The Apothecary Page 0,77

straying prematurely into Russian waters. An albatross soared in our wake. I had come to look at birds in a new, suspicious light in the past few days, but this one seemed genuinely like a bird. It wheeled in our slipstream as if for the pleasure of it, making endless, effortless figure eights with its vast wings.

Jin Lo showed me a vial she had brought, to be used if we were stranded at sea. She dipped a cotton thread into the clear liquid and lowered it, wet, into a beaker of seawater. Salt crystals began to form on the treated thread, and grew until they looked like a piece of rock candy hanging in the water. Jin Lo pulled out the hardened salt and handed me the beaker of water.

“Drink,” she said.

“It’s safe?”

“No, I poison you.”

I smiled, used to Jin Lo’s sense of humour by now, and drank the water. It was cold and tasted clean and silvery, but not salty.

“People could use that,” I said, excited. “All over the world!”

Jin Lo frowned. “Is new. Difficult to make more than small amount.”

In the afternoon we watched her send her particles up into the air so she could practise with her net. Count Vili explained that large amounts of radiation were required to make the net contract sharply, so the low levels of radiation from the sun just made it hang like gossamer in the light. It was barely visible, but cast a golden shimmer against the sky.

The crew of the former Kong Olav, who knew a good fishing net when they saw one, asked Jin Lo to try to snare some fresh fish.

“This is not purpose of net,” she said.

“Just try!” begged Ludvik.

Jin Lo sighed. “Okay,” she said. “You find fish.”

So the men scanned the surface of the water intently, until they saw herring gulls feeding in the distance. “There’ll be a school right there,” Ludvik said. “The birds always find them.”

They steered the Anniken towards the gulls and stopped the boat. Below the birds, we saw small baitfish leaping from the water in silver showers, trying to escape the larger fish below. The big ones flipped at the surface and sometimes cleared it, and meanwhile the gulls went crazy trying to snatch the flying baitfish.

Jin Lo, unmoved by the spectacle, showed two of the men how to hold the net’s nearly invisible golden edges. Together they swung it out over the sea, where it fell like a light rain on the surface of the water. After a few tries they gathered it in, full of fat, shining fish, which flipped and wriggled on the deck.

The cook prepared the fish on an open grill on the deck, grumbling about how Benjamin’s father had taken over his galley as a laboratory. The apothecary had extracted the Quintessence from the preserved flowers in the glass bell, but he was still experimenting with it. Thinking about how intently he concentrated on his work made me think about my own parents, and how soon they’d be back in London to discover I was missing, and what they might do.

When the fish came off the grill, hot and salty and delicious, Count Vili and Benjamin and I took our plates to sit on the storage bin. The brief noonday sun was out, and the count held up a fish by the tail, then stripped off the flesh with his teeth like a great happy cat, basking in the light. I’d grown fond of the count on the voyage. He was sardonic and jaded sometimes, but he was also endlessly willing to be pleased.

“Kings do not have finer lunches than this one,” he said, licking grease off his fingers. “I can promise you that.”

“What do you know about the bomb the Soviets are testing?” I asked.

“Only that it was designed by a physicist named Andrei Sakharov,” he said. “Their young genius. I have longed to meet him under other circumstances. I think he has a very flexible mind. We thought for some time that we might win him over to our work. But I fear he’s rather entrenched in the Soviet system.”

“Maybe he’ll be interested when he sees what you can do,” I said.

The count gave a wry smile. “When we have sabotaged his work? I don’t know how you make friends, but I don’t think that’s the best way.”

I thought of something else that had been bothering me.

“When the apothecary made the jaival tree bloom,” I said, “to harvest the Quintessence, it released something he