Saskia lurches from where she lay slumped to one side of the wheel, water dribbling from her slack lip, pulling her body upright with her hands on the wheel. I am going back and forth. I suppose I’m blubbering, panicking, although I’m almost too tired to. My eyes smart and there are hot streaks eating their way down my cold face. Makemin is crumpled by the rail slumped in his chains. I release him and drag him back to the bulkhead. I fetch fresh water from the cabinets in the upper decks and bring it to Saskia first. She drinks it dazedly and retches down the wheel, turning it to steer more strictly into parallel with the coast. The waves about us are becoming agitated, and now she is hoarsely at it with bilge me this and batten you that. Her voice is strange and high, a woman’s voice. I am careering around the deck uncertainly, feeling very much unable to think, and somehow the deck itself is there to hold me fast to it, teasing me in my weakness with spurts of seawater in my eyes.

*

The island is rolling by us on the starboard side. The bluffs screen the interior from view, but there’s an odd smell blown off the land to us, earthy and metallic, a little rancid. Saskia has turned from the coast, to swing us wider out and give us a broader view of the shore. Her voice crying orders from the bridge down to the lower decks, is deep and thrilling again, like a baritone bell.

After an anxious counting and recounting, it appears no one was lost in the swells. Makemin brings the Clappers forward again, drubbing them on the shoulders and setting their complicated gear rattling, brusquely orders them to mount their song of thanksgiving, and they break into their music like a clock striking the hour. I suspect he is less interested in giving thanks than in diverting us, so that we won’t be abashed in sight of the island, but the song, that used to stir uncertainly deep feelings in me, seems weirdly thin and preposterous now, as though a number of dignified men should roll around on their backs uncouthly, sobbing and simpering like babies. We are further distracted by our work, setting the half-wrecked ship back in order. And as we work, the island is still sliding past us, like an irregular, black rampart.

We swing gradually around a promontory. Wreckage in the water by the breakers, and two vast dun red-laced ribs sticking out of the waves like fingers pointed toward us. The ship must have been far larger than ours. Fragments of it are spilled out along the rocks—I imagine a ruptured hull slopping its contents onto the studded shore at the base of the cliffs like a disemboweled whale, and shreds of bulkhead sinking out of sight. The ribs are motionless. They might be part of the island. Looking at their uncannily clean lines, the rust scoring them, and the paltry few clumps of foliage or sea stuff that have managed to attach themselves to the metal, a resounding accumulation of time thrums around me, and without being told I know this is an ancient wreck.