said.
“Not so difficult,” Jin Lo said.
“It can’t hurt to try,” said the captain.
“We need paint,” Jin Lo said. “Not blue, not white.”
The crew sprang into action, opening the storage bins on deck. They produced two cans of red paint from beneath piles of rope, plus several paintbrushes.
“Not those,” Jin Lo said, dismissing the paintbrushes. “Too slow.” She took the paint cans to the little galley, where she chose the largest cooking pot and dumped the paint into it.
“But I make the oatmeal in that pot!” the cook complained.
“Your oatmeal already tastes like glue,” Ludvik said. “So what if it tastes like paint?”
There was a strange air on board of anticipation and growing willingness. The apothecary brought his black leather bag from the cabin and joined Jin Lo, who took a bottle of grey powder from him and tapped some into the pot.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Is like magnet,” she said. “But not magnet.”
She stirred the pot, smelled it, and added something else from the apothecary’s bag. The paint seemed to move almost restlessly in the pot. She let it run in ribbons off a wooden spoon to test the consistency. The red liquid was a little less bright now, and a little runnier. “It’s good,” she said.
The apothecary helped her decant the heavy pot back into the paint cans. The boat was still moving north into the wind through the dark night, and Jin Lo asked the captain to bring it nearly to a stop. He nodded to the man with the earrings and the boat slowed. Then she carried her can of paint forward to the bow and leaned over the starboard rail. She waited for the men to gather around her—she had a sense of occasion, and knew her audience—and then she carefully tilted the paint over the lip of the steel hull. The red colour didn’t drip or run down, but spread so rapidly and evenly over the vertical side of the boat that it looked like water spreading over a flat floor. It continued, as far as I could tell, beneath the surface of the waves, unaffected by the water.
The men watched, mesmerised. They’d spent years of their lives scraping and painting boats, but this paint moved on its own, as if drawn to any surface. “Can you teach us to do that?” Ludvik asked.
“After Nova Zembla,” Jin Lo said. “Then I teach you.”
She took the second can to the port side to run the paint down over the hull, watching it spread and wrap itself around the hull, then studied her work. She found that she had missed a spot, and poured a little more until she was satisfied. At the stern, she poured the last of the paint, and the boat was entirely red. The words KONG OLAV were gone.
The men stared at Jin Lo and the apothecary with shining eyes, in silence. It was a job that would have taken them a week in dry dock. If they’d had doubts about the apothecary’s abilities before, those doubts were gone.
Then the skinny young crewman piped up. “She needs a new name,” he said.
“Who does?” the apothecary asked.
“The boat. It’s a dead giveaway if she doesn’t have a name.”
“Of course,” the apothecary said. “What should it be?”
Again there was a silence.
“The Anniken,” Ludvik ventured.
“Is that a suitable boat name?”
“It’s my little girl’s name. She’s a fierce little thing.” He looked around at his friends. “I always told her I’d name a boat for her. I didn’t think it’d be so soon. But if we do this, I’d be doing it for her.”
“Does that mean you’ll go with us then?” the apothecary asked. “On the Anniken?”
The men looked at each other, and at the same moment they all threw their arms in the air and a great cheer rang out on deck. “The Anniken!” they cried. Their voices were hoarse with emotion. I looked at Benjamin, beside me, and I could tell he was proud of his father.
Count Vili elbowed me. “See?” he said. “I had a feeling the soft sell would work.”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I think it was Jin Lo’s paint that did it.”
The apothecary stood blinking at the men, overwhelmed. “The Anniken it is, then,” he said.
Ludvik’s tanned face broke into a blinding smile. He went to put his daughter’s name on the side of the boat, looking enormously proud. The captain took over at the wheel, and the others started to drift back to bed. It had gotten so late that it