The Southwind Saga (Book 3): Flood Tide

by Kovacs, Jase

  If only a cure was so simple for Kev and Larry. Both of them are fading. I can't stand to see two men who have been such giant personalities drifting towards the distant shore.

  I can do nothing for them. Instead, I stand with Matty. "So certain?" I prompt.

  Matty stares hard at the southern horizon. We have been out here for maybe thirty minutes, since she turned off the radio. I think the red sails are gaining on us – not much, but enough to tell. Dalbarade still looms, a hole in the stars, but the volcano's glow and the embers of the resort have faded. I have been standing with Matty, waiting for her to reach out, as she casts her thoughts out into the night.

  "I was so certain that this was the right course of action. Everything I knew pointed me this way. This was our best opportunity to strike. We had to seize this moment or we would never be free. And what happened?"

  "It wasn't just you, Matty. You're no dictator. We’re all volunteers."

  "I lead us all into his trap. And now my friends are dead and dying. How many have we lost? Who will die before the dawn?"

  "How many would die if we had done nothing? If we had hidden on Madau until the Green Lord came down on us with all his fury? His masalai pouring from the jungle? Would you have had Madau be another Woodlark?"

  "I know that. I know. But it doesn’t excuse my mistakes. Why I didn't see the signs?"

  "I didn't either."

  "Yes, you did. You did, Zac. But you followed me. You trusted me. They all did. And for what?"

  "This is a war, Matty. You can't expect to win every battle."

  "We’ve lost a yacht. Lost too many people. And the night is not yet over."

  "Matty, you have been awake for almost twenty four hours. You have had a hell of a day. You need to rest."

  "Don't patronise me."

  "How am I—"

  "I was sleepwalking again, wasn't I? Last night. That's why you were weird this morning. Why my clothes were inside out." She looks at me, hard, then nods as she sees something in my silence. "I can't be trusted."

  "Matty, your night terrors don't mean anything."

  "I dragged everyone here. I thought I could defeat him. That we would just walk in and take his head. So goddamned arrogant. I couldn't see any other alternative. That makes me dangerous, Zac."

  "No—"

  "I shouldn't be in charge, Zac. I can't see—"

  "Listen, Matty. Listen to me. The weakness, the danger you fear? That is what you are feeling now. These feelings are your enemy. The plan was sound. It was screwed up by others. It was Michael who brought Shiloh in too early. Who got drunk and lashed out at Kev—"

  "Don't—"

  "No, shut up now and listen to me. You lead us. You got us organised and put us on the shore and everything was going according to plan. Yes, the Green Lord knew we were coming. Yes, it was a trap for us. But you got us out of the trap. And now you have a plan to get home. To save us."

  A smile ghosts her lips, and her eyes are damp when she looks at me. "Yeah. I have a plan. You still trust me, don’t you?"

  "Of course." The memory of her in front of the painting, chanting like a masalai, threatens to rise but my faith keeps it at bay. "We all trust you, Matty."

  "Good. When the time comes, remember that."

  An excited shout comes above. A crewman sitting on the roof points at the chasing sails. "Bigpela kanu i kam!"

  "A big canoe is coming?"

  Matty points. "The two on the left. Next to each other."

  "They do look bigger than the other canoes, I guess."

  "It's not two canoes. It’s a pahi, a big twin masted oceangoing canoe, like the ones that took the Polynesians across the Pacific."

  "Okay. So what?"

  "So it's as big, or bigger, than Fidelio. It has a longer waterline." She looks at me expectantly and sighs when she sees my blank look. "Longer hull means a greater maximum speed. It can go faster than us, Zac. I've been watching it for a while. It's gaining on us. It has been all this time. I guessed as much when I was speaking to him. His radio signal was so clear and strong. All this time he has been gaining on us."

  "Okay. So do we get you back into Excelsior now then? Get you ready to fight?"

  She takes my hand in hers and looks at me. Her life passes before my eyes. She smiles. "I will not lose anymore friends. Remember that you trust me."

  She lets go, turns and dives into the black sea.

  Instantly I am at the rail, pointing at the spot where she disappeared with barely a splash. My yell leaves the lining of my throat raw and sore. "Man overboard!"

  A flurry of confusion. Abella and Abigail at the rail with me, shouting questions. Enzo turning the helm, backing the jib, heaving to. Slowing. Someone flings a float overboard. We strain to see her, to find any trace.

  "There she is!" shouts Abella. Matty fights through the rough sea with powerful over arm strokes. Our canoes turn in, coming up to see what is amiss.

  She's swimming away from us.

  "What happened?" demands Abigail.

  "She just turned and dived overboard," I say. "We were talking about what to do next and then she just went!"

  Fidelio still has lot of momentum to lose. Enzo strips his shirt off and steps up to rail. Someone places his hand on Enzo and stops him from diving in after her. I am shocked to discover it is me. "No," I say.

  "Get off me!" he shouts.

  "No. She wants this. She told me to trust her." We turn to watch her driving through the troubled sea. "She has a plan."

  She reaches Jacka's towed canoe and clings to the bow. While it was empty and we were going fast, it planed happily along behind Fidelio. But now her weight drives the canoe's bow underwater.

  "Cast off the tow line!" I shout. "She'll drown!"

  "What the hell is she doing?!" Rod fights to go after her and now it is Enzo who holds him back.

  The big canoe is racing towards us, a great twin hulled vessel with two masts lofting giant sails. It is coming so fast. It must have been holding back before, creeping up on us until it was ready to strike. And it has seen our confusion, our yacht's manoeuvres, and decided it was time.

  A wave breaks over Jacka's canoe. Matty clings desperately to its hull, her face a white mask as she hauls air into her starving lungs. "Goddamn it!" I shout and dive for the cleat. The line is off in a second. Immediately the canoe rises on the following wave. With the pressure released, Matty easily slips aboard. She drops the boom and is underway in moments.

  "What did she say?" Enzo demands.

  "That she had a plan. And we were to trust her."

  "But what do we do now!?"

  I look over to the deck of our wounded. So many loved ones. So many friends hurt. I remember Solomon that morning when the fight broke out on Madau. He's gone now. Left behind on Shiloh. Old Ian's throat blown out in the bar. Dolf falling before a painted wall. Robbo and little Molo, gone. Dead. I look to those on our deck who we might yet save. Kev. Larry. Apo. And others. And then I look to Abigail who, alone of those standing, understands what is happening. She nods slowly and that gives me the courage to say what needs to be said.

  "We keep going."

  CHAPTER TWELVE: MATTY

  The steering oar hums in my hand as I bring the canoe up to the wind. The angry sea pitches water aboard. I tie off the sheet and set my course to intercept the pahi, which already has begun a wide, sweeping turn to cross Fidelio's wake.

  I glance back at the catamaran. She has hove to and a knot of people argue on the back deck. I expected Enzo and the others wouldn't let me go so easily. But I trust Zac. He understands. He will respect my choice. He will not let them waste my decision with some foolish attempt at rescue.

  The large fore-and-aft sails of the pahi shiver as she slacks her sheets and slows to hold her place ahead of me. She is at least twenty metres long, two hulls like a catamaran with a broad platform between and a low hut-like structure at the stern. Figures line her gunnels, crouching, tight and wound, like cats in the moment
before pouncing. I see the glow of many feral eyes.

  As I close, I can see more figures aboard the pahi. The masalai that line her rails are as still as a baited trap, but the crew – they must be humans still, for they shift the sails and sheets with great attention to hold place in the ugly sea.

  I see him. A great hulking man perched at the stern. Between the moonlight and the breaking spray, I cannot make out any features. He is a silhouette, no more. But he gives an impression of immense power. As patient as a stone. He stands at the tiller; the steering oar is a child's toy in his broad hands. He shifts his weight and it seems as if the entire pahi heels in response. Her sheets tighten and she catches the wind and springs to life. She crosses my bow, and now I must fetch her wake.

  He does not look back as I come up on her stern. The hands trim the sails, and she stays just ahead of me, just outside my reach. I wring every knot speed I can from my waterlogged vessel. These canoes aren't so great for the solo sailor. You need to have a crew. Friends. I look back. Fidelio, Razzmatazz and Excelsior are distant shapes, swallowed by the gloom. Fading. Then gone.

  I feel the bittersweet smile on my lips more than the emotion behind it. I sail my canoe using traditions as old as time. Stripped of artifice and technology. No tools, no engine, no electronics. No weapons. Nothing but wind and wit to carry me through.

  I remember a dream I had long ago in which I sailed a canoe much like this. Severed from the anchors of my past. Following the stern lights of my family, in canoes of their own, as they led me towards Madau and my future.

  I wedge the steering oar in place and bail water. Little Molo did this once. He was the bailer for this canoe. He's gone now. So many others gone, because of my mistakes. I was so certain and yet still people died.

  Am I doing the right thing now?

  I am where I am meant to be?

  Hours slip by. The pahi leads and Dalbarade Island grows. My attention wavers and dips. Sleep steals moments of waking like a thief. My wet clothing wicks warmth away from my body, and I shiver without respite. I consider stripping naked. It would be warmer to wear nothing than these wet clothes. But I feel his eyes upon me, and I would not let him see me revealed.

  We slip down the island's western side. The black cone rises into the sky like a vast monument to some forgotten pharaoh's vanity. The fire at its peak auras the looming clouds, a false dawn that leads us on like a lighthouse promising safe harbour.

  The pahi slips through a hidden entrance in the fringing reef as casually as a blind man moves unseeing around his home.

  So tired. Everything is a blur. My eyes rimmed with salt. Fire in my joints. Cold in my muscles.

  A cliff ahead.

  True dawn pales the east.

  A dark maw opens at the shoreline as a cave takes us in. The pahi's masts dip and lower as it reaches through the entrance; my canoe's own mast barely clears the low lip of the cave mouth. We slip into the stone cold darkness as the sun breaks the horizon. I coast into the cave with the last of the wind's momentum, then I drop my sail.

  The cave is a long wide passage that reaches up to the volcano like a vein flowing to the heart. Spluttering torches light a concrete wharf along one side. People on the wharf catch the pahi’s lines. Other canoes come in, their sails furled. Their crews ignore me as they paddle past, their eyes dull as if drugged.

  My canoe bumps against the dock, and I pass a line around a palm tree piling. For the moment I am ignored. I slump. My vessel is moored. My journey is over. My gambit worked; the pahi and all the red canoes have returned. My friends escaped.

  The concrete wharf is very old and deeply encrusted with black marine growth. My canoe grinds against dead oyster shells as she moves with the gentle motion of the bottled sea.

  I lift my gaze to see the giant standing amidships of the pahi, deep in conversation. His back is to me and he stoops to whisper in his companion's ear. I am not surprised to see he talks to a thin man with long white hair and one arm.

  The Green Lord's back is wide and ridged with strange loops and coils of muscles. I am reminded of tumours or a jungle fungus, growing over itself in a mad explosion of expansion, with no order or thought. His skin is torchlight red where it is not covered with black tattoos of lines and ridges and swirling maelstroms, vortexes that move under the flickering light of the fires. The patterns shift hypnotically as his muscles move while he gestures with his hands, the designs of black ink calling me, drawing me down, drawing me—

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH

  — a dull roar fills my head like the beating of surf against a rocky lee shore, heard on a foul night, a noise that promises drowning. The roar fills me as the dancing tattoos draw me in. There is a vortex at the centre of the galaxy, and it calls itself the Dark Star and it is coming, it is coming for me, and I hear its call. It called me to the Black Harvest, and I found a cavern full of glory there, beauty and love and the Pale King opening his arms, and I turned on him. I turned like an ungrateful child. He welcomed me into his family, and I cast him down into the abyss. An ungrateful child who killed her father and then killed the one who offered her forgiveness. The Green Lord's tattoos make sense to me. They may look like a random design of lines and triangles and squares, repeating over and over in a pattern that seems pleasing to the eye but nothing more. But there is truth there, and stories of deeds and legends of life written in the tattoos the same way our own definitions are encoded in DNA. And like our DNA they define the nature of the man if only you have the learnings, the secret knowings of the tribal priests to speak the secret words to open his —

  The Green Lord throws a cloak over his shoulders, and the vision is gone. My head swims with the sudden emptiness. He draws the material tight around his towering form and steps onto shore. He doesn't look back before he disappears into the cave.

  Rueben comes to my canoe. His pale face is drawn, and his chest is swaddled with yellow bandages and dark stains. But the inner fire blazing in his eyes is undampened. He sneers down at me slumped in my canoe.

  "So much effort," he says, his lips curling back like skin splitting on a rotting fruit. "Just for a drowned rat." He waves forward a pair of his followers, stick thin men, hollow eyes, dirty skin bleeding with fresh tattoos across their arms and back. "You know what happens next."

  He turns away, perhaps in anger, perhaps in disgust. I couldn’t care less. I step onto the wharf, and his people grip my arms. Their hands are strong, and I couldn't resist even if I wanted. They walk me down the wharf. Further into the cave.

  The crews draw themselves up on either side of the wharf to watch me pass. Scattered amid them are masalai, dull and simple, standing with slack arms and veiled eyes, like the plastic statues found in the old world’s shops. No one makes a sound as I am taken.

  We turn down a side passage. The main cave was a natural formation, but this passage is manmade. I see the rough marks of chisels scoring the walls, and I wonder at the years of effort it must have taken to dig out the living volcanic rock by hand.

  We pass beyond the reach of the torchlight and walk into darkness. My guards do not falter, as if they don't need to see to know the way. They stop and I feel a draft as a door opens. They shove me against a wall, hard. I slump to the ground as the door slams behind me as.

  The stone is cold and wet. I feel around, to gain some idea of where they have left me. I'm in a tiny room. Maybe a metre across by two long. Just enough to lie down.

  I do that.

  No strength.

  No thoughts.

  There is no noise. No light. Nothing. Nothing but—

  Well. This is another fine mess you've gotten us into, says Katie.

  Not now, Katie. My job is done. My day is over. I need rest. I need the quiet.

  She does not answer.

  I fall.

  ***

  I dream of the day I gave up. When all hope was gone and I stepped from Voodoo’s rail and gave myself to the sea. I sank down in the blue wom
b of the world and waited for my lungs to open themselves to the salt.

  I dream of the sharks. The vast armada of sharks cruising as one. Coming from the deep, reef sharks, hammerheads, makos, threshers. All schooling together as if they were mere sardines. A collection of animals shaped by evolution and time to live and hunt alone, now working together for some purpose beyond my understanding. Nurse sharks, tiger sharks, leopard sharks. And at the heart of the school, an enormous great white. Its eyes as dark as the grave, the rows of its teeth as jagged and nasty as anything carried by a masalai.

  I dream of the moment where it saw me, floating down there, mortal terror driving all thoughts of suicide from my mind. How, when confronted by a monster, I suddenly found that I was not ready to go.

  And in my dream, I hear their hearts beat. A deep steady thrumming that fills the water around me. Sound passes through my body like light through a window. A hum that shivers my every cell and sets my nerves aflame.

  Then the sharks are gone into the abyssal depths, and I rise up from the darkness, so slowly, and the closer I get to the surface the stronger the pain becomes.

  When I open my eyes it isn’t to the blue bowl of sky but to an empty night. The darkness is so profound and complete that I feel a sickening plunge as if I was falling. I see stars but they are merely the false signals of my straining eyes. The only things that confirm I am alive is the cold stone beneath me and the pressure in my bladder reminding me that the base needs of my body are unconcerned by visions.

  A faint breeze on my face takes me to the corner of my tiny cell where I find a rough hole the diameter of my arm leading down into the bare rock. My thighs scream with pain as I squat and relieve myself. I have no idea how long I have been asleep, but my aching muscles tell me it was not nearly enough.

  I steady myself against the wall. The stone is rough and regular, hewn with chisels. The neatness of the strokes tell of long practise, but the short grooves betray the workman’s weakness. Larry told me once that the Japanese soldiers used slave labour; either locals pressed into service or prisoners of war who lived out their last miserable days turning tropical islands into concrete fortresses.