Keig worked slowly to get the block clear with the minimum disturbance. Till abruptly there came the sound of booted men running hard towards us. At once Keig surged to his feet, sending the slab crashing on to the edge of the lighter with a clang like a giant tocsin.
I began shoving myself up into the space he had vacated. My legs felt ridiculously wobbly. Ahead I saw Keig poising to dive into the sea. And then came a shot. I heard the droning swish of heavy pellets without realizing what they were till the noise of the gun broke on my ears.
Keig made a low powerful plunge. I staggered to the lighter’s edge and tumbled in haphazardly after him. The sea seemed fiercely cold after the long fug of our hiding-place. I gasped for breath and struck out. The dark blob of Keig’s head was about ten yards in front. He turned as he heard me.
‘Keep under,’ he shouted.
His dark head disappeared. I swam on for a few strokes, already out of breath.
Then, with a wide hissing splash, a circle of buckshot struck the water a little to my right. I dived. Fear did wonders for my swimming. I got through stroke after stroke, my lungs bursting, determined not to come up. Dimly ahead in the green murkiness I made out a swirl of movement that must be Keig.
When at last I did break the surface I saw that he too had come up for a single gulp of air. I let the blessed coolness stream into my own lungs and then resolutely plunged my face down. But I did so with the faintly comforting thought that while we had both been on the surface no shot had been fired.
I swam on, the water streaming past my body and through my clothes with satisfying speed. And then I abruptly realized that I was in the grip of a really powerful current. The discovery gave me a moment of blind panic, only stilled when I saw Keig’s shadowy form ahead.
Soon I felt I must surface and look round. The jetty seemed extraordinarily far off. I rolled over on to my back and took a long look. I could still make out a small group of Keepers in their dark green uniform but already details were beginning to blur.
I turned to see what Keig was doing. He too had surfaced and he was swimming easily some fifteen yards away, turning to head for the shore. I swung myself round and struck out.
Even in those few seconds we had been swept noticeably further. I tried to gauge the direction we were being taken in: it was straight out to sea. The jetty stood almost at the south end of the isle and already we had been carried well past the southernmost headland.
I swam as strongly as I could, but I seemed to be able to make no impression on the water. Soon Keig appeared at my side, and before long he had to tell me to catch hold of his trouser strap.
Before much longer again the buffeting of the waves and the unyielding drag of the current sent me into a swoon of exhaustion. Hours seemed to pass. I kept swimming mechanically like a running-down clockwork frog, and I imagine my strokes were about that effective. I knew nothing. Only all around me the salt cold battering of the water, and, like something half-seen at the end of a tunnel, the feel of my numbed hand on the twisted sodden cotton strap of Keig’s trousers.
When my trailing feet struck a rock I did not at first realize what had happened. Dimly I conceived it as some new menace to fight off. And then it came to me: I had touched bottom. We were saved.
Keig must have carried me up the beach where we landed and into a little wood that grew on either side of a stream. And it was lying there, propped against the narrow trunk of a birch, that the sound of his voice brought me to reality.
‘How are you doing then?’
I felt as if I could not move a muscle, but nevertheless marvellous.
‘All right,’ I said.
I tried to smile.
‘That’s grand then,’ Keig said. ‘I must be off shortly, you know.’
‘Off? Where?’
Panic swept me to sudden vigour.
‘To fetch Margaret,’ Keig replied stolidly. ‘I’ll have to make haste. They won’t be certain we were swept out to sea: there’s sure to be a hue-and-cry. And they’ll remember Margaret’s over here sooner or later.’
The reminder of the position we were in and of all we would have to do before we were finally safe brought back what seemed an intolerably oppressive burden to me.
‘You’re going to stick to your plan then?’ I asked.
‘No, I’ve had to make it a bit different,’ Keig said. ‘It’ll be no use trying to get a boat to take us out to the steamer now. They’ll have a good watch on them, the Keepers will. Or if I was in their shoes I should.’
‘But if we can’t get a boat ...’
‘We’ll have to make one, won’t we?’
‘Make one?’
What had he been planning while I had lain there half-conscious?
‘Make not what you’d call a boat, but a raft like. It shouldn’t be too hard, not when I’ve fetched a few things from the farm. A raft won’t get us out to the steamer direct though, she passes too far out. We’ll have to go to the mainland. The current’ll take us, you should know that.’
‘Yes.’
I lacked the heart to respond to the rough joke. But I did look up at Keig as he leant over me.
‘You saved my life,’ I said.
A slight smile curved his wide straight mouth.
‘Did you think I’d leave you to drown?’ he asked. ‘If it hadn’t been for you yesterday, I’d have been dragged out of that place by the Keepers and flogged till I couldn’t stand.’
‘That place?’ I said. That place was the Rota. Didn’t you know?’
‘The Rota? No. I told you, I hardly know one street in Lesneven from the next. There was a bit of a crowd outside and I thought I’d best get in among ‘em. Then I saw the door.’
He frowned abruptly.
‘And what was doing in there?’ he asked. ‘Mylchraine closed up the Rota years ago.’
‘He was holding what they call an esbat,’ I answered. ‘A witchcraft ceremony.’
‘He was?’ Keig queried, a look of sharp interest seizing his whole face. ‘Was that him? Mylchraine?’
‘Yes, that was him. Had you never seen him before?’
‘No,’ Keig said slowly. ‘But I’ll know him when I see him next.’
He sat there in silence, and I lay still against the narrow birch trunk. After a minute or so he spoke again.
‘Esbat, did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, he has them up at the house here as well, in the part that’s already finished. There’s plenty mortal eager to go, too. Ones you’d have thought decent folk.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘And to think ten or fifteen years ago all that was just something a few old people went in for in the country, innocently enough too.’
Keig looked up into the trees on the far side of the stream. His eyes were clouded in thought, as though he were struggling with some complex problem.
‘Fifteen years back,’ he said, ‘Mylchraine was no more than an estate owner among all the other estate owners in the island. Then he began taking first this, then that. And now he lords it over those esbats of his and watches others make beasts of themselves because they think it’ll please him. How did he grow from one into the other? How does that happen?’
He asked as if he expected an answer. He was applying to me, the educated man, for information. And, in face of the challenge of such totally honest simplicity, I knew I ought to produce an equally honest, though necessarily less simple, reply. And I did not feel able. I was, it is true, still physically exhausted; but it was not this that made me blindly unwilling to tackle the question. I just was not—I knew it of myself—capable of going on and on, painstakingly truth-testing, past however many horizons of human nature it would have to be to bring back the untarnished answer.
But Keig had twisted round to look me full in the face. He was waiting for that answer. A fool thrush suddenly cascaded into song somewhere over on the other side of the dell.
I snatched at a ready-made stop-gap.
‘Yo
u know what they say: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
I could see Keig fasten on the words and mentally worry at them like a dog trying to get at a bone greasily wrapped in layers of paper.
He jerked himself a bit straighter.
‘That’s a saying?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
‘Who said it?’
I blinked.
‘I believe it was Acton, Lord Acton, the English nineteenth-century historian.’
Keig’s deep-set brown eyes glowed suddenly to incandescence.
‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t always corrupt, having power. Only sometimes it does. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes not a bit. That stands to reason.’
‘Well,’ I said, more than a little taken aback, ‘perhaps the phrase is a little over-neat, but people have been happily quoting it ever since.’
‘And what’s the sense in that?’ Keig said angrily. ‘Going about telling only half the truth. They’re wrong. Wrong.’
I decided there was no reply I could reasonably make. Keig sat there glaring ahead at the inoffensive trees for perhaps half a minute more. Then he abruptly rose to his feet.
‘I’m away,’ he said. ‘I dare say I’ll be gone three hours or more. You can break sticks for the raft. Thin ones, three or four foot long.’
And he strode past me, on up the side of the stream and into the tangle of bushes at the head of the dell.
I was too astonished even to wish him luck. And, lying there still propped weakly against that birch tree, I thought with foreboding that luck was what he was likely to need plenty of, making his way from one point to another in the confined area of this small isle.
7
For some time I lay where Keig had left me, with my back up against the thin trunk of the birch tree, with the deep blue of the sky visible above me through its thin branches and with the sun-warmed air gradually drying out my sodden clothes. But then at last I heaved myself to my feet, filled with a sudden determination to make myself useful.
I scrambled, rather totteringly, up to the edge of the dell and cautiously explored the area round it. To my satisfaction I found that there was not even so much as a cottage or a barn in sight. Comforted by the thought that I was in no immediate danger of discovery, I went back to the dell, found and ate with trembling hunger some hardly ripe elderberries and hung up my coat—precious wallet still in it—shirt and tie so that if anyone did come by later I would look reasonably respectable. Soon I even felt relaxed enough to crouch behind a bush and perform my natural functions. And then I spent a lot of time breaking off all the thin branches I could lay hands on and piling up the sticks ready to be bound into bundles for Keig’s raft.
From time to time I took a few minutes off to make a careful survey all round to make sure I was still in no danger of being caught unawares. It was between quarter and half past four by my watch—which had unexpectedly lived up to its guarantee of being waterproof—when in the course of one such sentry tour I spotted Keig returning. He was striding towards the dell blithely enough accompanied by a woman, each of them hefting a substantial bundle and Keig carrying in addition over his shoulder a long-handled axe whose polished head glinted sharply in the sun.
I waited with some curiosity for a closer look at the woman by his side. What sort of a wife had Keig married, I wondered.
I did not have to wait long to find out. The couple advanced over the rough pasture towards me without seeming to take any precautions, and soon they were near enough for me to risk calling out.
At the sound of my voice Keig ran quickly forward.
‘Are you well?’ he asked. ‘We’re in luck so far. I found out there aren’t so many Keepers on the isle. They’re guarding the boats but they’ve few men to spare for a search. So we should have an hour or two quietly enough anyway.’
He dumped down his heavy bundle and leant the formidable-looking axe up against it. He stroked his chin.
‘I had time for a shave at home even,’ he said. ‘That sets you up, you know. Sets you up grand.’
I thought it somewhat odd all the same that, even if the hunt was a little less hot than we had feared, he should have taken time for such a marginally useful activity as shaving. Plenty of people in Oceana wore beards, and it was even much more common there than in television England to see men with a two or three days’ growth on their chin. But I was to find out later that shaving was a positive obsession with Keig: it was almost as if he felt, like a vice-versa Samson, that his strength depended on having a face free from hair.
Altogether, however, he looked now a lot sprucer than when I had seen him last. He wore his own jacket and trousers, rough enough countryman’s working clothes but infinitely better than the shapeless coarse convict’s garments I had first seen him in. And, with the thick black stubble off his cheeks, he looked altogether a good deal more ordinary than before, though nothing could conceal that tremendous oak-tree girth of chest.
I turned to look at his wife, who had by now scrambled down into the dell light-footedly enough and had dumped her scarcely less large bundle beside Keig’s. I suppose she must have been about forty then, a tallish full-figured woman, holding herself noticeably well. Though there were a few strands of grey in her free-flowing mass of black hair, and though the exertion of crossing the little isle had put a sheen of perspiration on her pale face, hinting at less than perfect health, she was nevertheless, I thought, decidedly attractive. She wore the clothes that countrywomen in the remoter Parts of Oceana still kept to, a long very full-skirted dress with over it the ubiquitous orangey-red shawl. But the dress, in a dark green gingham sort of material, did at least match well with the colour of the shawl, a piece of taste uncommon enough in my younger days in the country districts.
I waited for Keig to introduce her, but he said not a word. So I smiled and wished her good afternoon.
‘Good afternoon to you,’ she answered in a low voice with every bit as much of a country accent as Keig himself.
But she said no more, simply standing there beside the two big bundles with her eyes to the ground. Keig immediately began bustling about, pulling some bread and a long piece of sausage from his bundle and handing them to me to eat.
‘Did you get sticks?’ he inquired shortly.
With a certain amount of pride, I showed him the large collection I had made, dumped in piles behind various bushes so as not to be too noticeable to anyone passing. But he took it all as a matter of course.
‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘find that twine and start on the bundles.’
His wife, without a word, produced a large hank of heavy twine and began dividing up my piles of sticks into thick rounds.
‘We’ll need more branches yet,’ Keig said to me. ‘You’ll find a knife in Margaret’s packet. I’ll cut some cross-pieces.’
He picked up his axe, its handle smooth with years of use, felt its balance with a plain air of pleasure and marched off in the direction of a useful-looking birch sapling further up the dell.
We all three worked with hardly a word exchanged for something over half an hour, by which time the raft was beginning to take shape. Then Keig called abruptly to Margaret.
‘Leave that now. Climb up to the top there and see if there’s any sign of anybody on the move nearby.’
Margaret silently knelt on the bundle of springy sticks she had been working at and swiftly tied the last knot in the twine round it. Then she rose, dusted her hands lightly together and set off for the head of the dell. She had to pass close to where I was hacking away at some birch sprigs and I decided to say just a word as she passed to soften the harsh edge of Keig’s order. I suppose I was influenced by the fact that she was an attractive woman. The set of her head on her shoulders brought out a touch of the cavalier in me, but no more.
‘He’s a great one for driving people on, that husband of yours,’ I said with a smile.
She lifted up her head for a moment a
nd I caught a glimpse of sharply scornful eyes flashing at me. Whether she would have added a comment or not I do not know, because hardly had I spoken myself when Keig suddenly came striding up, swept by me, scrambled a step or two up the bank of the dell and taking his wife’s wrist between two fingers and a thumb helped her up. It was a gesture of telling protectiveness.
I bent down to my struggle with the pliantly resistant birch twigs thinking hard about this new item in my stock of information on my companion in adversity.
I had been working for less than ten minutes more when Margaret Keig’s voice came low and urgently from her observation point at the top of the dell.
‘Keig. Keig. There’s dogs barking down over by the lane.’
Keig stopped at once and listened hard, as I did. Very faintly in the distance the sound of concerted barking could be heard.
‘Come down,’ Keig called to his wife. ‘We’ll have to patch the raft up as best we may and be off.’
Margaret came scrambling down and we all three set to work at top speed to get the raft in a fit state to put to sea. It took us less than five minutes. Then while Margaret and I seized the two big bundles, Keig hefted up the whole contrivance and staggered down with it out of the dell, across the short strip of soft sand at its mouth and into the sea.
He swung the raft over his head and lowered it into the water, where it bobbed encouragingly enough. Margaret and I lowered the bundles on to it.
‘Get on yourselves now,’ Keig said.
We knelt on either side of the cumbersome craft. By now it was a good deal lower in the water but it still seemed to have plenty of buoyancy and I felt moderately hopeful of our chances. Keig placed his long axe carefully beside Margaret and then bent down and began shoving us slowly forward. I picked up one of the leafy branches we had hastily cut for want of better paddles and swished it energetically through the water. It appeared to make little difference.
‘Once we catch that current...’ Keig muttered as he pushed.
Remembering the terrible sucking drag that had impeded every inch of our progress towards this very spot only a few hours earlier, I felt a decided flame of hope. Once we had got fairly out into that we would be swept well beyond sight of the shore in minutes.
Strong Man Page 6
