The Eden Legacy dk-4 Read online

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Daniel.

  ‘-real men are away. Premature ejaculation helps them deposit their sperm and get away before the alpha males return to kick their-’

  ‘I said that’s enough.’ He grabbed her wrist and squeezed it so tight she flinched and looked at him in surprise. ‘Typical biologist, aren’t you?’ he said softly. ‘Tolerate frailty in every species but your own.’

  ‘We should know better.’

  ‘And you do, I suppose. That must feel good.’ He held her a moment longer then let go, sat back in his chair. She could feel her wrist throb where he’d held it, but she didn’t look down, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Their food arrived at last. They ate, paid and left without exchanging another word.

  TWENTY

  I

  Knox was suffering a little from remorse when he banged on Rebecca’s door at five the next morning. That man in the restaurant last night had been a dick; she’d been entitled to her revenge, especially considering the extraordinary strain she was under. His job had been to back her up, not slap her down. But when he tried to make amends by offering to carry her bag down to the taxi, she shook her head and assured him coolly that she could handle it fine by herself, thanks.

  The port was already buzzing when they arrived, though the sun wasn’t yet up. High on a crane, a welder showered sparks as if celebrating fiesta. Ropes creaked alarmingly as a container vessel unloaded a huge net swollen with wooden crates. Last night’s whores boiled up coffee and rice for their men; children huddled beneath blankets on the sea wall, and fished for crabs. Small waves rocked the Yvette softly against the tractor-tyre buffers of the port wall. Knox jumped down on to its deck, turned to help Rebecca, but she ignored him, pointedly making her own way down.

  He checked over the boat once more. A moderate westerly was pinning them to the jetty. He started the motor and left it idling while he freed the fore and aft mooring ropes from their steel mushrooms, stowed them away. He pushed against the harbour wall, burbled them clear of the harbour and its traffic. Then he turned the engine off again, unfurled their mainsail, took his seat at the stern and adjusted the rigging until suddenly it swelled pregnant with the breeze and they were off, passing through thin banks of predawn mist.

  The sky began to lighten over the rocky silhouette of land, revealing thatch shanty towns on the shore, the marooned and rotted carcasses of metal and wooden hulls. Herons, whimbrels and plovers waded the mudflats and shallows with their curious jerky, backward walks. A pair of fishermen pushed their pirogue out into the shallows, then jumped aboard and paddled vigorously out towards them. Knox looked at Rebecca, sitting on the starboard bench, staring out towards land. ‘So was it true, then?’ he asked.

  She turned to him with a raised eyebrow, though he was sure she knew what he was talking about. ‘Was what true?’

  ‘That stuff last night. About sex tourists having dicks like betting-pencils, living with their mothers until they’re ninety-five.’

  Her chin lifted defiantly. ‘It was true of him.’

  He couldn’t help but laugh, and his laughter was so obviously unaffected that it seemed finally to thaw her. Their eyes met briefly but then she hurriedly looked away again, almost in confusion. ‘So you’re a freelance, eh?’ she asked. ‘Any particular specialty?’

  Knox shrugged. He’d been expecting this, had decided to hew as close to the truth as possible. ‘Archaeology and history, mostly.’

  ‘Hence that salvage ship?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The interview I read with that guy. He reckoned the Chinese made it to America before Columbus.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Knox. ‘That’s what he reckons.’

  Rebecca laughed. ‘So weren’t the Chinese frightened of sailing off the edge of the world, then, like all the Europeans?’

  Knox hesitated. ‘That’s a bit of a myth, actually,’ he said finally. ‘No one ever truly believed the earth was flat.’ He pointed away to the western horizon. ‘Think about it. Any sailor could tell you the world was round. All they had to do was climb their mast and look at the curvature of the sea. You didn’t even need a boat, just a high cliff. And if there was no sea to hand, there were plenty of other ways. You could watch the shadow cast by the earth during a lunar eclipse, or measure the different lengths of shadow similar objects left at different latitudes.’ He sat forward, his enthusiasm getting to him. ‘There was this extraordinary Alexandrian called Eratosthenes. He actually calculated the circumference of the earth that way back in around 300 BC, and he got it right to within a percentage point.’

  ‘Huh. So where did the flat-earth idea come from, then?’

  Knox smiled. ‘It’s the fault of your people, as it happens.’

  ‘My people?’

  ‘Sure,’ he nodded. ‘Darwinists; evolutionists. Though, to be fair, it really started with an American essayist called Washington Irving. He wrote a romanticised account of Columbus’s voyages, I guess in around 1830, though don’t hold me to that. It praised Columbus for defying the conventional wisdom of his time, risking sailing over the edge of the world for the sake of expanding knowledge. But it was complete nonsense. You’ve got to remember that Columbus didn’t head off searching for a new world; he was just looking for a shortcut to the Spice Islands. The people who argued against him pointed out that such a voyage was too far to be practicable, because they correctly believed the earth to be about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand miles in circumference; but Columbus refused to accept their estimate, insisting that it was only seventeen thousand miles around, which meant that Japan was just two and a half thousand miles west of Spain.’

  ‘And how far is it really?’

  ‘Ten or eleven thousand miles. Something like that. But the point is, Washington Irving knew all this. Everyone did. He never meant for his version of the story to be seen as historically accurate. But somehow the idea caught on. People began to believe flat-earthers had been for real. And then Darwin came along with all his disturbing ideas about evolution, and a lot of people took fright and tried to rubbish him away. The science got lost; it became a propaganda war. And a couple of Darwin’s defenders, Draper and Dickson White, I think their names were-’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rebecca. ‘That sounds right.’

  ‘They decided attack was the better form of defence. They wanted to make the point that just because an idea is revolutionary doesn’t mean it’s wrong; and also to poke a little fun at people who insisted on clinging to stupid ways of thinking even in the teeth of irrefutable evidence.’

  ‘So they accused them of being flat-earthers?’ laughed Rebecca. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Exactly. Pure propaganda. And incredibly effective. Too effective. Now anytime someone criticises a new theory, they’re just another flat-earther. It’s pretty unfair, when you think about it. And unnecessary, too. They could have accused them of being like the people who attacked Copernicus and Galileo for putting the sun at the centre of the solar system. Or they could have even accused them of being bulge-earthers.’

  Rebecca squinted at him. ‘Bulge-earthers?’

  ‘Oh, man,’ laughed Knox. ‘This is going to get complex. Maybe that’s why they didn’t use it, come to think of it. You’ve got to go back to the Greeks. Everything was made up of four elements: earth, fire, air and water.’ The Indians, Japanese and plenty of others had believed in there being just four or five elements, but it had been the Greeks who’d influenced the Europeans, and it had been the Europeans who’d believed in the bulging earth. ‘Earth was the heaviest element, of course, because it fell through air and water. It therefore had to lie at the centre of the universe. Second heaviest was water, which surrounded earth; then came air, which surrounded water, and fire, which flamed upwards in air. But Christianity had a problem with this view, because the universe was God’s creation, and therefore perfect; and it stood to reason that a perfect universe would be arranged in a series of perfect concentric circles, with earth at its ce
ntre, and the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars all revolving around it.’

  ‘Why would that be a problem?’

  ‘Because if you put your perfect circles together with your differently weighted elements, the earth should logically have been an absolutely round ball completely submerged by water.’

  ‘Ah. So we should all have drowned by now? Or be fish?’

  ‘This was a serious conundrum,’ said Knox. ‘Medieval scholars really fretted about this stuff.’

  ‘And what was their explanation?’

  ‘It’ll sound weird, but effectively they decided that God had wanted to create man, and therefore had needed dry land, so He’d arranged the universe’s mix of elements and gravitational fields in such a way that the earth bobbed in the great world ocean, rather like an apple in a bucket.’

  ‘So just the top bit is exposed?’

  ‘Exactly. But that creates problems of its own, not least that all of the world’s exposed land had to be gathered in one place. There simply couldn’t be any land on the other side of the world.’

  ‘And people really believed this?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It was pretty much accepted wisdom in Europe in Columbus’s time; so the argument against him wasn’t just that the voyage he proposed was many thousands of miles longer than he believed; but also that it would be across a wilderness of water, and that therefore they’d have no chance of finding land and restocking on the way. But Columbus knew that there was land to the west, because he’d seen Iceland for himself; he’d heard about Greenland, Newfoundland and maybe even the northern US from the men of Bristol, who regularly fished off those coasts. And that was why he dismissed the arguments of the Spanish courtiers, and had the courage to set off.’

  ‘Bulge-earthers,’ smiled Rebecca, glowing with the new knowledge. ‘I’m going to have to use that in my next series.’

  II

  The gun dealer wasn’t due until that afternoon, so Boris took Davit into town after breakfast to buy supplies. The two-man tents on offer in the camping store weren’t designed for people the size of Davit; he could only fit diagonally. They took one each, added it to the growing mound by the counter, then returned to look at sleeping bags. ‘Damned things,’ muttered Davit, stepping into one and pulling it up to his waist. ‘It’s discrimination, that’s what it is. It’s tall-ism.’

  His good humour needled Boris. He’d been this way all morning. ‘So how’s the girlfriend?’ he asked.

  ‘I really like her,’ grinned the big man. ‘I’m thinking maybe of staying on a few days after we’re done with Knox.’

  ‘I wouldn’t make any promises,’ advised Boris. He didn’t know quite how, but Claudia had got beneath his skin. The evening before, he’d offered her fifty euros for a quick roll. The little bitch had turned him down flat. ‘A job like this, we may have to leave in a hurry.’

  ‘I’d just like to do something for her, you know? Show her a good time, buy her some nice clothes. She’s had such a hard life, and they treat her like shit at that hotel.’

  Claudia turning him down had only aggravated Boris’s itch. He’d lain awake last night listening to the two of them going at it like pigmy chimps next door. There was only one thing to do when a woman got beneath your skin this bad, and that was to fuck her until the sight of her made you sick. ‘Why don’t you ask her to come with us?’ he suggested. ‘She can cook for us, translate, even scout out Eden for us.’ This was a genuine problem that had been weighing on his mind. He and Davit shone like beacons in this place; they’d be spotted in a heartbeat as they approached Eden. But no one would look twice at Claudia if she went to their free clinic complaining of a toothache.

  ‘I don’t know, boss,’ said Davit. ‘I don’t want her tangled up in this.’

  ‘We won’t ask her to do anything risky. And we’d pay her well. Five hundred euros, say. That’s a hell of a lot of money in this place. It could change her life.’

  ‘She’d have to give up her job at the hotel.’

  ‘Make it a thousand, then. I don’t care.’ It was Sandro’s money, and he wouldn’t exactly miss it. And if Boris couldn’t manage to get Davit out of his way for long enough for him to scratch his itch good and proper, he wasn’t the man he knew himself to be.

  ‘Great,’ grinned Davit. ‘I’ll ask her when we get back.’

  III

  This coast had changed beyond recognition in the eleven years of Rebecca’s absence. New villages had appeared, old ones had grown large, and the tangled mangrove of her childhood had all but vanished, leaving it like one long beach. She glanced at Daniel at exactly the same moment he looked at her. It kept happening that way, and it unsettled her. She was here on serious business, not some frivolous jaunt. She folded her arms and looked north. They reached and passed Ifaty, though it didn’t feel as though they were racing. Daniel evidently just had the knack. When he stood up to do boat things, he walked in easy harmony with the roll, whereas she spilled all over the place. ‘Something to eat?’ she suggested.

  ‘That’d be great.’

  She unpacked two of the silver-foil packages Daniel had had their hotel prepare for them the night before. Cold boiled white rice, octopus and vegetables. She tried a mouthful. Bland, even with the tang of sea-salt on her lips. She went below in search of a bottle of her father’s home-made chilli sauce, opening cupboards at random, including a chest filled with medical supplies for patients too sick to make it to the clinic, and for anaesthetising and treating animals in the wild. She found a bottle of sauce at last, took it back up and added three drops to her rice, cautious as a scientist with a pipette, before mixing it in thoroughly with her fork. She held the bottle out to Daniel. ‘Want some?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Be careful,’ she warned. ‘It’s very hot.’

  He gave her a patronising look and splashed it all over his rice, as if to prove his manhood. She considered saying something, decided against. He took a forkful, nodded approvingly, followed it quickly with a second and then, a little more slowly, with a third. A first sheen of sweat appeared on his brow. He lifted his fourth forkful to his mouth, then hesitated. ‘Wow,’ he said, putting his fork back down. ‘You weren’t kidding.’

  ‘I did tell you.’

  ‘Yeth,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘What’th in thith thtuff?’

  She had to fight back laughter. ‘It’s my father’s homebrew,’ she told him. ‘The shops never make it hot enough for him.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Daniel lifted his fork again, then put it down untouched, stared at it bleakly. ‘Ith there any water?’

  She looked in the bag. ‘Orange juice?’ she asked.

  ‘Thankth. That would be gweat.’

  ‘No pwoblem.’

  ‘It’th not funny,’ he protested. ‘I’ve weally thcorched my tongue.’ He scowled good-naturedly as laughter finally got the better of her, and threw pinches of rice at her.

  She passed him her leftovers when she was done, leaned back against the side. The clouds had all vanished; the sun had grown hot. Her legs felt sticky and uncomfortable in her long trousers. She went below to change into shorts. Back on deck, she squirted lotion into her hands, put her foot up on the bench the better to rub it into her leg. She could sense Daniel watching, and his attention felt good. She set her foot back down, put the other one up, taking her time over it, stretching the moment out.

  The boat pitched suddenly. She yelped and tumbled into Daniel’s lap. He caught her easily, his arm around her waist. She looked into his eyes but there was nothing there to indicate he’d done it on purpose. ‘So sorry,’ he said, as he helped her back to her feet.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I

  Low sandy islets appeared offshore ahead, and the seabed became increasingly visible beneath their hull. Knox showed Rebecca how to hold a course then went to the bridge to check the charts for dangers. They hadn’t yet reached Eden’s waters, but there were more charts rolled up in a wooden umbrella stand. He pul
led one of the tubes out: it actually had two charts back-to-back inside an acetate cover, Tulear on the front, Ifaty on the reverse. He pulled out another pair, of Morombe and Morondava. The third tube also had twin maps, but different in style, and rather startling too-not least because he’d been looking at their twins just three days ago, on the wall of the Maritsa’s conference room.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Rebecca, who must have noticed his surprise.

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Just some old maps.’ His answer evidently didn’t satisfy her, for she left her position to come look. Instantly, the mainsail started flapping and they began to lose speed. ‘The Waldseemuller and the Piri Reis,’ he said, showing her the reproductions. She raised an eyebrow that he should be familiar with them, so he added: ‘They’re pretty wellknown in my line of work.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because they’re about the first maps we know of that showed America.’

  ‘Someone had to be first.’

  ‘Yes, but these were both made in the early sixteenth century, and no one’s quite sure how they were so detailed and accurate.’

  ‘Why should that be a puzzle? I thought Europeans discovered America in the 1490s.’

  ‘Yes, but they didn’t realise they’d discovered it. Not until later. Columbus went looking for the Spice Islands, remember, and he went to his grave thinking that was exactly what he’d found. So did Vespucci and the rest.’ It hadn’t been until 1513, when Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed Panama to the Pacific, that they’d finally accepted they’d found a whole new continent. ‘So how come these map-makers were drawing South America this accurately so early? Particularly its west coast, which hadn’t yet been visited?’