PRINKEPS AMERIKAE
A science fiction novel by
Jeff Provine
Shipwrecked
Chapter II
Jason Chapman awoke with a sharp headache. He opened his eyes and winced at even the dim light. Opening his eyes more slowly, he squinted and looked around him.
He was still in the cabin, which was lit by one of the portholes where the shades had fallen off. A drawer had burst open, spraying clothes everywhere. Pictures had fallen, books were strewn beside the bookshelves, and most of the cabinet doors had popped their locks, leaking out various containers. His bicycle had fallen from its restraints and lay half-hanging off his unmade bed. The cabin looked like it had been hit by an earthquake, and Jason imagined it might have. Years of higher education failed to tell him what the strange storm had been.
The most plausible explanation he could conjure up was that he had gotten into the wine supply and hallucinated, wrecking up the place before passing out. It had to be right. Jason began to laugh at himself, but the chuckles made his head pound harder, and he stopped.
Taking a deep breath in hopes that excess oxygen would drown out the pain, he pulled himself up by the wooden rungs of the ladder. Once on his feet, the blood drained out of his head, and his vision blacked out. His body wavered while his skin prickled After a second, his heart beat hard enough to keep up with the strain, and he could see again.
“Ow,” was the only word Jason could muster.
He smacked his dry mouth, tasting the ubiquitous salt of the ocean, and decided his first goal should be rehydration. It would be rational whether last night was an inexplicable storm or a night of uncharacteristic boozing. He repressed another laugh and stumbled toward the galley.
The cabin was a glorified bedroom with a kitchenette and bathroom attached. On land, it was nothing special, but, at sea, it was an impressive double-sized bunk beside a galley and a head, complete with tiny shower. It was the best his father’s money could buy. The built-in stereo and small television was surrounded by polished wood. Jason had not bothered to get the satellite TV link and instead depended on the small collection of DVDs he had brought along with him. He hadn’t watched any of them since he found himself able to quote every line of the Princess Bride.
Jason opened the cabinet and found a couple of the glasses broken. He grimaced at the shattered glass and reached around it for an unbroken one. Clearing a misplaced towel off the fresh water tap, he filled the glass, drained it, and repeated the process.
Feeling a little rejuvenated, Jason raided the medicine chest for some aspirin. There were three bottles, two still unopened. He swallowed a couple of pills, then looked himself over for anything that would need to be bandaged. There were a few bruises, but he had escaped the night without serious injury.
Jason turned back to the mess in the cabin. He wrinkled his nose and decided to leave it for later. First he would lie out on the deck for a while and sleep off his hangover.
He stumbled over the debris, grabbing a fresh shirt on the way, and climbed up the ladder. The lock was jammed, and Jason blinked at it. Last night must have been one heck of a dream.
Jason worked the lock loose and threw the hatch open. As he peeked up, he took inventory of everything on deck as his eyes grew accustomed to the bright sun. Ropes were thrown around at random, but the fishing gear and life vests were still in their plastic locker just as they should have been. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite place what.
Jason looked up at the clear, blue sky above and tried to think. After a second of staring, he realized that the entire mast and sail were missing.
Jason felt his eyes bug. He blinked them back into place, then jumped out of the hatch. His bare feet clambered over the warm wood of the deck. Jason jumped over the wheel and then onto the shortened mast itself.
He hugged it, holding himself in place as he stared at the break. It was a clean cut, too clean, perfect. No saw nor anything short of a laser could make that smooth of a slice. There were no scorch marks, just perfectly flat wood, even to the white paint. It was as if the mast had simply vanished.
An aching sensation in Jason’s chest woke him, and he remembered to breathe. He let go of the short mast and slid back down to the deck. His eyes did not leave the mystery, just stared until he had to shake his head and look away.
“That is just too weird,” Jason said aloud.
He turned completely around to look at anything else. Instead of being in the middle of the blue ocean as he should have been, he was near the coast. Cliffs on the shoreline stood resolute against pounding surf. Brown rocks jutted out of the water to the left. In the distance, he could see a few puffs of smoke from what must have been a village.
Last night he had been more than one hundred miles out to sea. There was no way he could have blown this far in just one night, especially without a sail. Jason squinted out at the horizon as if it were just a mirage.
The vista of land stayed put, and Jason looked down at the brown sea water below. It was murky, the kind dredged up as the currents came close to land. The yacht itself was jammed against a rocky pile of sand, with white, foamy waves splashing against the sides. It was stuck; he was shipwrecked.
“And it’s not a dream,” Jason finally admitted to himself. He felt better hearing words, even if they were his own.
The morning air was crisp and carried a hint of cool wetness in the breeze. Birds were cawing in the distance. Jason thought he could see other ships bobbing amid the low waves near the village. Everything looked peaceful and pleasant, total opposition to the confusion and desperation swirling inside him.
Jason took a deep breath and stretched his arms and fingers out as far as they would go. Letting the breath out, he began to talk to himself.
“All right, so you’re shipwrecked. A problem, but not a big one. Call the Portuguese coast guard, they’ll get you unstuck, and we’ll all have a nice laugh about it in the local tavern.”
Jason nodded at the self-given orders and set to work. He climbed across the deck to the helm. The deck was almost even, but set at just enough of an angle in the sand that his bare feet could barely grip the damp wood.
Fumbling with the lock, Jason opened the cabinet beneath the radio and let the various foreign-language dictionaries fall out. The Portuguese one followed Murphy’s Law at being at the bottom, tucked under the French, Spanish, Italian, and German dictionaries. He had gotten them to translate with locals, but it seemed that nearly everyone spoke some English in the twenty-first century. Besides, a few American dollars or tourist euros made them accept you as a long-lost relative. Jason smirked at himself.
Still smirking, Jason picked up the microphone and clicked the radio to outgoing. “This is Jason Chapman of the ship Argo, registered United States. I’m in a bit of a pickle here, so some help would be nice.”
Jason rolled his eyes at himself and waited for a response with a heavy Portuguese accent.
There was no reply.
Jason squinted at the silent radio. He twisted the volume knob to its maximum, but all he could hear was the distant crackling of static.
Setting down the microphone, Jason flipped through the dictionary. Piecing together words with the brief grammar instructions, he tried again, “Meu nome é Jason Chapman. Eu requeiro o auxílio.”
He had no idea whether it was good enough to be interpreted. The silence was so eerie that he would have been satisfied with a fisherman calling in to laugh at him.
Jason let the radio sit silently for a minute or so, then tried again. Again, there was no response.
Finally Jason turned to his days in the Boyscouts and started tapping out Morse Code for SOS. He hummed along, “Short, short, short. Long, long, long. Short, short, short.”
Only fuzzy crackles of static replied.
Jason bit his lip. Everyone knew the international code for distress from movies, even if they had never handled a radio. Something was not right.
He flipped through the frequencies one by one, listening for any kind of chatter. There was nothing. The waves should have carried at least something, whether police dispatches, weather reports, or idle chatter from a ham radio. There was nothing.
Jason looked across the board of instruments. Everything seemed normal; even the barometer was sitting at a high pressure mark, matching the clear, blue morning skies. The GPS, however, was blinking. It flashed, reading that it was sending out signals, but could not get anything in return. There should have been a dozen satellites to pick up. Instead, it was as if the skies were empty.
Kicking the radio box in desperation, Jason turned away and let out an angry sigh with as much air as his lungs could muster. He looked out at the black puffs of smoke in the distance. Even the remotest fishing village would have a radio. Maybe they didn’t understand and didn’t want to admit their fault.
Jason shook his head and looked back at the equipment. There was a rational explanation for this, there had to be. Wrinkling his forehead in thought, Jason searched for it.
His mind flashed. He looked up and said aloud, “The mast.”
The antenna had run the length of the mast. With the mast gone, the antenna was shortened to a few feet. Long-range communication was out.
“Still,” Jason said to himself, stopping his thinking. He scanned the horizon for the village. It would have been in range of the radio even without an antenna.
Confusion fogged his mind. Jason rolled his eyes and decided that thinking wouldn’t solve anything. He needed action.
If the villagers wouldn’t answer English on the radio, then he would go talk to them in person.
Jason slid across the deck to where a large metal box was built into the hull. It read, “Emergency Life Raft.”
Jason nodded. This qualified as an emergency.
He flipped the latches and pulled out a bundle of rubber and plasti-coated rope. It was heavier than it looked, and Jason tumbled on his first grip. Heaving the mass out onto the deck, he kicked it over until the printed instructions showed.
“Pull cord,” was all of the pertinent information. There were four paragraphs in three languages from the company dismissing liability of injury if the cord were, in fact, pulled.
Jason took a breath, then yanked the cord and jumped back.
The bundle jumped to life with a loud gasping sound and leaped out into a vague round shape. The long gasp continued as trapped air expanded and inflated the rubber ring into a lifeboat.
“There,” Jason said, placing his hands on his hips. He gave a nod to his handiwork.
After allowing himself a second of self-satisfaction, Jason reached into the box and grabbed two short wooden paddles. He tossed them into the boat and picked up the edge to push it into the water past the stern of the ship.
A spark in Jason’s mind stopped him. He dropped the boat and edged past it to the hatch leading below. Scrambling across the overturned mess, he came to one of the few drawers that still held its contents. He shoved some books out of the way and pulled the drawer as far out as it would go.
Digging past a pile of socks, Jason’s fingers touched a wooden cigar box. He pulled it into the light and flipped the top. A six-shot revolver and two cardboard boxes of ammunition looked up at him from inside. According to family legend, the gun had belonged to his grandfather. Even if it were a few decades old, it would still get the job done.
Jason tucked the revolver into one pocket of his jeans and put the rest of the bullets into the other. He set the box on the bed and crawled back over the mess to the deck.
Once topside, Jason stuffed the Portuguese dictionary into his back pocket along with his waterproof wallet and pushed the lifeboat over the back of the ship. It fell more like a rock than a light craft and landed with a generous splash. Jason took a final look around the deck, locked the hatch, and climbed down the side of the stern into the bouncing lifeboat.
The waves were rolling, not large, but strong enough to make the rubber boat rock up and down. Jason pawed at the sea with his paddle, doing his best to push the craft forward. It was designed for at least two paddlers and several passengers, and Jason’s paddling made the overly light craft want to turn in a circle.
Grunting with more frustration than exhaustion, Jason paddled several strokes on one side before switching to the other. Every few minutes, he would look back at the marooned yacht, perched on its black-brown pile of rocks. It gradually sank into the distance.
Jason looked back at the village before him and grimaced. It had not seemed to have moved at all. Gritting his teeth, he set in paddling as determinedly as he could.
It took nearly an hour to make any real progress. Jason’s t-shirt and hair were soaked with sweat and spray from the sea. It was cold, but the exertion made him boil. He panted and wanted desperately to stop and rest his aching shoulders, but he wanted more desperately to get to the village. The faster he talked to someone, the faster he would get out of this mess.
The village slowly approached, looking as tiny up close as it had from a distance. There were low, shabby buildings built in a Mediterranean style with stucco walls and red-tiled roofs. A fleet of unpainted wooden sailboats were beached on the sandy shore, with figures milling around them. As he came closer, Jason could see old rope nets strewn among them. The village must have been the poorest in western Europe.
“Maybe they can’t afford a radio,” Jason mumbled to himself.
He grimaced at the idea, then shook his head. Portugal was a first world country, or at least second. They had to have something in the way of communication.
As he came to within the last few hundred yards, Jason could make out the figures on the beach. The people were clad in rags, or at least what looked like rags. They were made out of clean and colorful cloth, but were simple tunics tied off with rope at the waist. It was like something out of the Middle Ages.
Jason’s eyebrows stitched curiously. National Geographic showed that even tribes in the rain forest wore t-shirts, yet these people didn’t. All he could bring himself to say was repeating, “That’s weird.”
The people stood on the beach amid baskets of fish and enormous rope nets. They were staring out at the sea, straight in Jason’s direction. Every so often they would point and talk to one another, but for the most part they merely stared at him.
Jason felt his nervous skin prickle. He wanted to charge toward the shore, but he had to wait and paddle, stretching the awkwardness into an almost physical pain.
At last Jason reached shallow water. He tossed the oar aside and jumped into the waves, which reached up to his knees. The boat bumped into his legs, and he grabbed the rope strung alongside the inflated rubber ring, holding it behind him.
The crowd on the beach stood in a thin mass, each one peeking over the shoulder of the other without coming closer.
Jason cleared his throat. “Um, hello!”
A rumble of murmurs broke out among the poor people. Several of them stepped backward, away from him.
The waves lowered, and the lifeboat pulled at Jason’s hand as if trying to escape back to the sea. He held it and pulled back, dragging it toward the land.
The people stepped away from him, their brown eyes wide as they stared. Some of them had their line of sight locked on Jason, while others looked at the lifeboat. Even as they stared, they moved away.
Jason heaved the craft into the sand, but it stuck halfway. He pulled, and it did not move. With a sigh, he turned toward the people.
“Um, help?” Jason asked. He wanted to reach for the dictionary, but he did not like the idea of his lifeboat floating away while he tried to deal with locals.
No one moved.
Jason sighed again. He looked a few of the bigger men in their eyes, then pointed at the boat and moved his finger toward the shore.
No one moved again for several seconds. Finally, one of the young men stepped forward and grabbed the other side of the boat. Jason nodded, and they pulled the boat ashore.
Jason let the rope fall out of his hand. He took several deep breaths to compose himself, then turned to the man who had helped him. His skin looked scalded by the sun and beaten by the salt air, but Jason imagined he was only a few years younger than himself.
The man was bent over the boat, squinting at the rubber sides. He petted it and poked it, as if he was unsure what to make of the bright orange material.
Jason resisted snorting a laugh. He pulled out his dictionary and flipped to the list of handy phrases. After a second’s pause, he waved his hand to get the young man’s attention.
The man looked up from the boat and stared at Jason with his mouth agape.
Jason checked the dictionary, then proudly said, “Dom dia.”
The man’s eyes squinted, changing from wide awe to utter perplexity.
Jason rolled his eyes. His pronunciation could not have been that bad. Making a fresh sigh of frustration, he simply bowed in a friendly manner.
The man seemed to understand that. He lowered his
head several times, then called out, “Salve, hospes.”
Jason flipped fervently through the pages of the dictionary. The
man had said something about saving, but that was all he could make into sense.
Jason finally looked up and replied simply, “Um, what?”
The man blinked, then seemed to nod in understanding. “Khairein.”
Jason again dived into the dictionary, but came up lacking. This was get him nowhere. He took a breath and decided to take the initiative.
“Meu nome é Jason Chapman,” Jason told him, reading from the dictionary’s phrase list again. He pointed to himself. “American.”
“American,” the man repeated slowly, looking less confused.
Jason smiled and nodded eagerly. “Right.”
“America ubi estque?” the man asked.
Jason held up a hand to stop him. He would answer questions later.
“My boat crashed,” Jason said, pointing out to the yacht on the rock. Its white hull was almost invisible with the white mist on the horizon. “I need help.”
The man looked over Jason’s shoulder, blinked, then looked at Jason again.
“My boat,” Jason repeated. He flipped through the dictionary. “Navis.”
“Navis,” the man said. He squinted, then asked, “Navicula?”
“Yes, right!” Jason said. “My navicula.”
The man laughed and began to grin excitedly. He pointed at the rubber lifeboat and said, “Navicula tua.”
Jason felt a bubble of hope rise inside him. They
were communicating at least a little. He nodded with large swoops of his head.
“Right. My boat. It’s crashed. I need to call someone for help.” He took a
breath and spoke very slowly. “Do you have a radio?”
“Ray-dee-oh,” the man repeated. He was still grinning.
“Yes, radio,” Jason said. “Or a telephone. A telephone would be great.”
The man blinked and his grin faded slightly. “Tele-phon?”
Jason stretched his pinky and thumb and pressed his hand to the side of his face like a cell phone. “You know, telephone.”
The man’s grin disappeared. Squinting, he emulated Jason making his own sign for a telephone. He made a hopeful smile.
Jason rolled his eyes and gurgled a new aggravated sigh. He slipped the dictionary into his pocket and pointed to his telephone-shaped hand. “Yes, telephone. Do you have one?”
The man slowly shifted and pointed to his own hand sign. He nodded along with Jason.
Maybe they were communicating, maybe they were so lost in sign language that neither had any clue about the other. Jason narrowed his eyes but kept his smile. He asked, “You’re just emulating me like a monkey, aren’t you?”
The man made a broad, confused smile and pointed at his outstretched hand again.
Jason dropped his hands and let out a rumbling groan. Even if the man partially understood “telephone”, he was holding out on Jason.
Slowly, Jason reached to his other back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He should have known he would have to empty out his spare change as a bribe. Digging into the coin pocket, Jason pulled out a euro coin of cupronickel ringed in brass.
Jason handed it to the man. Nodded assuredly, Jason said slowly, “Now, telephone.”
The man took the coin and looked at it with gaping eyes. He flipped it over and over, feeling its face with the tips of his fingers.
“Telephone,” Jason said to remind him.
The man nodded and made the hand-sign again. He held out his hand for another coin.
Jason sighed through his nose. He did not have time to haggle over the simple matter of a phone.
Jason dug out a large two-euro coin and turned to the crowd standing around them.
“Listen up!” he shouted. Volume would make up for what vocabulary he lacked. “Two euros for a telephone. Get it? Telephone. Dois euros!”
The people made a collective gasp of excitement and charged toward him, hands outstretched.
Jason’s heart immediately leaped into a fit of terrified pounding. The rag-clad people looked as if they would smother him. He only needed one telephone, not a whole town to tell him where to find one.
He held his hands up to stop them, but the people swarmed in close.
“No!” Jason shouted. “No euros until you take me to a telephone!”
A calloused fisherman’s hand snatched the coin from his fingers. Jason tried to see which person owned the hand, but arms were getting tangled as the mob pressed in to grab more money. Taking a few steps backward, Jason tried to bat the hands away, but they were dexterous in fishing into his wallet for coins.
Finally Jason turned the wallet upside-down and dumped out a mixture of European, British, and American change onto the sand. The people dove to the ground, clambering over one another to snatch up the coins. It could not have been more than ten dollars, but it seemed the whole village was after it.
When the coins had all been taken, those without money looked up at him and held out their hands.
Jason swallowed and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s it. No more.”
They walked toward him, slowly, their hands and mouths wide.
“I said no more!” Jason shouted. “Not until I talk on a telephone!”
At the word telephone, the people began extending their pinkies and thumbs and pressing their hands to the sides of their faces.
“That’s not going to cut it,” Jason told them. He held up his wallet and pointed. “I will give you money… um, dinheiro, but not until I talk on a telephone.”
Someone made a swipe for his wallet. It tumbled out of Jason’s hand and fell in the wet sand close to the line of waves.
Jason instinctively stomped on the wallet, protecting it under his foot. His empty hands dove into his pocket, pulling out the revolver. He brandished it with both hands, pointing angrily at the closest few villagers.
“Okay, that’s it!” Jason shouted. “Back up!”
The villagers did not seem to pay any attention to the firearm in Jason’s hand. They merely circled around him, hands either outstretched or mimicking telephones.
Jason pointed the gun into the air and pulled the trigger. A deafening roar rang out.
Everyone on the beach stopped. For a moment, no one moved, just stared. Then, as suddenly as they had frozen, the villagers burst to life and tumbled over one another as they tried to flee. Several of the women in the back began screaming. Children joined them with crying. The men mostly scattered, running as fast as they could toward the buildings. A few stayed still, frozen with their eyes and mouths wide in shock.
Emotion flooded through Jason’s veins. The gun gave him a sense of power, but he was almost as afraid of it as the villagers were. His hands shook.
“All right, then,” Jason said slowly.
He looked at the few of the crowd who were still there. The younger man to whom he had first spoken was standing nearby, his hands trembling around the euro in his fingers.
“Now,” Jason said. “Take me to a telephone.”
The man whimpered and his trembling spread to his whole body.
Jason took out the dictionary and juggled it with the handgun. “Traga-me a um telefone.”
The man’s mouth moved, but he did not seem able to form words.
“Agora!” Jason shouted
With a sharp cry, the man fell to the ground and lay prostrate in front of Jason. He wailed, yelling something about “venia da”, but Jason could not make any sense out of it.
Jason felt his shoulders sink. It was totally hopeless. He might as well return to his boat and try to break it loose with a lever.
“All right,” Jason said more calmly. “I’m going back to my boat… navicula mea, right? Call the coast guard if you get a chance… um, chame o protetor de costa. I think.”
Jason tucked the dictionary and the still-warm gun into his pockets and picked up his much lighter wallet. He walked slowly, heading back toward the rubber lifeboat while keeping an eye on everything around him. The other people on the beach were bowing now, mumbling things themselves. It sounded more Italian than Portuguese to Jason, and he doubted he had an ear for the language at all.
He dragged the boat back into the surf and began the long process of paddling back out to the rocks where the boat rested. The sun was high and hot, and Jason imagined that it would be one or two o’clock by the time he got back. Half of the first day of his shipwrecked adventure had been for nothing.
As he paddled, he thought that he should not have even gotten his hopes up. Judging from how simply dressed they all were and how they swarmed over a few coins, the villagers must have been the broke end of the country. They probably didn’t even have a telephone.
“Oh, well, maybe I’ll get lucky,” Jason told himself. “Maybe one of them will run off to tell a governor or magistrate or whatever they have in rural Portugal.”
Jason snorted a laugh at himself. “Yeah, and maybe the US Navy will show up out of nowhere with a rescue helicopter.”
He was on his own, as he had been for the past few weeks, but now he was actually in a dire situation. There did not seem to be any way out of it, or at least none that would come to his oxygen-starved mind as he paddled. Jason kicked himself for not spending the extra few hundred dollars to get a satellite phone.
After what felt like the whole afternoon, Jason reached his yacht. The tide had gone out, and the Argo was stuck up higher on the rocks than before. He couldn’t haul the lifeboat out of the water by himself, so he tied it to the railing of the yacht above. Then he clambered onto the deck and lay panting for a few minutes.
Not knowing what else to do, Jason set to cleaning up the mess. He munched on a few power bars from the galley while he repacked his clothes, restacked books, and rehung his bicycle on the wall.
The task would have taken about an hour, but Jason stretched it out, taking careful stock of all he had. There were provisions for another week, so long as he did not mind a few meals of just pork and beans. As long as he didn’t mind a salt-water shower, he had enough fresh water in the tanks for another week, plus the stack of bottled water beneath the fridge.
Then there was the diesel, which was almost full. He could squeeze out a few hundred more miles in it with good currents, which would be plenty to get to Lisbon harbor without the sail. Still, Jason decided he should be careful and not run the generator more than needed.
Instead, he sat below deck in the shadows of the lowering sun and sipped a can of grape juice. His mind was spinning with all the success of tires in the mud, trying to gain the traction of an idea. He had no way of pushing the yacht free himself, despite the Goldberg devices his imagination wanted to dream up.
Taking a long look at the bicycle, Jason said to himself, “You know, you could cycle for help.”
The idea seemed reasonable. He’d make landfall at the village in the morning, get a town name and bearings on a map, then cycle toward Lisbon or wherever he could find a place big enough for a telephone or at least a policeman. A full sensation of hope settled into his stomach. He might very well make it, using his own internal strength.
A sudden banging sound overhead made the hope scatter and disappear. Jason looked upward at the white ceiling as if he could see beyond it.
There was another bang, followed by the softer padding of heavy footsteps. Someone had come aboard.
“Great,” was all Jason could bring himself to say.
Breathing heavily through his nose to keep from hyperventilating, Jason pulled open all of the shutters of the portholes and looked out. At first, all he could see was the blue of the ocean or brown of the rocky sand of the land, but at the rear port window he found what he expected.
One of the wooden fishing boats was rocking gently in the waves with two men standing on the deck with ropes in their hands. They were staring back at the boat, their gaze locked above the porthole where Jason was peeking. Their bodies seemed stiff and slow, as if they were uneasy.
“I’ll give ‘em something to be uneasy about,” Jason muttered. “Nobody robs my boat.”
He grabbed his revolver and climbed up the ladder one-handed. His teeth were gritted and eyes squinted, ready to burst out in the glaring western sun. Just before he charged, he stopped himself and decided to scope out the situation.
Jason peeked slowly up from the hatch. There were a pair of feet and ankles on the deck, clad in winding leather sandals. Jason looked up higher and checked for anyone else, but it looked like only one person had dared to trespass on his boat.
Jason rose slowly out of the hatch, bringing his revolver along with him. The man on the boat was by the wheel, staring and mumbling as he looked over the various electronic equipment. Jason imagined the man was deciding what to steal first.
“Hey!” Jason called.
The man jumped and spun, falling against the raised foredeck of the boat. It was the younger man who had tried to communicate with Jason earlier.
Jason frowned and lowered his gun. “What are you doing here?”
The man stuttered out something Jason couldn’t understand, then fell prostrate to the deck. He shook visibly and stretched out his hands as if in penance.
Jason sighed. He tucked the revolver into his pocket and walked over to the man. “Hey, buddy, I wasn’t going to kill you, just scare you a bit.”
The man looked up with wide, fearful eyes and pointed past Jason.
Turning around slowly, Jason searched for a potential attacker. There was nothing even remotely dangerous. Instead, he found a large wooden tray piled with smoked fishes, flowers, and various bowls of dark purple liquid. Nearby, a small gold tray held what looked like an old piece of parchment.
“That’s weird,” Jason said. He had to stop and think to make sense of it. After a few clueless seconds, he decided that the villagers were presenting him with some kind of gift in recompense for attacking him earlier.
Not knowing what else to do, Jason picked up the letter and tried to read. The note was handwritten with block letters and no spaces between words. It wasn’t Portuguese or French, which he could have recognized immediately. Maybe it was Spanish or Italian.
Jason scratched his head. “I guess that makes sense.”
The man behind him said something. Jason did not even try to begin translating it.
Turning around, Jason pointed at the man. “Get up.”
The man looked up at him.
Jason motioned, pointing at him and then at the wooden boat floating nearby. “Go on, get out of here.”
The man slowly rose to his knees.
Jason pointed toward the other boat. “Get off my boat!”
The man nodded eagerly and scrambled over the railing. He disappeared, and a splash soon followed. More water splashed as the man swam hurriedly away.
Jason walked carefully over the deck and stood tall to peer over the edge. The man was swimming away quickly. Beyond him, the two men on the ship were still standing like statues.
Jason looked away from the villagers and back at the little present. It looked good, and he wondered if it was fit to eat. He was not in a position to catch food poisoning just yet, so he decided he would let it sit for now.
He jogged to the radio and picked the Portuguese dictionary out from where he had stuck it. After flipping through the pages, he looked out at the villagers. The two were helping the young man back into the boat.
When the men had settled, Jason called, “Obrigado para o presente!”
The villagers looked at one another. Jason saw their mouths move, but he could not hear them.
Not that their words would have made any sense. Jason imagined the expression on his face looked as confused as theirs. It was as if these people didn’t understand Portuguese at all.
Realization sparked in the back of Jason’s mind. The hairs rose on the back of his neck. This was not Portugal. The storm had driven him somewhere else.
He looked back at the paper and tried to make sense of it. There were a few words that seemed recognizable, but he couldn’t piece it together.
Jason looked up from the paper, folded it, and decided to try to translate it later with the other dictionaries. Maybe he had come to the Azores or some unknown island outside the Mediterranean held by French-Italians.
The men on the boat were still standing there, as if they were waiting for something. Jason squinted at them and wished they would move on and leave him in peace. He had enough to worry about trying to find help tomorrow without locals sneaking around leaving presents on his ship.
It was then that a loud horn blast shook the air.
Jason jumped and had to grip the rail to steady himself. He looked left and right, trying to place the sound. It seemed to have come from the land, but it was too far away to see what could have made the blast. He had heard weird European car horns before, but nothing that long and metallic.
Another blast followed, and Jason caught its angle directly toward the rocky shore. There was something flashing in the distance, catching the light of the sunset. The flashes were moving, meaning it was either something very large or very fast.
Jason ran to the cabinet beneath the wheel and dug out his binoculars. The flashes could have been off windshields of cars on a seaside motorway. Now was the first time he would have caught the reflection, and he did not even think to look earlier. Maybe the horn blasts were shrill European car horns.
Pulling the binoculars to his eyes, Jason looked carefully. It was about a mile away, but he could make out blurry, red, metallic shapes. He fiddled with the screw between the lenses, focusing the binoculars until he finally saw whatever it was in focus.
They were Roman legionaries, unmistakably recognizable. The flashes were from their raised shields and helmets. The horn blasts were from their trumpeters, sounding off a halt.
Jason stood motionless, staring and not knowing what to do. Everything made sense now, but it was impossible. The villagers weren’t poverty-stricken castoffs from modern society, they were decent provincial Roman fishermen. They had run from the gun not because they knew it was deadly, but because it could conjure thunder. The people had been speaking Latin, the ancestor of Jason’s attempt Portuguese. He looked at the paper again and broke the words into Latin, ancient Roman Latin.
Jason shook his head. It had to bee impossible. People don’t just travel through time. Then again, people don’t face sudden storms of green lightning, either.
He swallowed and stared out at the Roman soldiers.
All he could do was whisper to himself, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”