that certain consequences follow certain omens without being able to put the mechanism to paper. He had formed up with the others on the quarterdeck, had kept Petar’s steadier men around him, had his pistol in hand and his attention on the rail, and it was not enough. When the first grey hands closed over the gunwales and The Drowned hauled themselves over the side in numbers — split-knuckled, patient, waterlogged with the weight of whatever they were carrying — the knowledge that he had been prepared for this and the sight of the actual thing failed to connect, and the pistol left his grip. It hit the deck and discharged, and the report came up through the planking and the night air and every man on the quarterdeck heard it, and the sound of it was perfectly precise. Georgiana Wentworth finished the rite alone, cracked-voiced, with the dead already aboard, and it was enough, and when the wind came it was a fact to be grateful for without reservation.
Alexandria was easier. Holt had given Freddy and Thomas Wyndham considerable latitude at Stelios’s, because a man who has watched two days of horror handled with reasonable courage ought to be permitted his date Arak, and he had not anticipated the particular enthusiasm with which they intended to lose the drinking contest they’d set each other. He steered them back through the lanes of the Frank Quarter by landmarks — the minaret, the tanner’s smell, the lamp above the Locanda’s Venetian lion — and ordered a crate of the Arak delivered on the way, because Thomas had claimed a small victory and the evening deserved some kind of conclusion. When Pyke, the antiquities dealer, found Freddy in the common room and leaned in with his questions, Holt caught the shape of what was happening before Freddy had finished the sentence about dead men in the water, and he told the man simply that Freddy had been seasick the entire voyage, had eaten something that disagreed with him in a vivid and sustained manner, and was not a reliable witness to anything at present — would he like to speak to someone in a condition to be coherent. Pyke left. The crate arrived. Holt sat in the courtyard of the Locanda del Leone with the sounds of Alexandria coming through the walls and was, for the moment, grateful the night was asking nothing further of him.
Chapter 4, Session 4 — The Road to Cairo
Holt caught it within minutes of watching Yusuf work — a quiet percentage shaved off the top of every transaction at Yaqub ibn Ezra’s counter, small enough to pass unremarked by a man in a hurry and obvious enough to a man who had spent years reading purser’s ledgers for exactly this kind of discrepancy. He said nothing to Yusuf about it. He simply collected Adrien and walked the two of them around the corner to the Bank of England’s Alexandria branch instead, where the money would change hands honestly or not at all. It was a small correction, the kind he made instinctively and without ceremony, but it set the tone for how he meant to run his own affairs in a city built on everyone else’s commission.
Inside, a meticulous clerk named Wetherall worked a slide rule and a stack of specimen books with the unhurried precision of a man who had never once been wrong about a sum, and Holt asked him for a quarter-year’s advance against his Navy half-pay. It was not a request made lightly. He was mortgaging his own future income to stay solvent on an expedition that had already cost him a ship’s berth, a surgeon’s reputation he had never possessed, and any illusion that this posting would resemble ordinary naval service — but the alternative was watching the venture outrun his purse somewhere on the Nile, and Holt had never been a man to let arithmetic catch him out. Wetherall advanced the sum without comment. Holt walked out lighter in future certainty and heavier in present coin, which struck him as an entirely fair trade for a man who intended to see this through.
The Pasha’s Bureau rewarded the same instinct that had served him in every foreign port he had ever called at: patience, and the correct application of manners. Where Adrien and Freddy took the coffee and dates offered them and thanked their hosts without recognising the ritual for what it was, Holt understood — the way he understood tides and courts-martial and the unspoken protocol of a foreign flag officer’s wardroom — that the gesture required acknowledgment in kind, and gave it. He walked out of the courtyard with his travel papers first among the party, ahead of titled men with better tailors and worse instincts for bureaucracy, and thought little of it beyond the private satisfaction of a job done properly.
Provisioning the river journey afterward felt like the first task since Trieste that fit him exactly — rice, lentils, eggs packed in bran, dates, oranges, coffee, and a coop of protesting chickens, assembled with the same brisk competence he had once brought to victualling a gunroom. When the crew made camp along the Nile that night, he handed out twenty packs of snuff from his own stores, captain to captain, a gesture that needed no translation and earned him a regard the men did not extend easily to passengers. Eighteen packs remained by his own count, and he judged the other two well spent. But it was at the river’s mouth, where the brown Nile shoved out against the sea and two riptides collided into a chaos of standing waves, that the voyage finally asked something of him that only he could give: Rais Sala was losing his fight with the tiller, and Holt threw his own weight against it without waiting to be asked, and between the two of them the djerm swung clear of the bar and slid into the calm water beyond. It was one moment among many small, competent contributions, but it was the one where every soul aboard understood exactly what a Navy officer was for.
Chapter 4, Session 5 — The Cairo Interlude
Cairo was keeping Eid al-Fitr, and the whole of it came through the shutters of Holt’s room at the Auberge du Muski as if the wall were not there at all — drums, the cry of sellers, children loosed from a month’s discipline, a city that had finished its fasting and meant everyone within earshot to know it. He had drawn the street-facing room, which was the sort of luck he had come to expect. The inn was kept by a Frenchman named Bruyère, one-time quartermaster to some regiment now scattered or dead, and Holt took the man’s measure inside a minute and found it good. Here was competence of a kind he recognised without a word passing between them: a man who knew where every barrel was, what it cost, and what it would cost tomorrow. In the courtyard there was a cat with one eye, and Holt, who had made allies of Ragusan bosuns and Greek cooks by simply being decent to them, offered it the same cautious goodwill. The animal regarded him with its single eye for a long moment, then turned its head away with great deliberation, as though he were a sum not worth the working. Fair enough. He had been dismissed by better.
The work that mattered took him and Thomas back down to Bulaq, the river-port, on Bruyère’s specific advice, because the desert did not forgive a man his water and Holt had no intention of finding that out the hard way. There a scrawny, near-toothless fellow presided over a contraption Holt admired at once for being primitive and for working, which in his experience was the only combination that ever survived contact with a real journey: a jar rigged to a foot-pedal that dipped into the brown Nile and drew the water up through layer upon layer of cloth, filthy coming in and near-clear coming out, filling barrel after barrel. Holt negotiated for twenty skins. Then he made the man understand, through gesture and repetition and a hard patience, that he wanted them oiled — properly oiled, worked through and through — because an unoiled skin cracks in the heat and a cracked skin leaks and a leaking skin is a dead man a week down the track, and Holt had already seen enough dead men for one voyage. He arranged for the whole lot to be delivered straight to the caravan once the caravan was a thing that existed. It was a small piece of work and no one would ever thank him for it, and standing in the stink and clamour of the port he felt the quiet, complete satisfaction of a man who had just ensured that the water would still be water in seven days.
He nearly undid the dignity of the thing on the way out. Casting about in a fit of desperate optimism for anything useful to buy, he asked the labourers hauling at the barrels whether they had clothing to sell, and only as the words left him did he take in that the men were wearing loincloths and little else, and had, in the most literal terms available, nothing on them to give. Holt let it go. A man could not think of everything, and he had thought of the water.
Chapter 4, Session 6 — The Locked Room
The camel, to his surprise, made sense to him. Where the soldiers fought the roll of it, Holt sat into the long pitch and sway and felt a deck under him, the same rhythm his body had known for twenty years, and he crossed the first stretch of desert more at ease than any man who had never left England had a right to be. What did not sit easy was Hewitt. Holt had spent a career watching bad officers take out their smallness on the men who could not answer back, and when Hewitt set about beating his servant Rajan at the fire over a spilled drink, Holt did what he had wanted to do to a dozen better men than Hewitt and had never been free to, which was to step in and put a hand on him and, when the man turned his contempt outward, strike him. It settled nothing. Hassan settled it, with a word Holt did not hear and would not have understood, and Hewitt went white and quiet, and Holt was left with the particular sourness of a just impulse that had accomplished exactly nothing except to mark him, the next morning, as a man who had come to blows with the corpse the night before it was a corpse.
He read the lock when they found the body, saw how the snapped black thread had drawn the key home from the wrong side of the door, and gave the party the mechanism of the thing plainly and well, because competence was the one currency he had always been able to spend anywhere. And then Thomas took it from him. Over some imagined slight to the Wentworth sisters, Wyndham squared up and pulled his rank and his birth and his easy assurance that a soldier of family outranked a jumped-up naval lieutenant riding on a mortgaged half-pay, and reminded Holt, in front of the others, of exactly what he was and was not. Holt backed down. He had frozen once already this voyage, at the rail with the drowned coming up the hull, and he knew the difference between that and this: this was not fear, it was arithmetic, the plain sum of a man with no name and no money and no stake choosing not to spend what little standing he had on a fight he could not win. He swallowed it whole and said nothing, and it went down like a stone and stayed there. He had mortgaged a quarter’s pay to be on this expedition and he still did not belong on it, and a long sea voyage lay ahead in close quarters with the man who had just made sure he knew it.
Chapter 4, Session 7 — The Sterile Bay
The waterfront was supposed to be his. A Royal Navy lieutenant walking a harbour is the one arrangement of circumstances in this entire expedition where Holt outranks every person around him on merit rather than birth, and he went down to the Suez quays to find the party a hull and came back with nothing at all. The bay was full of small craft fit for grain and pilgrims and nothing else; the two soundest vessels in it were already under the Pasha’s commissariat and unavailable at any price; and the soldiers on the quay had no naval knowledge and no English, and Holt had no Arabic. A full day of professional competence applied to a problem that simply would not yield to it, and he came back to the party empty-handed and said he would try again tomorrow. That evening a Company man named Alan solved it over a drink in a cellar in about forty seconds. Holt was awake before dawn regardless, and it was his eye that caught the Shah Alam’s mastheads coming into the bay in the grey light and his shout that got the party to the gangplank ahead of the soldiers. That is the shape of it: the port beat him, and he was still the first man up.
Aboard, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Thomas beat him too. They squared off on deck for a friendly bout, sabre against cutlass, with a gentleman’s wager on it — the loser buys the drinks ashore and owes an apology to the ladies — and Wyndham slipped inside his guard and flicked the cutlass out of his hand and stepped back and said well thought, sir. Which was gracious, and which Holt will have found harder to swallow than contempt would have been. The thing that has sat like a stone in him since the desert has now been converted into a round of drinks and an apology he can actually pay, and it is not clear he wanted it settled that cheaply.
Then Socotra, where he did what he does. He was the one who saw movement disappear into a cave mouth thirty feet up a cliff face, and rather than wait for ladders he tested the vines and went up them, and made fifteen feet before one parted and dropped him onto hard ground — shouting “Avenge me” on the way down, while the lascars exchanged money over the outcome and the lookout called the result from the crow’s nest. Georgiana, who has no fondness for him whatsoever, patched him up without being asked and without complaint. And hours later, in a chamber hung with silk, he climbed a tower of sailors to reach Freddy’s cocoon and was still sawing at it when a drone dropped from the ceiling and drove its fangs into his chest. He fought the thing off with numbness spreading across his ribs, and then the pyramid went out from under him, and he and Freddy and the spider hit the cave floor together with the spider crushed flat between them. Georgiana treated him a second time, and the numbness went.
He has no connection to the Choir, no stake in the Order, no birth to stand on and a quarter’s half-pay mortgaged into somebody else’s war — and on that island none of it was relevant, because a boy was gone into the dark and a Navy officer does not leave people behind. He got both of them out. The lascars saw it. Ismail, whose deck has never once acknowledged a King’s commission, saw it. For the first time since Trieste, Holt has done something in front of a crew that a crew will remember, and there are weeks of open water left in which to find out what that is worth.
Chapter 4, Session 8 — Landfall
He had it worked out before the pilot came aboard. Five weeks from Suez, eight people in one cabin with curtained berths, a spider’s bite through the chest and a fifteen foot fall onto rock, a duel lost on deck to a man with better birth and a better sabre, and a debt to Georgiana for patching him twice in a single day without once asking him to be grateful about it. Holt does not much care for owing people. He cares even less for the ceremony of settling up.
So he went first, on the black stone steps at Chandpal Ghat in the rain, before the luggage was ashore and before anybody could organise a proper goodbye. He gave them a speech. It was theatrical and it was funny and it was over in about thirty seconds, something about the end of the fellowship and sailing to the undying lands, and then he shouldered his kit and walked up into Calcutta and was gone into the crowd of coolies and palanquin bearers before the party had finished laughing.
He owed Thomas a round of drinks ashore. He owed the Wentworth sisters an apology, which was the actual stake of the duel and the part that mattered. He owed Georgiana something he never found a word for. He paid none of it, and he knew he was not paying it, and that is why he went first and went fast.
What he leaves behind is smaller than what he did. He went up a human pyramid of lascars into the dark on Socotra to cut Freddy Cavendish out of a cocoon, took a drone’s mandibles through the chest for it, and came down in the collapse with the thing crushed between them, and thirty men watched him do it and so did Ismail. There is a Royal Navy lieutenant loose in Bengal now with a mortgaged half-pay, no stake in the Choir, no interest in the Order, and a reputation on the river that he did not have to buy.