by Kovacs, Jase
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2
Compass course: 260.
Wind: SE 10kn.
Boat Speed: 5kn.
Weather: Clear, falling wind.
Remarks: Alan found to be dead drunk on watch 0400. Violent disagreement. Alan secured by bosun and confined to bunk. Gybed SW of Alcestor Island to 350 degrees at 1400. Alan awake and sobering up at 1500; I've relieved him from all duties. Refuses to show us where he has hidden his swipe. He knows I'll tip it over the side. Gybed midnight east Egum atoll, to W-E leg.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3
Compass course: 80.
Wind: Nil.
Boat speed: nil.
Weather: Clear but for storm clouds southern horizon, heavy swell.
Remarks: small canoe sighted ten miles SW Alcestor island at first light. Solo crew. Fled under paddle to west when we sighted them. No ID made. Assessment: fishing canoe from community on Yanaba island, but very far from home.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
Compass Course: 80.
Wind 10kn.
Boat speed: 5kn.
Weather: storm building to south, wind increasing in afternoon.
Remarks: I assess storm to be dangerous. Seeking sheltered anchorage in Laughlan island group to ride out the storm.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5
Compass Course: Nil.
Wind 30-35kn.
Boat speed: Anchored.
Weather: Heavy storm broke 0200 hours. Front passed by 0400, followed by continuous black squalls until 1700.
Remarks: I write at 2100. The weather is improving; the wind began to fall at sunset. Our anchorage provided good shelter to the E and SE winds. But we dragged during the height of the storm. While Blong, Enzo, and myself were distracted and dealing with this, Alan drank his remaining swipe, which he had been hiding in an old oil bottle. He is now passed out; I am concerned that he is suffering breathing problems. If he doesn't recover, we'll head back to Madau at first light.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6
Compass Course: 270.
Wind: 10kn SE.
Boat speed: 5kn.
Weather: High cloud, intermittent calms.
Activities: Returning to Madau Island at best speed.
Remarks: Alan remained in a coma throughout the night. At 0400 he stopped breathing. Enzo and I performed chest compressions; he began breathing but remained unconscious. Stopped breathing at 0430, then again at 0457 and 0515. Chest compressions performed each time. We were unable to revive him the last time. Alan Hardy died 0530 on patrol aboard Excelsior, NOVEMBER 6. We are returning his body to Madau.
***
I put down my pen and close the logbook. The cockpit filled with a golden haze. I can't tell if it’s the early morning sun or an illusion caused by exhaustion. Tiny motes and clouds drift in the corner of my vision. I rub my eyes. A mistake. Tiredness fills my body. My arms ache from the long sessions of CPR as Enzo and I tried to revive Alan. My crewman. Now lying dead in his bunk.
The wind grows in strength with each passing minute. I'm glad; calm often follows the storm. Becalmed with a dead man on board? No thanks.
Later. The morning sun at our backs, Woodlark growing on the horizon ahead. Excelsior is Duncan's boat, a big hunk of steel, thirteen metres from bowsprit to davits. Not fast or elegant, but she is strong. That's saved us more than once. Right now, we are on an easy point of sail. She needs little guidance to follow her nose back to Madau.
My thoughts stay with Alan. Damn it. He shouldn't have even been on the boat in the first place. Fifty-five years old. Thirty-five of them living in Papua New Guinea, a coffee exporter out of Lae. Spent his weekend on the water either racing his twenty-two foot sloop up the Huon Gulf, or deep-sea fishing with his mates.
There was no reason he couldn't be crew – at least, there wasn't according to the council. My opinion, that he drank too much swipe, an alcoholic fruit wine brewed up out of pineapples, and that it had been ten years since he had done any sailing to speak of, were overruled. I kept to myself that I found him argumentative and unpleasant.
A political necessity, Duncan had said. Alan was friends with Fat Kev and Michael; Duncan said that we needed our crews to be inclusive, to counter the derisively name Matty's Navy as some of the older residents had begun to call my expeditions. But it was clear from the start that Alan was past his prime – that he could not (and would not) follow my directions. In short, he resented my command and felt it should be his.
I open the logbook and read over my last few entries. A few brief lines that chart a man's end. This logbook is my official record, and so I stick to the dry facts. I do not go into detail about the long night Enzo, Blong, and I spent dealing with Alan, dangerously drunk in rough seas, threatening to throw himself overboard when he wasn't flinging insults at me and swinging a winch handle at Enzo. I'll never know what battles he survived to find sanctuary on Madau, but I think that night he fought them anew.
Excelsior heels as the wind steadies at fifteen knots. A good, comfortable speed as we run on a downwind reach. It's something like seventy miles back to Madau Island; the reefs to south of Woodlark are uncharted but, after half a year of patrols, I am confident I can thread them and shave six hours off our return voyage.
Enzo and Blong sleep below. I can't help but look forward to 0900 hours when I can wake Enzo for his watch and turn into my bunk. The last few days have been exhausting; not just from the physical activity of sailing and riding out the storm, but from the mental demands of dealing with Alan as he unravelled before our eyes. Already I’m questioning my decisions made in the moment of crisis. And the questions I’ll face on our return already fill me with a sullen anger. Every decision I made in the heat of the moment will be picked apart by the landsmen and women on the council who haven't left the island in years.
A darkness seethes within me like a pool of oil slopping in the bilge. I can't tell yet whether it's because Alan died a pointless, self-inflicted death – or whether his death was in its way a vindication that I should not have compromised when it came to selecting my crew.
I just know that I won't give into 'political necessities' again.
***
MATAI.
I sink like a drowned corpse spiralling into the depths. But there is no up or down to my movement, just a vague impression of infinite time and space. I am in the void, and I am of the void. I sink and yet I float, and still my body is nothing, insubstantial, a concept rather than a physical fact. My eyes are open, but it makes no difference, for my body is just a necessary fiction, a metaphor for my experience, to explain how I could be here, seeing this. There is no light here, and yet there is a pervasive unlight, a darkness beyond ultraviolet, a darkness that is not the absence of light but its opposite, welling up from a nightmare maelstrom that drains the souls fallen to the plague, spiralling away to the deeper dimensions that are found beyond our universe and from the depths of the vortex comes the voice:
MATAI.
It comes from everywhere and fills my soul with fear primordial in its precedence.
YOU KILLED MY PRIEST, MATAI.
Waves of hate and loathing fill me. The loathing that rises from that vortex infects me like a virus so that I turn against myself and hate myself for what I am: a living human.
YOU KILLED MY PRIEST. BUT NO MATTER.
THERE IS ANOTHER.
A shape of unimaginable size rises from the vortex. A dark creature, formed of unlight and matter of composition unknown to our universe, drives itself through the infinite vacuum with vast fins that crackle with eldritch energy. It rushes towards me, filling my vision as its true terrible size becomes apparent. Nothing this massive could live, not in space, not in the void, not anywhere.
And then I know it does not live. It is a being of pure malevolence, of unending appetite, that broke into our universe and now exists only to consume and destroy. I want to turn away from it, to flee, but I have no arms, I have no legs with which to run. I have no mouth with which to scream. I am a drifting so
ul, and nothing more, drifting within this limbo, and it is coming, he is coming, the Dark Star is coming, and he is coming for me.
But then warmth fills me, and I know that the one who loves me has come. My lost sister has returned. I open myself to her, her love and protection. Strong arms wrap around me, lifting me up, away from the great evil that breached the maelstrom. But then with a shock I realise these arms are not my sister's. This is not Katie.
The arms that hold me are thick and firm. Giant hands place themselves on my hips, so large that the thumbs meet in the small of my back and the tips of the fingers brush across my abdomen.
I feel the presence, the intelligence behind these hands, which pulls me away from the coming evil, that lifts me faster than the great beast can chase.
The intelligence behind these hands is familiar and warm and protective.
And it is male.
And he says, I have you, Matty.
I have you, my girl.
***
"Matty!"
I wake with a start. Something hard is in my hand. A familiar knurled grip. I lunge at the silhouette leaning over me. He leaps back as the blade misses his belly by inches. Then I freeze as my mind catches up with my instincts. I look at the knife clenched in my white-knuckle hand. A fish knife, kept in the lazarette locker. I have no idea when I got it out.
Enzo smiles warily as he eyes the blade. "Je suis désolé. Is my fault. I know better than to give you a surprise, no?"
I drop my hand and release a long breath. My back and shoulders flare painfully as tension drains. "Sorry, Enzo, I-" Then the magnitude of my sin hits me, a sin worse than rising from a nightmare to attack my friend. "Shit! Was I sleeping on watch!?"
Enzo relaxes and sits down in the cockpit. "I not say you sleeping. You were calling out. It was like... how to say, a seizure? If you just sleeping, I not mind so much. There is plenty of water around, not so much to bump into." He looks out at Woodlark, suddenly much closer than I last remember. "Well, not so much for now."
I struggle to follow the Frenchman's strange grammar. My mind swims with the lingering impressions of a dream, of strong masculine arms holding me as a great shark surges from a deep-sea trench. The feelings tingle the way your skin does after a slap. "Did you say a seizure?"
He shrugs. "I suppose it is. Maybe my English is not good. You kept calling out. It is what woke me."
Excelsior lurches as a freak wave collapses just as we crest its peak. We drop with a sickening plunge into a thudding crash that hurls green water high in the air. There is a shriek from below deck and then Blong appears in the companionway, rubbing his head. "Hey lady, this boat crazy hard."
I doubt you would recognise him as the filthy scabbed wraith that I found under the dominion of the Pale King. Blong's black, coarsely cut hair shines in the morning light. His skin is tanned to a mahogany brown, his scars have faded, and his body has filled out from six months of a healthy island diet of fish and vegetables. His dark eyes hold an amused glint as if the entire world was a joke only he gets. When I first began our patrol log books and listed crew, it was only a brief hesitation before I put his surname as my own. My little brother, who I saved and who saved me.
Despite the leaps and bounds with which he has recovered from his living horror on the Black Harvest, where he was dangled as bait by the Pale King to entice mariners to their doom, he is still a ten-year-old boy. He pushes past Enzo so he can sit with me at the helm, slipping under my arm like a cat seeking attention.
"Smells down there," he says ominously. "Like the dark place."
"Sorry, mate," I say. "But there's not much we can do about that. We're taking Alan home as fast as we can."
"Why can't we?" asks Blong, gesturing as if throwing something overboard. Enzo and I glance at each other. We have deliberately not discussed that option. Keeping a corpse on the boat causes all sorts of problems. The pragmatic move would have been a quick but respectful burial at sea. But both Enzo and I know that it would prompt further questions, more second guessing from our – enemies is a strong word, but it's how I feel – enemies in the council.
"Because we so close to home," says Enzo. "Is better we take him back to his friends, so they can say goodbye."
"Stinky. Maybe he go masalai," says Blong, using the local word for the infected.
Because the disease struck so quickly – and the bizarre nightmare of the dead coming back broke our understanding of the world – every community seems to have their own name for those who died yet still walk. Most expats call them zombies – but zombies don't burst into flames when exposed to the sun. Nor are they vampires, with only the newly discovered Alphas having any form of intelligence to speak of. Zac, and others who see the world through a religious lens, call them the damned. Duncan, with a laconic indifference, calls them deadies. I used to call them Marys, after my mum who said they were like Typhoid Mary who carried a disease but didn't die from it. But that name means little to others, so I too have started them to think of masalai, the evil spirits that the locals believe haunt places of darkness and death.
"He's not coming back," I say to Blong. "Alan died from natural causes. Only people who have been bitten by a masalai come back."
Blong squirms beneath my arm, uncomforted by my reassurances. "Smells like the bad place."
Like the Black Harvest.
"Matty…" says Enzo.
"It'll be okay," I say, as I compare the compass to our bearing to Woodlark to confirm that the expected current pushes us south.
"No, Matty. A sail." Enzo rises out of his seat, staring to the south with a keen attention. Blong takes the helm as I rush forward. I see triangles nicking the horizon. I climb up to the spreaders, where I hook one arm around the mast and lean out, my other hand shading my eyes as I squint against the bright dancing diamonds of the mid-morning sun.
"How many?" Enzo shouts.
I take a moment before replying, to assure myself that my first instincts are correct. "Four canoes; bearing south west, heading north." I drop down the mast as fast as I can, to where Enzo waits with a questioning expression on his face. "Red sails," I say.
"Can we cut them off?"
My mind is already laying out the probabilities of a successful interception. I see the chart in my mind; our course laid over theirs. Both of us on a downwind run, but on opposing tacks. They have the advantage of Excelsior when running, their big lateen sails send them skimming across the waves. If they hold their course, then we should be able to intercept at least one of them. But we will have no chance of catching them if they shunt and flee.
A fever of excitement infects the three of us. We have spent three cruises over half a year patrolling the same hundred mile long stretch of water in anticipation of this moment. The return of the red sails, the canoes that brought the followers of the Green Lord to Woodlark and spirited him away to the islands far to the south.
My mind is made up. "Blong, hold course. Enzo, work your magic on our trim. I want everything the wind gives us." I slip into the cockpit and lift the faded and split cushions that cover the shallow seat locker. Once the locker was used to hold spare halyards. Now it is my armoury. The M4 assault rifle my father looted from a Philippine Navy gunboat nine years earlier gleams with a thin protective sheen of oil. I clear the weapon, my hands moving with long practice, and load it with a fresh magazine.
Excelsior has a big racing helm, and Blong spreads his arms wide, as if he was preparing to embrace a particularly rotund grandmother, to keep us on course. Enzo grinds at the sheet winch, drawing in our sun-bleached genoa to form the most optimal curve and wring every iota of speed from the wind. Enzo has been sailing since he was a boy, first in the Mediterranean and then all around the world, and I am happy for his thirty years of experience as I feel Excelsior rise like a dolphin punching through the waves.
A flying packet of spray drenches me as I lean out of the cockpit to watch the red sails. So very close now, no more than a mile to the nearest canoe.
Damn, they can move. There are three men at the helm of the nearest, one standing tall with the steering oar under his arm, the other two crouched and facing us. I can't tell anything about them, the bright sun reducing them to faceless silhouettes.
Salt tingles on my lips. This moment is so wonderfully bright. My nerves dance with electricity, but I am still and intent as I watch our courses converge. Narrow, converge, and then I sigh with disappointment as they slip in front of us at range of eight hundred metres. "They're too damn fast," I call back to Enzo.
"Shoot them!" shouts Blong.
"Not yet," I say. "Not until we're sure they're the baddies."
"They got red sails!" yells Blong, gob smacked at my stupidity. "What else you need, lady!?"
"We gotta be certain…" I say, my voice trailing away as the two crouching men move forward to the canoe's mast. Surely they're not… I glance at the other three canoes and see, like dancers in a choreographed ceremony, that they too have men at their masts. As if they were one creature, all four yards come down, their red sails billowing like collapsing tents. Outrigger canoes like these don't tack like a yacht. Instead, they stop and reverse direction, the helmsman moving from one end of the canoe to the other, so what was the bow is now the stern, their outrigger always to windward. The men lean out, using their bodies to swing the yards as the canoes slow. The sails spin, catch the wind again, and the canoes take off again, coming straight at us. "They're shunting!" I shout.
"They're going to attack," Enzo says.
"What we do?!" shrieks Blong, his face alive with sheer excitement.
"Hold course. They're coming to us." I slip into the cockpit and take up my weapon. My hands take their long-accustomed grip, the metal cool and malevolent against my skin. Instinctively, I confirm that the weapon is SAFE. "Enzo, I'm going to the foredeck. For the love of God, don't luff. I don't want my head to be taken off by a flogging sail."
