DUTCH EAST INDIES 1770
THE DOCKS OF BATAVIA clanged with trade as our boat came in to moor. I watched the land arrive from the forecastle deck, my pulse high and thin in my ears.
I would turn eighteen in mere minutes.
There had been many times in this life in which I’d believed I wouldn’t make it this far.
The first had been when I’d contracted a deep, penetrative fever as a boy, shortly after setting sail for Amsterdam in 1764. I’d just turned twelve years old, and the reality of my fateful entwinement had only just sharpened. I could not remember the how or the why, only that I would die at Arden’s hand within half a dozen years. It always took a decade or so for this terrible truth to fully register; that it was not a childish nightmare or an irrational fear, but instead a very real impending doom.
As I lay tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, hallucinating pirates in my cabin and sharks in my belly, I remember dimly wondering whether my own death would consequently kill Arden, wherever they were. But to my memory, neither of us had ever died prematurely, which did seem unlikely – bordering on miraculous – given the wars, plagues and famines we’d lived through.
Sure enough, despite the doctor’s sincere assurances I would not recover, my fever broke.
The second time was only a few months later, when a rollicking storm almost overturned our galleon somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope. The Brouwer Route was notoriously fraught with danger – storms, ills, pirates – and the crew believed we were finally falling victim. Towers of water thrashed down on us from above, until, as though by some divine command, the clouds parted and the vessel righted itself at the last possible moment.
Many died.
Sure enough, I did not.
Around then, I came to wonder whether it was a curious condition of the tether that bound me to Arden; maybe the only thing that could kill us was each other.
The third time was two years after that, when the skin on my forearm began to turn black. It started as a brownish mole, but its borders soon spread like a greedy empire claiming stolen land. It grew pink notches and ragged edges, pushed upward in a bleak dome. Unmistakable cancer. The fatal roots soon burrowed down into my bones until I awoke screaming with the pain of it. If it ended how it had for my mother, I’d soon be clutching at my torso as though trying to dig the organs from my body.
My father and the doctor arrived at my cabin with a scalpel and a bone saw, determined to remove the arm. But by then, I was curious as to my own immortality. Would the cancer spread? Or would I somehow live through this too? Convincing my father that I would take my own life if he took my limb, I survived the encounter with the arm intact.
Sure enough, the cancer kept spreading over my skin’s surface, but never to my liver, my kidneys, my heart.
The fourth time was that morning, when I awoke to a garrotte at my throat.
Arden had found me at last.
This time she was a girl half my size, with a shaved head and feral eyes.
I’d fallen asleep propped up against the wall behind my bunk, reading a tome on modern pathology by Giovanni Battista Morgagni – medicine had become a keen interest of mine, since my arm had declared civil war on itself. I woke to find that Arden had a palm planted on the wall either side of my neck, the garrotte pinching sharply into my skin.
‘Ouch,’ I said plainly.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so casual, but Sander Schoonhoven, the seven-foot-tall first mate, had also entered my room and was mere inches from hauling her off.
Now she was tied up with thick ropes in the cargo hold, and I was about to turn eighteen. It had been my birthday for several hours, but since I’d been born around midday, I was a few moments shy of that elusive number.
Four minutes, to be exact.
The boat bobbed against the side of the dock, the gated harbour a maze of stacked crates and coiled ropes. Four servants stood by a gilded palanquin, ready to escort the governor general into the city – he was the most important dignitary we’d transported in over a decade. Word had travelled about my father’s inhuman ability to weather any storm, and soon enough he was a captain coveted by the most powerful people in the empire.
Several sailors hopped down to secure the galleon to the harbour, nodding hello to the row of musketeers in knee-length breeches. The air smelled of pepper and cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon, vanilla and salt and fish.
Sander Schoonhoven stood beside me on the forecastle deck, muttering to the purser about how much profit would be made from the next eight-month voyage if the spices and silks were not spoiled over the course of the journey.
Three minutes.
My father appeared at Sander’s side, cheer-faced and weather-beaten. We had survived another trip. He just had no idea his good fortune was owed to his lucky talisman: a semi-immortal son. Would the ship capsize the moment I died? If I died.
Two minutes.
I could barely register what my father was saying over the sound of my blood roaring. This was the closest I’d ever come to surviving past childhood. And with Arden bound and gagged several decks below, it would take nothing short of a miracle for her to kill me now.
One minute.
Anticipation beat in my chest like wings.
Would I feel some kind of tether snapping when I became a man? That existential tug loosened at last. The hold Arden had over me, snipped by the hand of time. A centuries-old curse finally broken. Freedom rolling out before me like the open sea, with nary a storm cloud to be seen.
A bell chimed somewhere deep in the city.
For a split second, nothing happened.
And then I buckled.
The tether was not snipped.
Instead it grew a thousand times stronger.
All the breath was sucked from my lungs. An invisible lasso tightened around my middle. There was a ferocious burning at the back of my neck, as though a puppeteer had hooked me on a string and hauled me backwards.
Then a roar from behind me, a body slamming into mine, a flash of bald head and feral eyes, a gust of eternal wind, a shattering of barriers,
and we fell
fell
fell
before the brutal harbour edge came to meet our fragile skulls.