Son of Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page A

take the sight. It was a tricky business, balancing on the moving boat while staring through the eyepiece, trying to keep the horizon level and the sun in view just exactly as it turned noon. Fish grabbed a handful of Aiden’s sweater to steady him, but shooting the sun was only the beginning. After that there were pages of calculations to do. Aiden had never been really good with math and was soon lost in azimuths and angles. He realized that if his fate were ever in fact to take him to sea, it would certainly not be as a navigator.
    “Well, according to your reading, we should be seeing Japan any minute now!” Fish said. “That’s the thing with navigation—one small error changes the course of the whole voyage.”
    So navigation was just like real life, Aiden thought. Errors went back forever, each one building into the next—a deadly daisy chain of fate. The wind was steady and the sails well set, so Fish let Aiden try his hand at the helm. He was nervous and zigzagged at first, turning the wheel too hard one way, then the other.
    “Don’t think,” Fish said. “Just feel.” He spread his legs slightly and bounced, sweeping his hands up with surprising grace, like a dancer. “The ocean is a live thing. The ship is a live thing. They are like lovers who love but sometimes want to kill each other. You must keep them both on the loving side.”
    “You’re kind of poetical for a Swede, aren’t you?”
    “A sailor spends a lot of time inside his own head,” Fish said.
    They sailed along in companionable silence until the clouds came in and the wind turned gusty enough to require Fish’s more experienced hand at the helm. Aiden went below to check on the polar bears. The mother bear seemed in much better health. Her eyes were bright and her breathing was steady. Aiden sat quietly for a while just watching them, until the mother bear’s wariness ebbed and the cubs’ curiosity overflowed. Then he eased the cage door open just enough to sneak the two babies out. Soon they were romping and tumbling all over. Aiden wrestled them, rolled them about and tossed them into the straw. They chirped gleefully, galloped gracelessly back and flung themselves upon him with furry vigor. The mother bear watched nervously at first, woofing and huffing, but eventually she seemed to understand that he was not going to hurt them and settled down. Once the cubs were tired out, he raked the dirty straw from the cage, shook in a fresh bale, then squeaked open the door and pushed them back in. The mother bear scooped them into her arms, sniffed them suspiciously and started licking them free of every dreadful human scent. Aiden leaned back against a bale of straw and watched the little cubs suckle contentedly. Despite his previous twenty-four-hour sleep, he was still deeply tired and dozed off himself. It was a fitful sleep, full of violence, and he woke with tiny scratches all over his arms from thrashing in the straw.
    The bears were sound asleep, snoring in oblivious bliss. The ship creaked gently. He could smell the rich aroma of frying potatoes and hear the easy cadence of Swedish conversation from the deck above. In the main salon, the men were just sitting down for a meal. They had left a place for him. Evening came early in January in this northern latitude, and though it was only about four-thirty, the sun was already low, slanting sharp gold beams through the small portholes. It was all so totally foreign, yet so easy and comfortable.
    After supper, Captain Neils went to his tiny cabin to update the ship’s log, while the other men, like all sailors eager to take advantage of sleep when it was possible, took to their bunks. As long as the weather stayed fair, they would keep only one man at the helm throughout the night, each taking a two-hour watch. Aiden went up on deck and sat on a pile of lumber, watching his first sunset at sea. The clouds slid through ripples of gold and crimson, with fringes of purple. A hundred