The Kingdom on the Waves Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2008 by M. T. Anderson

  Cover photograph copyright © 2011 by Jens Carsten Rosemann/iStockphoto

  Map illustrations copyright © 2008 by Pier Gustafson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First adult electronic edition 2011

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Anderson, M. T.

  The astonishing life of Octavian Nothing, traitor to the nation. v. #2 The kingdom on the waves / taken from accounts by his own hand and other sundry sources ; collected by Mr. M. T. Anderson of Boston. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After escaping a death sentence in the summer of 1775, Octavian and his tutor find shelter but no safe harbor in British-occupied Boston and, persuaded by Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offering freedom to slaves who join his counterrevolutionary Royal Ethiopian Regiment, Octavian and his friends soon find themselves engaged in naval raids on the Virginia coastline as the Revolutionary War breaks out in full force.

  ISBN 978-0-7636-2950-2 (hardcover)

  [1. African Americans — Juvenile fiction. 2. African Americans — Fiction. 3. Freedom — Fiction. 4. Slavery — Fiction. 5. United States — History — Revolution, 1775–1783 — Naval operations, British — Juvenile Fiction. 6. United States — History — Revolution, 1775–1783 — Naval operations, British — Fiction. 7. Virginia — History — Revolution, 1775–1783 — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A54395 Asu 2008

  [Fic] — dc22 2008929919

  ISBN 978-0-7636-4626-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5377-4 (adult paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5179-4 (electronic)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5660-7 (adult electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com

  To N.

  [TABLE OF CONTENTS]

  ARGUMENT OF THE FIRST VOLUME

  V.

  THE THEATER OF WAR

  VI.

  The KINGDOM ON THE WAVES

  VII.

  MOTHERLAND

  VIII.

  THE HOUSE OF THE STRONG

  IX.

  THE REASONING ENGINE

  X.

  TABULA RASA

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE BOY OCTAVIAN IS RAISED IN A GAUNT HOUSE by men engaged in mysterious pursuits. It is revealed that the men of the house are philosophers pursuing subtle knowledge of the arts and sciences, calling themselves The Novanglian College of Lucidity: Novanglian, for the house is located in the New England Colonies, in the town of Boston; Lucidity, for it is an age when Enlightenment illumines every corner of the unknown. The eccentricities of that College are many; the boy Octavian’s mother will not tell him of why he must live there, or why she is constrained as often she is. The reader is made acquainted with two of Octavian’s friends, a slave named Pro Bono and Octavian’s tutor, Dr. Trefusis. Through hints by these savant gentlemen and examination of his circumstances, Octavian realizes the nature of his situation: He is the subject of a great experiment, in which the scholars of the College of Lucidity seek to determine whether the capacities of the African are equal to those of the European. Accordingly, Octavian has received instruction in all of the gentle arts, in the deepest sciences, and is an excellent Latinist. The College of Lucidity having suffered some financial embarrassment, Pro Bono is given to a potential investor as a gift. As the Colonies resist taxation by the Crown, the tumults of war press themselves upon the College. Adding to the distresses of the age, the smallpox threatens the beleaguered city. Fearing disease, a revolt by the slaves, and a myriad of other destructive eventualities, the scholars of the College flee Boston and establish quarantine in the countryside, where they inoculate all of their party against the pox. Something goes amiss with the inoculation, and several members of the party suffer the full agonies of the disease. The disease proves fatal to Octavian’s mother. Dumbfounded by the scene of horror he discovers when he seeks to pay his last respects to her, Octavian flees the College of Lucidity. He takes refuge with the rebels, aiding in the fortification of the countryside as Boston, now a fastness for the King’s Army, is besieged by the Patriots. One of the Patriots, without knowledge, betrays our hero to an agent of the College of Lucidity, and the boy is again captured. Taken back to the house in the countryside, he defies his former masters. With the aid of his tutor, Dr. Trefusis, he escapes, leaving the masters of the College drugged and insensate. Dr. Trefusis and Octavian, now under fear of a sentence of death, flee towards the city and the King’s camp, where they might find safety. Octavian muses on who — the King’s forces or the rebels’ — offers the greater hope of freedom to him and his fellow Africans, embonded in the New World.

  The rain poured from the heavens as we fled across the mud-flats, that scene of desolation; it soaked through our clothes and bit at the skin with its chill. It fell hard and ceaseless from the heavens as the deluge that had both inundated Deucalion and buoyed up Noah; and as with that deluge, we knew not whether it fell as an admonition for our sins or as the promise of a brighter, newly washed morning to come.

  I left all that I knew behind me. Though the ways of the College of Lucidity were strange to the world and the habits of its academicians eccentric, they were familiar to me; and I traded them now for uncertainty and strife. Though I returned, indeed, to Boston, that town best known to me, its circumstances were changed, now that it was the seat of the King’s Army and sat silent and brooding in the Bay. We knew not what we would find therein.

  Dr. Trefusis and I stumbled across the ribbed sand. Treading through seaweed mounded in pools, we slithered and groped, that we might retain our footing; and on occasions, we fell, Dr. Trefusis’s hands bleeding from the roughness of rock and incision of barnacles.

  We wound through the meanders that led between stubbled mud-banks in no straight or seemly course. I pulled Dr. Trefusis out of the ditches where water still ran over the silt. We crawled over knolls usually submerged by the Bay. At some point, soaked, he shed his coat.

  After a time, there was no feature but the sand, corrugated with the action of the tides. We made our way across a dismal plain, groping for detail, sight obscured.

  But that morning I had been a prisoner, a metal mask upon my face, and my jowls larded with my own vomit, in a condition which could hardly have been more debased; but that morning I had watched the masters of my infancy and youth writhe upon the floor and fall into unpitied slumber, perhaps their bane. A sentence of death might already rest upon my head. The thought of this plagued me — the memory of those bodies on the floor, bound with silken kerchiefs — and I found I could not breathe, and wished to run faster, that I might recover my breath.

  Tumbling through the darkness of those flats, revolving such thoughts amidst utter indistinctness, I feared I would never again find myself; all I knew was lost and sundered from me; I knew not anymore what actuated me. We ran on through the night, across the sand, and it was as Dr. Trefusis had always avowed in his sparkish philosophy, that there was no form nor matter, that we acted our lives in an emptiness decorated with an empty show of substance, and a darkness infinite behind it.

  Forms and figures loomed out of the rain: boulders in our path, gruesome as ogres to my suscep
tible wits, hulking, pocked and eyed with limpets, shaggy with weeds.

  We came upon a capsized dinghy in the mud, mostly rotted, and barrels half-sunk. My aged companion now leaned upon my shoulder as we walked, his breath heavy in his chest.

  Once, I started with terror at a ratcheting upon my foot, to find a horseshoe crab trundling past in search of a pool, its saber-tail and lobed armor grotesque in the extreme. Dr. Trefusis, wheezing, greeted it, “Old friend.”

  His amiability to the crab, I feared, was merely a pretense to stop our running. He did not seem well.

  We could no longer detect the city, the night was so black, so full of water and motion, so unsparing was the drench. Our senses disorganized, our frames trembling with cold, we calculated as best we could the direction of our town and made our way across that countryside of dream.

  Once I was shown by the scholars of the College a rock, spherical in shape, which, when chiseled open, revealed a tiny cavern of crystal; and they told me that these blunt stones often held such glories; that though some were filled only with dust, others, when broke open, enwombed the skeletons of dragons or of fish, beaked like birds. Thus I felt in approaching my city; that place which seemed known stone, but which, when riven after its long gestation, might contain either wonders, or ash, or the death in infancy of some clawed terror.

  We found ourselves at the brink of the returning tide. We walked through it without notice, so thick was the very air with water, until the flood reached Dr. Trefusis’s knees, and there he halted, swaying. “I cannot continue,” said he. “I will return to shore.”

  Thus his offer; but well did I know that he had no intention of returning to the bank and could not unassisted, did he wish to. I was aware that if I left him, he would sink to the ground and allow the waters to cover him.

  I instructed him to climb upon my shoulders.

  “I will drag you down, Octavian.”

  “You have risked your all for me, sir; and it is only right that I do the same for you.”

  He considered this, and at length, we now feeling the motion of the tide through our legs, said, “When I become burdensome, cast me off backwards.”

  I leaned down as best I could with the waters rising, and he clambered atop me, clawing at my head and neck for purchase. When he was situated, I stood again and began striding through the returning sea.

  I know not whether we miscalculated the hour and season of the tides; whether we had stumbled too far out in the darkness; whether the mud-flats were less passable than they appeared from the shore, flat puddles actually concealing deeps; or whether, had we been able to see the topography of the mud-flats around us, we could have avoided this current by circumnavigation. There was no time to ponder the extremity and futility of our progress. I walked on, clutching the ankles of my shivering tutor.

  The water soon was around my waist. The tails of my shirt were licked to the side. By such actions of the tide, at least, I determined the direction of the mouth of the Bay, whereby the water returned; and knowing this, I oriented myself so that we headed, as I figured it, near to due north, so we would intersect with the city, were we not swallowed up by the waves.

  The waves came up around my elbows. They slapped at my chest. One beat as high as my neck, and I struggled to remain upon my feet, hitting at the water for balance.

  “Saint Christopher carried the infant Christ upon his shoulders,” murmured Dr. Trefusis above my head. “And now, the child carries me.”

  “You have carried me often enough, sir,” said I. “Whenever you praised me to Mr. Sharpe, you held my head above the water. For that, I owe you my eternal gratitude.”

  “My boy,” said Dr. Trefusis, weeping, and he slapped his hand, clammy and shaking, on my forehead.

  This display of sentiment was interrupted by a detonation so loud I stumbled. It was, I perceived, summer lightning cutting through the storm, etching mud and spire.

  “No worry,” said Dr. Trefusis. “The most excellent place one could be in a lightning storm is stranded in the middle of a wide, featureless plain, chest-deep in water.”

  “The lightning has at least afforded us a glimpse of the city, sir. It is to our right.”

  “We will not reach it, Octavian. Throw me off and swim.”

  “I can do no such thing.”

  He sighed and tapped my arms. “I hope to meet Louis the Fourteenth again in Hell.”

  “Do not speak of that place, sir.”

  “I was but a child when introduced to him. I should like to ascertain if even in the flaming chasms of Tartarus, he wears high-heels.”

  “Please, sir.” I stumbled onwards.

  Again, the lightning rolled through the heavens. This time, I perceived something near to us — a dark shape upon the water but a few rods off. I believed it was a boat.

  I stalked forwards, the water now risen fully to my chest. The drag upon my limbs was considerable. With difficulty did I make my way across the seaweed beds and barnacled rocks beneath us.

  The boat rested upon the waves; and therein, slumped, was a single, cowled figure. There was a lantern before him, fixed to the seat, which illumination touched the edges of objects obscure in their outlines.

  The water surged past my swaying frame, and I sought to remain tall as the wavelets teased me.

  The cowled figure perhaps surveyed us, or perhaps was hunched in sleep or even death.

  “Sirrah,” said Dr. Trefusis. “You are in a boat, and we are out of one.”

  I reached out and seized upon the gunwale of the boat. “Sir,” said I, “we must beg your mercy. Might we climb aboard?”

  The figure, dimly seen in lamplight, pulled one oar free of the lock and suspended it above my hands, prepared to do violence to my grasping fingers.

  “Gentle Charon,” said Dr. Trefusis, “conveyancer of the dead, I have obols on my tongue.”

  The figure made to strike us with his oar.

  Rapidly, I translated: “My master offers you money.”

  The figure regarded us. “Ye,” said it, “are a strange kind of fish.”

  “Never has fish been so eager to be landed,” said Dr. Trefusis. “Though not, perhaps, gutted.”

  “When this fish talks of ‘money,’ what does it mean?”

  “Sums in excess of one crown for passage to the city.”

  “Describe the excess, sir.”

  “Two shillings. I offer you a crown and two shillings.”

  “In fish money. Surely that ain’t good human money. Refigure. What d’ye call that in the money of men?”

  “In human currency, I should think that an even pound.”

  “Y’art a good, talkative fish, but not strong in sums.”

  “Perhaps I mistook the exchange,” said Dr. Trefusis. “A guinea.”

  “And two shillings more for not slitting ye and frying.”

  “Agreed,” said Dr. Trefusis. He reached out to grasp the lip of the boat.

  Our conductor said, “One other rule, sirs: Ye glimpse my face, and I cut your throats.”

  Dr. Trefusis climbed aboard. The water was now moving strongly against my chest. My weight being much greater than Dr. Trefusis’s, there was some danger of my upsetting the craft as I clambered aboard. Both my tutor and our mysterious captain leaned out over the water opposite to me, that they might right the boat while I struggled over its gunwales. The boat was heavy laden with casks covered in a tarpaulin. I scrambled up, heaved by our captain’s hand, and lay panting upon the boards.

  Once we were settled, facing resolutely away from our host and his fatal visage, he commenced rowing.

  Dr. Trefusis and I huddled side by side, our eyes fixed upon points in the darkness, that we might avoid any accidental glimpse of our captain’s features. We heard only his rowing and felt the advancement afforded by his strokes upon the oars. We kept ourselves in silence, in obedience to his dictatorial will.

  I know not what his errand, so hidden in obscurity, was that night. After a half an ho
ur, we were approached by a whaleboat, also marked with a lantern upon her, and the two drifted without words until they were joined in comfortable parallel. Shadowed sailor confronted murky oarsman like a levee of the dead. “Gift for your mama,” said our shrouded captain. Without further parley, he unloaded his wooden casks from beneath the tarpaulin, and they were received by two figures on the other vessel, which wraiths stowed them under a cloth and produced a purse that they proffered to our host. He took it, said only, “Keep them dry, boys,” and began to row away.

  The rain had lessened now. The returning Bay was fully in sweep around our prow. It was but fifteen minutes after that we approached the wharves of our interdicted city.

  Our revenant rowed to the side of a dock and held it with one hand. “Two pound,” he said.

  Dr. Trefusis did not argue. He reached into his shirt, drew forth a money-bag, and paid out the sum.

  We rose and stepped out of the boat.

  We were come at last to the city.

  Our spectral host lifted his hands from the dock, thus giving himself over to the directions and exhortations of the tide; and with that, he was swept away into the darkness.

  Our mysterious ferryman having deposited us on a wharf off Essex Street, we made our way to South Street, where Dr. Trefusis recalled that there was an inn that might accommodate us. This found — the Graven Bull — we roused the innkeeper and begged a room.

  It must be admitted that we presented an image little calculated to quell fears of the indigent and the beggar: a tall, gawky Negro boy in torn breeches and loose smock (and, as most certainly I was, wild-eyed with fatigue and the allure of the cook-fire within), and an aged man in tattered stockings and breeches so involved in mud that their color could no longer be descried. Though that very morning, Dr. Trefusis had been dressed in all the finery of leisure and the cut of fashion, now was he reduced to the appearance of one who had snatched his clothes from a rag-cart, being slashed from barnacles, bruised from falls on stone, wigless and almost hairless, a few wisps straggling down the side of his skull, dripping with rain as he shivered and coughed profoundly.