The New World
by Michaelmf Flynn
Đặng Văn Denizci, puhāvam of Golden Wind for Sriwijaya’s Palembang, stood in the bow of the junk and studied the eastern horizon through his farseer, praying to the Buddha that he would raise land before the crew grew more mutinous than it already had. After a long voyage across seas both strange and hazardous, a bit of solid land would not go unappreciated. Fleshpots would be nice, too.
He had the fleet’s latitude and, if old Kartawidjaja’s cartographers had known their craft, it ought to be close to that of the fabled Tai Ch’in; but he had lost his longitude and had no idea how distant the exotic “Far West” might yet lie along this latitude. It was all very well for Farūq to say “Hug the African coast north to the Pillars,” but not when coast, wind, and current all conspired to bend his course west to the balmy isles of the Orang-Awok.
Four weeks westing before he had found favorable winds and currents. But he had been five weeks now on his easting and it seemed as if he had somehow misplaced an entire continent.
Văn Denizci kept his glass level by long practice, absorbing the rolls with his knees and hips. This Western Ocean was choppier than the seas that lapped the Home Islands; but he was more than grateful to be out of the terrible swells and ferocious winds of the Southern Ocean and would accept this rough chop with gratitude.
A following wind tousled his long, black hair, blowing it forward into his face. He brushed it back impatiently and adjusted his headband. Then he straightened and blew his breath out, lifting his drooping moustaches, and handed the farseer to first officer Budhiharto, who stood beside him. \
“What do you make of that cloud on the horizon. Four points sisi kiri.” He pointed off to the left. The Melayu tongue was not tonal like Yüeh or Min-dong, but Deni hailed from the kingdom of Mìng-uŏk in Fukien and, like most Turco-Yüeh, he spoke Melayu with a habitual sing-song. The old Empire had gone out like the tide now these many centuries since, but such legacies had been left behind in the South like the flotsam of a great wreck.
Budhi was the opposite of Denizci in every way: short and round where the captain was tall and lean, blank where the captain was thoroughly inked, and possessing a guileless face where the captain owned the look of a hungry sea-eagle. He stared at the indicated spot for several minutes before lowering the glass. “Black smoke…,” he said. “Storm cloud? Volcano, maybe.”
“Maybe. Volcano means land, though.”
Budhi shook his head. “But smoking volcano means bad land. I remember when Tandikat blew his top… I’d say wide berth, bapak.”
Deni retrieved the farseer and studied the cloud once more. A smudge, barely discernible, hugging the nearly invisible horizon. “Might be only a rain cloud,” he temporized. Was it a large cloud far off or a small one closer in? Distance was hard to judge with nothing but the trackless ocean for scale. He sniffed the air but could taste no land in it.
(c)2023 Michael F Flynn
No comments:
Post a Comment