The Last Lugger of Roebuck Bay

• Chapter 1 The Red Dust of Chinatown
• Chapter 2 Copper Helmet and Salt Air
• Chapter 3 Bardi Tides
• Chapter 4 Below the Thirty-Fathom Line
• Chapter 5 The Shadow of the Bends
• Chapter 6 Voices on Dampier Creek
• Chapter 7 Reading the Shoals
• Chapter 8 Whispers from Across the Sea
• Chapter 9 The Queen of Shells
• Chapter 10 Mangrove Secrets
• Chapter 11 The Call of the King Tides
• Chapter 12 Diver's Graveyard
• Chapter 13 The Line Between Us
• Chapter 14 Storm Clouds on the Timor Sea
• Chapter 15 A Net Full of Shadows
• Chapter 16 The Constellation of the Shark
• Chapter 17 Decrees from Canberra
• Chapter 18 Broken Valves
• Chapter 19 Salt in the Blood
• Chapter 20 The Final Drift
• Chapter 21 Sirens in the Wind
• Chapter 22 The Harbor Under Watch
• Chapter 23 Smoke Over the Marsh
• Chapter 24 The Requisitioned Fleet
• Chapter 25 Burning the Moorings
• Chapter 26 The Bay Remains

The red pindan dirt got into everything, but it had a particular fondness for the teeth. If a man spoke more than three words in the open afternoon breeze along Dampier Terrace, he could chew the Kimberley down into a fine, gritty paste before he reached the doors of the Roebuck Hotel. Kenji Sato kept his mouth shut. He had lived through nine lay-up seasons in Broome, and he knew that salt water eventually washed out of a man’s clothes, but the pindan stayed in the pores until the grave.

He stepped off the timber boards of the master pearler’s verandah into the heat of April, 1941. The midday sun was not an overhead lantern; it was a weight that pressed between the shoulder blades, thick with the smell of drying trepang, rank mangrove mud, and boiling vinegar from the noodle houses behind Carnarvon Street. Down at the foreshore, the tide was going out like water pulled down an open plug-hole. Ten miles of grey-green shelf were baring their ribs to the sky, stranding forty-odd luggers on their fat bellies in the silt.

"Oi, Sato-san."

A boy ran past with a tin tray of tea bowls, his thongs slapping loudly against the soles of his feet. Kenji didn’t answer with a word, only a brief dip of his chin. The town was waking up from its midday coma. The monsoon—what the white men called the wet season and Kenji simply thought of as the long, sour rot of waiting—had broken two weeks ago. The south-easterlies were stirring, bringing the cool dry drafts off the interior desert that hardened the mud and made the pearling masters look at their tide books with predatory eyes.

Kenji walked toward the foreshore with his canvas kit bag balanced over his left collarbone. He was small-framed, like most men who came out of Taiji on the Wakayama coast, but his forearms were corded like hawser line from fighting the seabed currents under four atmospheres of hydrostatic pressure. His left ear remained slightly deaf from a bad drop near the Lacepedes five years back, and when the barometer plunged before a storm, his hip joints clicked like billiard balls. Aside from that, he had survived twenty-eight, thirty-two, and thirty-five fathoms without ending up twisted in a wicker basket on the deck of an auxiliary cutter. In Broome, that made him an elder statesman at thirty-three years of age.

Around the bend of Sheba Lane, the tin buildings leaned against each other like tired drunks seeking shade under wide iron eaves. Here, the English language lost its swagger and broke into its working pieces: Malay curses tossed from billiard saloons, Hakka arithmetic clicked out on wooden abacuses behind boarded shopfronts, and the sharp, clipped Japanese vowels of men who spent their lives thinking about air pumps and diver’s weights. A clutch of Koepanger crewmen squatted on upturned kerosene tins outside a tailor’s shop, gambling over small mother-of-pearl buttons, their voices rhythmic and low.

Kenji turned toward the jetty where the smell shifted from woodsmoke to dead shell. The pearling lugger Ibis lay careened on her starboard side twenty yards out on the mangrove flats, waiting for the spring tide to float her off her bilges. She was a two-masted ketch, fifty-three feet on the deck, built of stout jarrah and cajeput that had seen twenty seasons of hard bottom-scratching. Her hull was coated in fresh, pungent copper paint that stung the nostrils from thirty paces away.

Underneath the curved overhang of the counter stern, a young man was working with a scraper, his long arms moving in steady, circular strokes to clear away the dried barnacles the painters had missed. He had the wide, dark shoulders and deep chest of the saltwater people from up north toward Sunday Island, skin the shade of roasted wattle seed, and hair pulled back from his forehead with a twist of red cotton rag.

Kenji stopped in the narrow line of shadow cast by the hull. "You scrape the wood too thin, Salty, the teredo worms won't even need to chew. They'll just walk straight into the hold."

The scraper paused. Salty looked down from his precarious perch on an upturned grease drum, his brown eyes narrowing against the glare of the wet sand behind Kenji’s shoulder. His real name was Mark, given to him by the German missionaries at Beagle Bay, but nobody called him that south of the salt marshes. To the fleet, he was Salty: the Bardi man who could smell fresh water under three fathoms of sand and who handled the life-line without ever letting a diver twist his umbilical into a figure-eight.

"White master said clean her belly right to the grain," Salty said, his voice deep, unhurried, carrying the slow cadence of the tidal creeks. "You want to drag three tons of sea moss down to the Eighty Mile? We be burning kerosene just to make two knots against the rip."

"Old Man Gregory doesn't buy kerosene," Kenji said, dropping his kit onto a dry patch of salt grass above the high-water line. "He buys cheap sump oil and mixes it with paraffin. Stinks like hell when the wind is aft."

Salty tossed the rusted scraper into an empty lead pail with an iron clang that startled a pair of white-bellied sea eagles circling over Roebuck Deep. He wiped his palms on his moleskin trousers. "He gave us the new engine?"

"No," Kenji said, stepping up to examine the rudder gudgeons. "Same four-cylinder Kelvin. He said the war in the north makes spare parts hard to get. Canberra is taking all the brass for ammunition."

Salty hopped down from the drum, landing silently in the red mud. He stood a full head taller than the diver, his bare feet splayed wide, gripping the slick ground as naturally as an oyster shell gripped limestone. He peered at Kenji’s face, looking for the grey fatigue that usually hung on the divers after three months of cheap gin and gambling in the boarding houses.

"You look sober, Sato-san. Master Murata said you lost fifty quid at the fan-tan table three nights back."

"Murata is an idiot who doesn't know seven-card draw from his mother’s apron," Kenji muttered, though his fingers checked his empty trouser pockets by reflex. "I lost thirty. And two shirts. The shirts were too small anyway."

"The old men down at the camp say this season is bad," Salty remarked casually. He reached into his pocket, brought out a dried sliver of salt beef, broke it in two with thick thumbs, and offered the larger piece to Kenji. "Not the wind. The wind is coming round good from the south-east. Cool nights. But the birds aren't nesting out on the islands like before. They go deep into the mangroves. Like something is pushing them off the blue water."

Kenji chewed the tough beef, the salt stinging a split in his lower lip. "Your old men say that every April. If the birds don't nest, it’s the war. If the tides are three inches short, it’s the war. If the baker burns the damper, it’s the war."

"Maybe this time the old men have ears," Salty said, not smiling.

They leaned their shoulders against the warm jarrah planks of the Ibis and looked out toward the mouth of Roebuck Bay. Out past the headland where the red cliffs plunged straight into the turquoise chop, three pearling luggers were already making sail under reduced canvas, their gaffs swaying as they caught the first puff of the afternoon sea breeze. They moved like white moths against the blinding sheet of the Indian Ocean. Every man in town knew those boats: the Redbill, the Triton, and the San Pedro. They were heading south to the Ninety Mile Beach, where the shell was thick if a diver was willing to risk the shifting sands and the long drift where the bottom dropped off into black emptiness.

"How many tenders we got?" Kenji asked.

"Just me and young Juma," Salty answered. "And the cook. That old Manilaman, the one with the glass eye who steals the rice wine."

"Ignacio. He’s ninety years old. He can’t see the salt from the sugar."

"He doesn't cost much," Salty pointed out. "Gregory likes men who don't cost much. He told the butcher in Chinatown that beef is up to fourpence a pound, so we eat dugong if we can catch it, and salt mullet when we can’t."

Kenji spat a string of gristle into the sand. He looked up at the deck of the lugger. The timber was bleached bone-white from the tropical rains, but the running rigging was fresh hemp, stiff and golden, smelling of Stockholm tar. Lashed to the port side of the engine casing was the thing that ruled their lives: the Heinke two-cylinder manual air pump with its heavy iron flywheels painted emerald green, alongside the brass inlet valves that would soon be Kenji’s only connection to the living world.

If Salty took his hands off the crank handles while Kenji was down in twenty fathoms, the pressure inside the copper helmet would drop in three heartbeats. If the non-return valve jammed, the weight of the sea would drive Kenji’s flesh up into the helmet itself until he was nothing more than broken marrow in a brass pot. It was a simple business, based entirely on the premise that the man on deck did not drop dead, get distracted by a passing turtle, or decide he disliked the man below.

"You check the leather washers on the pump?" Kenji asked.

"Soaked them in neatsfoot oil myself yesterday," Salty replied. "Smooth as pig fat. Pump throws twenty pounds of air on five turns."

"And the hose?"

"Red rubber. New from Singapore last December. No cracks." Salty turned his head and spat with precision between two exposed mangrove roots. "You worry too much, Sato-san. You think I want to drag your fat carcass out of forty feet of grey mud? You’re heavy enough when you’re breathing."

A sudden shout came from the top of the shingle bank. Both men turned to see Captain Gregory picking his way down the red dirt incline, his wide-brimmed felt hat pulled low over his eyes to ward off the glare. He was a tall, angular Scotsman with skin that had long since surrendered to the sun, mottled with liver spots and peeling perpetually at the bridge of his nose. He carried a leather-bound manifest under his arm and a bamboo cane that he used not for walking, but for prodding deck cargo and keeping wharf curs at a distance.

"Sato! You’re late," Gregory barked as he reached the firm sand. His voice was thin and dry, like dry corn husks rubbing together. "The tide will be up over the flats by four o'clock. The Southern Cross is already past the bar. If you’re not out past Gantheaume Point before the ebb starts running tonight, I’ll dock your lay by five per cent."

Kenji touched his hat brim, neither hurrying nor backing away. "The Kelvin was missing a fuel cock, Cap’n. Salty had to turn one down on the lathe at the slipway."

Gregory cast a sharp, watery eye at Salty, who immediately found something fascinating to study on the lugger’s iron keel.

"Well, it’s done now," Gregory said, tapping his boot with the cane. "Listen to me, Kenji. The price for first-grade mother-of-pearl is down three pounds a ton in London. The Americans aren't buying button shell like they used to. They've got some new chemical—plastic, they call it. Make buttons out of petroleum and milk. Can you believe that rubbish? Making buttons out of sour milk."

"Buttons need shell," Kenji said flatly. "Plastic buttons break when the washerwoman hits them with the flatiron."

"Aye, well, tell that to the department stores in New York," Gregory snapped. "The only thing keeping us afloat is the high-grade silver-lip. I don't want you wasting coal and oil scratching over the dead shell banks at Coulomb Point. I want you working the deep edges off Cape Boileau. Thirty fathoms. The big stuff."

Kenji felt the dull ache in his left ear throb once, deep in the bone. "Thirty fathoms is deep for the first spring, Cap’n. The current runs eight knots through the gutters out there. Water is still cold from the south."

"You want thirty pounds an ounce for blister pearls, or do you want to live on rice and salt fish until the King’s men come and shut this whole circus down?" Gregory lowered his voice, stepping closer until Kenji could smell the gin and tobacco that seemed to weep out of the master pearler’s skin. "There are three naval sloops sitting down at Fremantle right now, Sato. Two cruisers up at Darwin. The wireless says the Japanese army has moved into southern Indo-China. If things go pear-shaped between London and Tokyo, the military will requisition every stick of timber in this harbour before you can say your prayers."

The air between them seemed to chill, despite the forty-degree sun beating on the mud.

Salty looked up from the keel, his face settling into that blank, impenetrable stillness that Kenji had seen him use whenever a police constable from the Broome lockup came looking for track-workers.

"I am a diver, Cap’n," Kenji said quietly. "I come from Taiji. My father worked the luggers for your uncle. We look for shell, not soldiers."

"Your father didn't have thirty thousand imperial troops sitting on the back doorstep of Singapore," Gregory countered, though his tone softened slightly, losing its sharp commercial edge. "Just get the boat out, Kenji. Fill the lockers with good silver-lip before the season gets stolen from under our feet. If the fleet gets tied up, there won't be another pound of shell brought into Roebuck Bay for ten years."

The pearler didn't wait for an answer. He turned on his heel, his leather boots squeaking in the drying mud, and made his way back up the embankment toward the corrugated-iron shed that served as his counting house.

The two men watched him go. A cool breath of wind, the true vanguard of the dry season, drifted across the bay, rippling the shallow pools of trapped brine until they shone like shattered mirrors.

"He talks too much," Salty said.

"He’s frightened," Kenji replied.

"A white man with three luggers and a house on the hill doesn't get frightened of nothing."

"He doesn't get frightened of the sea," Kenji said, picking up his canvas kit and swinging it easily up over the low bulwark of the Ibis. "He gets frightened of papers with stamps on them. Men in offices."

Kenji climbed over the rail, his bare feet finding the familiar, scrubbed wood of the deck. Everything was in its place, smelling of salt, grease, and the faint, sweet perfume of stale sandalwood incense that the last Manilaman diver had burned in the forepeak to appease the ghosts of the reef. In the scuppers, two heavy lead-soled boots lay on their sides, each weighing twenty-eight pounds, their copper toes scuffed silver from contact with coral boulders.

Salty scrambled up over the chains a moment later, landing with a soft thud. He walked forward to the windlass and laid his hand on the pawl, testing the tension on the anchor warp.

"Tide's coming," the Bardi man murmured, pointing with his chin out toward the mouth of the creek.

Kenji looked out. The vast grey plains of silt were vanishing, devoured silently by a swift, green flood that moved faster than a man could walk. The Kimberley tides did not rise like water in a bucket; they rushed in like a herd of stampeding horses, thirty feet of vertical sea filling the red gorges and mangrove channels in a matter of hours. Around the hull of the Ibis, the first fingers of water hissed as they touched the hot iron keel, sending up small curls of steam.

Below decks, an old voice began to croon a cracked, melancholy Spanish hymn—Ignacio was waking up to put the tea kettle on the primus stove.

Kenji unbuckled his canvas kit and pulled out his woollen diving drawers, thick and heavy despite the heat, knitted by his sister back in Wakayama from coarse grey fleece that smelled of mutton tallow. Even under eighty feet of tropical water, the deep currents coming off the shelf would chill a man’s blood until his fingers locked like crab claws if he didn't have wool against his skin.

He looked across the deck at Salty, who was already clearing the bitter end of the main halyard.

"We take the morning tide down to the gutter," Kenji said, speaking in the pidgin English that belonged only to this coast, a language hammered out over fifty years by men who had nothing in common except the certainty that the bottom of the sea was a very bad place to make a mistake. "We drop on the slack. You watch that line today, Mark. My hip is singing. That means the rip is going to pull hard toward the reef."

Salty didn't look up from his knot, but his brown hands moved with smooth, deliberate certainty. "I hold the line, Sato-san. You find the shell. Don't worry about the rip. The rip knows where it’s going."

The Ibis shuddered once, a long, deep vibration that travelled up through the keel into their bare feet as the incoming sea lifted the hull from the mud. The ship was alive again, swinging slowly toward the channel, her copper-sheathed nose turning to face the open water where the deep shell lay waiting in the dark.

The dawn over Roebuck Bay did not arrive with ceremony. It cracked across the horizon like a split piece of green bamboo, dumping a bucket of harsh, lemon-coloured light over the mangrove creeks and the grey ribs of the mud flats. By five in the morning, the Ibis was already rocking in the long, rhythmic swells off Gantheaume Point, where the red sandstone bluffs dropped sheer into water the color of jade glass.

The Kelvin engine coughed, spat a ring of greasy blue smoke from its copper exhaust pipe, and settled into its habitual iron mutter—chug-tock, chug-tock, chug-tock—shaking the deck planks under Kenji’s bare soles. The smell of burning whale oil from the galley primus mingled with the sharp tang of salt spray and the oily reek of the bilges. Ignacio had produced four tin mugs of tea, thick and sweet enough to float a sixpence, alongside a slab of cold soda damper that had the weight and consistency of an anchor shackle.

Kenji sat on the low coaming of the diver’s hatch, chewing the damper with methodical slowness. Across the deck, young Juma was lashing the spare water breaker against the mast tabernacle. Juma was a boy from the Dampier peninsula, fifteen at most, with knees that knobby bone out of his canvas trousers and teeth perpetually stained orange from chewing raw betel leaf supplied by the Koepanger boys back in town. He moved with the nervous speed of a bush cur, keeping one eye on Salty and the other on the horizon where the open sea turned the deep, cruel violet of deep water.

"Eat it all, boy," Salty said from the helm, his bare toes gripping the spokes of the iron wheel. "Once the wind backs to the west, you won’t keep nothing in your belly except wind and spit."

Juma grunted, stuffing the crust of his damper into his cheek, his gaze fixed on the gear laid out beside Kenji.

The gear was everything. A pearling master could lose a lugger, borrow another from the banks in Perth, and be back on the banks by the next neap; but if a diver lost his kit, he was nothing more than an unpaid coolie with bad ears. In the center of the scrubbed deck sat the corselet, a curved breastplate of beaten copper and brass, pitted with hundreds of tiny scars from coral heads and wire slings. Beside it lay the helmet—a Siebe Gorman twelve-bolt, its metal buffed down to a dull, oily gold. The front face-glass was unscrewed and resting on a scrap of greasy sailcloth, looking like the blank eye of a dead dugong.

"How does the glass look, Sato-san?" Salty asked, leaning his weight against the helm to meet a rolling sea.

Kenji reached down, picking up the round brass frame of the face-glass. He held it up to the lemon sky, squinting through the thick, green-tinted plate. There was a tiny scratch on the inside face—left there three seasons ago when he had scraped a bit of sea-grime off with the edge of a shucking knife—but the lead gasket was fresh, greasy with tallow, and pliable under his thumbnail.

"It will hold," Kenji said. "If you don't drop the spanner on it while you're screwing me down."

Salty let out a short, dry bark of laughter. "The day I drop the spanner, Sato-san, you'll be too deep to complain about the leak."

They worked through the ritual without another word. It was a sequence that did not change whether they were floating off the Montebello Islands, the Ninety Mile, or the mouth of King Sound. Juma brought out the woollen combinations—two layers of coarse, thick grey stockings and an undersuit that smelled powerfully of damp sheep and human sweat. Kenji stripped to his cotton loincloth and pulled the wool over his limbs, grunting as the heavy fabric clung to his skin in the rising morning heat. The sweat sprang up immediately on his forehead, rolling down into his eyebrows, stinging his salt-chapped cheeks. A man had to boil on the deck so that he did not freeze at twenty fathoms.

Next came the canvas diving suit. It was stiff with dried salt and smelled of vulcanized rubber and rotting canvas. Kenji stepped through the rubber collar, sliding his legs down into the wide, baggy trousers. Salty stepped forward, his bare feet slapping the wet boards, his heavy hands catching the heavy rubber wristlets. He took two horn shoehorns from his belt, sliding them along Kenji’s palms to ease the tight, strangling rubber cuffs over his wrists without tearing the skin. The rubber snapped tight around Kenji's wrists with a wet thwack, biting into the veins until his fingers turned purple.

Kenji rolled his wrists, pumping his fingers twice. "Good."

Salty dropped to one knee. He picked up the heavy brass corselet and lifted it over Kenji’s head. It dropped onto the canvas shoulders with a dull, heavy thump that took the breath out of Kenji’s chest. The weight settled onto his collarbones—forty pounds of dead brass and copper. Salty began fitting the twelve brass bolts through the pierced holes in the canvas collar, sliding the copper brails over them.

From his pocket, Salty drew the heavy box spanner. He didn't rush. He tightened the wing-nuts in opposite pairs—fore and aft, port and starboard—balancing the pressure so the canvas wouldn't pinch and split under the weight of the water. He leaned his shoulder into the turns, his dark knuckles turning white, his breath whistling through his nose.

Clink. Clink. Scrape.

Every pearler knew that sound. It was the rhythm of a man being locked into an iron room.

"Number four nut is stripping its thread," Salty noted, not looking up. "The thread is worn thin like an old sixpence."

"Gregory said he’d replace it," Kenji muttered, his neck already stiff inside the wide brass collar.

"Gregory says the moon is made of silver-lip," Salty replied, giving the nut an extra half-turn with a measured, delicate grunt. "It holds for today. But don't you go bumping your chest against no coral bommies, Sato-san. If that collar leaks, you’ll be drinking soup out of your boots."

Kenji looked out across the rail while Salty worked. The Ibis was running south-southwest now, clearing the red mud shallows. The water had turned from murky chartreuse to the cold, bottomless blue of the open Indian Ocean. Five miles out on the beam, the sails of the Triton flickered against the horizon, small and sharp as shark fins. The tide had slowed, hanging at the peak of the high-water slack. In forty minutes, the sea would turn, and thirty feet of water would begin sliding back toward the deep trench off Indonesia, running like a flooded river between the submerged reefs.

"Air," Kenji said.

Juma dropped his tin mug and scrambled to the Heinke pump. The boy took the heavy iron flywheels in his hands, bracing his feet against the deck battens. He turned the handles once, twice—the bronze cylinders sighed, a rhythmic, wet whoosh-clack as the leather buckets sucked and compressed.

Salty uncoiled the corrugated red rubber hose, holding the brass coupling up to his ear. He listened to the air hiss, smelling it for the bitter stench of scorched oil from the cylinder packings. Satisfied, he brought the hose to the back of the helmet, spinning the heavy brass union nut until it seated against the leather washer. He took his wrench and tapped the joint twice—a quick, sharp ping-ping that rang over the splash of the swells against the hull.

"Air is sweet," Salty said.

Ignacio emerged from the low doghouse hatchway carrying a bucket of cold sea water and a bunch of green cabbage leaves he had begged from a Chinese gardener behind Dampier Terrace. He handed the cabbage to Kenji, who took two leaves and crumpled them between his fingers until the green juice oozed over his skin. Kenji rubbed the juice vigorously over the inside of the face-glass. It was the only thing that kept the glass from fogging up when a diver’s hot breath hit the cold surface of thirty-fathom water. If a man forgot the cabbage, he spent his drift staring into a white mist, blind to the shell, blind to the sea snakes, blind to the black holes where the bottom dropped into nowhere.

Kenji sat down on the bulwark, swinging his legs over the side. His bare feet dangled over the iron staging-ladder that hung down into the green wash.

Salty picked up the lead boots. They were terrible, clumsy things—slabs of cast lead fastened to thick cowhide uppers with copper buckles. Salty knelt and strapped them to Kenji’s feet, yanking the leather straps until they bit deep into the wool-wrapped ankles. Each boot weighed twenty-eight pounds. Combined with the corselet, Kenji was carrying near eighty pounds of metal on his frame. On the dry deck, he was a cripple, barely able to lift his knees; in the sea, that weight would be the only thing keeping him from bobbing up like a dead cork into the blistering sunlight.

"Ladder," Kenji grunted.

Salty and Juma caught him by the elbows, heaving him up. Kenji took one heavy, dragging step, his lead soles scraping the jarrah deck with a harsh, dry screech, and lowered himself onto the top rung of the diving ladder. The sea reached up and caught his shins, the cold shocking his calves through the wool and rubber.

Now came the weight. Salty lifted the back-weight and the chest-weight—two heavy lead hearts connected by tarred rope lanyards—and slung them over Kenji’s shoulders, securing the lanyard under the armpits with a quick slipknot.

Kenji rested his elbows on the gunwale, looking up at Salty. The Bardi man’s face was dark, shining with sweat, his eyes completely still. All the banter had vanished. The boat, the town, the master pearler, the war talk—all of it shrank down to the three feet of space between the diver’s eyes and the tender’s hands.

"Wind is three knots from the south-east," Salty said, his voice dropping into that flat, quiet tone he used only when the helmet was ready to go on. "Drift will be north-northwest. We take the edge of the gutter first. If the bottom is clean stone, I give you three tugs. If it’s rotten mud, you pull twice and we haul you out."

"Give me forty fathom of line," Kenji said. "No more. The tide will belly the hose if you let it run slack."

"I know the line," Salty replied evenly. "I held it before you had grey hairs in your chin, Sato-san."

Kenji reached down to his right hip and checked the diver’s knife—a nine-inch blade of Sheffield steel ground down so many times it looked like a bodkin, seated loose in a brass scabbard. If an octopus wrapped the exhaust valve or a line tangled on a dead staghorn coral, that knife was his only friend. He tapped the hilt once with his purple knuckles.

Salty lifted the heavy copper bonnet from the deck.

The world shrank. Salty lowered the helmet over Kenji’s head, turning it clockwise until the interrupted threads clicked home into the corselet.

Clank.

The light changed instantly from the blinding yellow glare of Roebuck Bay to a cool, bronze gloom. The smell changed too—the fresh salt air and the woodsmoke were cut off with a sudden, mechanical finality, replaced by the warm, oily breath of the Heinke pump: rubber, neatsfoot grease, and the faint, copper reek of his own lungs echoing back against the metal dome.

Through the front port, Kenji could see Salty’s dark fingers holding the face-glass.

"Slack away," Kenji called out, his voice hollow and huge inside the helmet.

Salty didn't hear the words, but he knew the motion of Kenji’s mouth. He set the brass circle into the threads, giving it three quick spins. He brought down the brass key and tightened the face-glass with two short, sharp raps.

Clink. Clink.

Darkness closed in around the edges of Kenji’s vision, leaving only the three glass circular ports—the front window, and the two small side lights that looked out over his shoulders.

The air rushed into the helmet through the inlet elbow behind his left ear with a sound like a locomotive letting off steam: hiss-shuck, hiss-shuck, hiss-shuck. The pressure began to build immediately, pressing against his eardrums. Kenji opened his jaws wide, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth to clear the Eustachian tubes. The pop came—sharp, familiar, painful—and his hearing opened up to the internal roar of his iron prison.

He raised his right hand and tapped the top of the helmet once with his knuckles.

Take me down.

Salty’s face vanished from the glass port, replaced by the white wash of the sea as Kenji let go of the ladder.

The Indian Ocean swallowed him whole. The crushing weight on his shoulders vanished instantly, transformed by the displaced water into a dreamlike, floating lightness. The emerald-green surface closed over the top of his helmet with a muffled roar of bubbles, and the Ibis drifted away above him, her dark, copper-painted keel looking like the belly of a great basking shark against the sun.

Kenji gripped the shot-rope with his canvas-clad mittens and kicked his lead boots out into the clear, cold green.

The descent was fast. The surface light died away by inches, shifting from pale lime to deep tourmaline, then to the cold, ink-stained turquoise of the deep shelf. The pressure mounted against his chest, squeezing the loose folds of the canvas dress against his ribs like an iron corset. Kenji hit the exhaust valve on the right side of the helmet with his chin, venting a blast of stale air to let himself drop faster.

Hissssss-burble.

A great silver crown of bubbles flared up past his side windows, tumbling toward the sky where the world of men and masters was already nothing more than a pale, rippling roof sixty feet above his head.

Below him, through the green mist, the bottom began to take shape. It didn't look like earth; it looked like the carcass of an ancient, drowned beast. Great ledges of limestone rose out of the sand, bearded with black sea-fans and thick clusters of finger sponges that swayed in the rip like wheat in an August gale.

Kenji’s boots hit the grit with a dull, soundless jar that sent up two small clouds of white silt.

He bent his knees, leaning his weight forward against the four-knot current that was already tearing across the shelf. The pressure here was forty pounds on every square inch of his body. His left ear throbbed with a rhythmic, dull heat, and his woollen suit felt wet, though he knew it was only the cold of the Southern Ocean creeping through the canvas.

He looked down at his feet.

There, half-buried in the silt beside a cluster of red coral, lay a broad, flat crescent with an edge like chipped porcelain—a silver-lip oyster, nine inches across, its shell slightly open, feeding on the tide.

Kenji reached for his waist-bag, his fingers steady, while forty fathoms above, through sixty feet of hemp and rubber, Salty held his life in the palm of his bare hand.