Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  “We used to do it for amusement, remember?”

  “We used to do a lot of things for amusement that we can’t do now,” he said gloomily, then he turned a dinghy-sailor’s accusing eye on me. “Isn’t yachting supposed to be fun? Isn’t that what you cruising sailors always tell me? How you relish the adventures of far waters? I do assure you, Tim, that however wet and cold I make myself in the Holy Ghost”—the Holy Ghost was David’s irreverent name for his beloved racing dinghy—”there is always a welcoming fire and a decent pint of bitter waiting in the Stave and Anchor.” He glanced up at the chronometer mounted on the saloon bulkhead and made a swift calculation of what time it would be at home. “I suppose they’re just closing up the bar now,” he said wistfully, “and John will have a fire going, and a decent fug of pipe smoke, and we’re stuck in Patagonia.”

  Even moored with two lines fore and another two aft, and with our heaviest anchors clutching what grip they could find, we were not at peace. If either of us had miscalculated the length of the mooring lines, and the tide then dropped or rose too fiercely, we would have an unpleasant half hour on deck rerigging the thrumming ropes in the wild, wet darkness. Night winds whistled and howled through the towering gulfs, bringing thick mists or flying clouds that poured sudden downbursts of violent rain on Stormchild’s teak deck. Worst of all were the rafagas—the sudden gales of deflected wind that, spilling and driving themselves down the sheer cliffs, would strike the water vertically with the speed and force of a hurricane.

  Under the impact of the rafagas the water would be flattened into a white sheet of shivering foam that was as terrifying to watch as it was to endure. Stormchild was hit twice, and both times she was laid right onto her starboard beam as plates and cups spilled in a shattering stream from behind the galley fiddles. David and I, clutching like grim death to whatever handholds we could seize, stared at each other and waited for the inevitable disaster. The first time an awful scraping sound, just audible over the insane shrieking of the wind, betrayed that the big anchors were dragging across rock, but then, slowly, painfully, miraculously, our boat righted herself. In the second knockdown Joanna’s portrait, which I had believed to be firmly fixed in its frame, had somehow come loose and its glass had shattered on the saloon floor. I could not work out whether that omen was good or bad. The next morning, when I retrieved the big plough anchor, I discovered its shank had been bent like a hairpin.

  In the daylight, when we were under way, the fog would sometimes slam down, or else the rain would be so fierce that we could scarcely see Stormchild’s bow pulpit, so we would turn on the radar and try to make sense of the tangle of echoes that confused the screen with its mad green chaos. More often than not the echoes were so jumbled that the set was worse than useless, and while one of us steered, the other would stand in the bows and shout instructions through the wind and fog and rain that formed this Patagonian summer.

  Below decks Stormchild had become a stinking pit of wet clothes, mildew, spilled food, damp bedding and diesel fumes. The fumes were my fault. I had been carrying a can of fuel for the saloon’s heater when I lost my balance as Stormchild lurched, and the diesel oil had soaked into the saloon’s carpet. We had tried to air the saloon, but the stench persisted. The Caribbean world of easy cruising and long drinks under Stormchild’s cotton awning seemed a million miles away.

  Yet the Patagonian waters, though short on the sybaritic comforts of a cruising life, were not without their compensations. On our fourth evening in the channels, when I thought we could not go on fighting the maniacal tides and winds any longer, the weather at last began to relent and the barometer to climb. At dusk the low mist lifted from the settling waters to show us a long view toward a wooded slope a quarter mile away. Then we heard an odd splashing and turned to see a group of sea otters playing in our wake, while at our bows, and fleeing the intrusion of Stormchild into their pristine world, a score of steamer ducks paddled wildly at the water with whirling wings. On shore were colonies of rockhopper penguins, while above us thousands of sooty shearwaters flighted to their roosts from the open sea. Just before the darkness was complete we saw two sea lions chasing fish. The sightings proved that we now sailed in one of the world’s last great wildernesses, a wilderness in which we saw no other boats and no other signs of human presence. There was a steamer service that ran through the innermost channels to the Tierra del Fuego, but we were well seaward of that boat’s route.

  The next morning we woke to discover that the weather had indeed relented. Dawn brought sunlight and a delicate, clearing sky. The force of the wind had gentled, and all about us was the sudden sparkle of light on water, a million seabirds, and a scenery so majestic that both David and I felt a catch in our throats. There are few such moments given to us on this earth, moments when we are granted a glimpse of the world as it must have looked at the crowning moment of creation. “‘And God saw every thing that he had made,’“ David, who, like me, was half bearded now, quoted from Genesis, “‘and behold, it was very good.’“

  We cast off our moorings, retrieved our anchors from their clinging kelp, and started Stormchild’s motor. The sound of the engine seemed an affront to the pure loveliness of the channels. For once we could see clearly and I collapsed the spray hood so that our forward view was unobstructed. The cliffs reared up from the green, shining water and were topped by long wooded slopes. Between the cliffs, where the turmoil of the restless earth had made steep valleys that dropped like chutes toward the tide-hurried water, beech trees grew. In the long, long distance, glimpsed between the scattered islands, the snow-touched peaks showed the spine of a continent. When the channel widened I was able to stop the engine and, for the first time in days, hoist Stormchild’s sails so that she glided like some stately pleasure barge across a wide sea-lake that stretched between a group of wooded islands.

  The wind was fitful, but the tide was friendly and pushed us silently along the waterway. We rounded a corner of glassy water to find another stretch of wide seaway, along which we ghosted between small natural meadows, wooded slopes and sun-touched cliffs. We were like men drunk on beauty, dazzled by a place as wild, as desolate, and, for me, as close to God as any place on earth. Birds of prey with massive ragged wings spiraled above the scree-edged peaks and beneath the scatter of high white clouds, while black-necked swans swam from a tree-edged creek to paddle in Stormchild’s placid wake. White mountain streams cascaded through the trees. It was, so long as the weather held, Arcadia discovered. The only jarring note was that one of our two rifles now lay beside the binnacle, for David, knowing we had entered the outer islands of the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo, had insisted on removing the companionway paneling and retrieving the gun we had hidden there. “Though I doubt very much we shall need it,” David had said as he brought the rifle topsides.

  “You think Genesis will let us come and go in peace?” I asked.

  “I think that naval fellow in Puerto Montt was right,” David said, “and that the Genesis community won’t foul their own nest. Why on earth should they provoke the enmity of the Chilean authorities by a gratuitous display of violence?”

  “So Jackie was right after all?” I asked with as little malice as possible, “and we don’t need guns?”

  “I pray we don’t need guns,” David said fervently. He was staring forward and, looking at him, I suddenly thought how much this voyage had aged him. There was white in his beard and deep lines about his eyes, so that, for the first time, I saw in my middle-aged brother the signs of old age, and I wondered if I looked the same, and whether Jackie had been offended by my tactless remark on Antigua, and the memory of that remark burned shamefully inside me as I thought what fools old men made of themselves because of young women.

  David opened the rifle’s butt and took out a pull-through and a bottle of cleaning oil. “I do pray we don’t need guns,” he repeated, “but that rather depends on how we respond if we meet hostility.”

  I shrugged as though I did not
think it an important question, though increasingly, as the sea miles had slipped beneath Stormchild’s keel, that question had dogged me. I had sailed from England with only one clear purpose: to find and rescue Nicole. But as David had just suggested, the completion of that simple purpose depended on what kind of welcome the Genesis community offered Stormchild. I suspected that there would be no welcome at all, which was why I was glad David was now cleaning the Lee-Enfield, though whether he would actually fire the gun was plainly another matter. “Are you suggesting I should turn the other cheek?” I asked him.

  David tugged a square patch of flannel cleaning cloth through the rifle’s barrel. “I think,” he said slowly, “that if we are offered violence, then we have to withdraw. We may have to fire in self-defense, but otherwise we must behave with the utmost circumspection.” He offered me a wry smile. “I know it’s not the most adventurous approach, Tim, but we can’t risk causing injury or death.”

  I knew David was right, but I did not want to admit it. “Back in England,” I observed caustically, “you couldn’t wait for me to put a bullet between von Rellsteb’s eyes. Now suddenly we have to be circumspect?”

  “Back in England,” he said very simply, “I was wrong.”

  “You’re scared of losing your chance of becoming a bishop, are you?” I accused him nastily. He smarted at that, looking guiltily offended. “Oh, come on, David,” I said, “you’re a Blackburn! Of course you’re ambitious, and murdering environmentalists would really mess up your chances of sitting in the House of Lords and having first pick of the choirboys.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said huffily, “and even if I did want a bishopric, that has nothing to do with the present circumstances.”

  “Then what does?” I asked him.

  He sighed. “The truth, Tim, is that I’m scared of dying. I’m scared of getting into a fight and leaving Betty a widow. I’m not as brave as I was thirty years ago, and I promised Betty I’d do nothing stupid. I intend to keep the promise. I also promised Betty I’d look after you. It’s bad enough that we’ve lost Dickie and Joanna, without losing you.”

  For a moment I said nothing. It was unlike David to so openly reveal an affection, even toward me, and I was touched. I was also boxed in, for I had not sailed clean across the Atlantic and down to the southern hemisphere just to surrender at the first sign of von Rellsteb’s pugnacity. “If I prove that von Rellsteb killed Joanna,” I finally told David, “then I’m going to kill him. With or without your help.”

  “No, you won’t,” David said very patiently, “because if we discover any wrongdoing, then we will summon the authorities, and if the authorities won’t help us, then we will travel to Santiago and enlist the support of the British Embassy. You’re famous, and I’m not exactly disreputable, so I assure you the ambassador will listen very closely to us, and if the embassy insists to the Chilean authorities that the Genesis community is sheltering lawbreakers, then it won’t take long for the Armada to get a patrol boat into these waters.”

  I shrugged, ceding to his argument. “OK,” I said, “no heroics. We go, we reconnoiter, and at the very first sign of hostility, we withdraw.” I spoke sourly, but I knew David was right to insist on caution. We were two middle-aged brothers, one of whom wanted to be a bishop, and though an atavistic part of me still wanted to tear the Genesis community apart, common sense suggested we would be hopelessly outgunned and savagely outfought if we took on von Rellsteb’s group with our two ancient rifles.

  David, seeing my disappointment, smiled. “If we’re lucky,” he tried to console me, “we’ll find Nicole without any complications.”

  So, rigged with cautious good sense, we sailed on.

  We sailed through the scenery of a suddenly limpid and serene paradise. The wind was dying, and, denied its power, our sails flapped impotently. David went below to make lunch, and, impatient to make progress, I started Stormchild’s motor.

  By the time we had eaten our meal of pickles, cold salted pork, bread and margarine, the tide had turned against us and Stormchild was struggling against a surge of water that poured between two dark headlands which, if my chart was correct, marked our passage into the Desolate Straits.

  “Not long now,” I said nervously. Our wake was a slash of reflected sunlight against the suddenly dark water.

  There was no sign of the Genesis community’s presence in these waters; it seemed as though David and I were the first people ever to invade this wilderness. We passed between the twin headlands and the channel widened once more. The water swirled darkly past our hull as kelp geese and black-necked swans paddled desperately away from our intrusion. David, dividing his attention between the birds and the chart, suddenly pointed to a long hilly stretch of land that lay beyond a low rocky promontory and said that, unless he very much missed his guess, those spiky hills were part of the Isla Tormentos.

  I stared at the jagged skyline and thought of Nicole in a burst of sudden, incoherent, and utterly unexpected joy. I was near to rescuing my daughter, and surely all the old love that had been so strong between us would revive when we met, and my heart was so full of love and hope that I dared not express myself for fear of weeping. Nicole, Nicole! I had crossed a world to find her, and now she was so close, and I felt nothing but a welling of love and expectation. David, sensing my feelings, stayed silent.

  We turned eastward to cross a wide stretch of open water, then turned southward again into the Desolate Straits proper. In one of the pilot books David had brought from England I had read that the straits took their name from the false hope they offered a mariner. They seemed to promise a sheltered deep-water route clear down to the Land of Fire, while in reality they were merely a long inlet that stretched into the very heart of the Isle of Torments and, once in that stony heart, came to a blind and bitter end. A skipper, thinking to save himself a hard outer passage, but finding, instead, that he had wasted a day’s sailing only to reach a dead end, would call these deceptive straits desolate indeed.

  Yet here the channel ran straight and inviting. Stormchild’s engine purred sweetly, driving her across the now mirror-smooth water, on which our wake fanned in gorgeous silver ripples. To port a black cliff spilled a thin stream of falling white water, while to starboard a slope of sun-drenched trees ended at a beach of white stones. The landscape dwarfed our boat and overwhelmed our senses.

  “It’ll be nice to see old Nickel again,” David awkwardly broke our silence. He had always been fond of Nicole; it had been David, rather than Joanna or myself, who had taught Nicole to sail, and who had first discovered her fierce ambition. David had harnessed that ambition to dinghy racing and often said that, if her brother’s death had not skewed her life, Nicole would have achieved what David himself had so narrowly missed: a place on Britain’s Olympic sailing team. Nicole, David always maintained, was simply the finest sailor he had ever seen.

  “She’ll be surprised to see us!” I said. Our conversation was stilted because neither of us could match with words the apprehension we felt for the approaching moment. “Perhaps,” I said to cover the clumsiness of our feelings, “we should take in the sails?”

  We stowed the canvas. I was becoming increasingly nervous as we came closer to the bay, which had been marked as the site of the Genesis settlement on the charts in Captain Hernandez’s office. Fine on Stormchild’s starboard bow we could see a rocky headland crowned by a row of wind-splintered pine trees, and, if the Captain’s chart was right, the Genesis community lived just beyond that promontory.

  David propped the rifle against the folded spray hood, then stooped to light his pipe. “I hope we don’t have to use violence,” he said nervously, then laughed. “Dear Lord, but I sound just like the American girl, don’t I?”

  The thought of Jackie gave me a sudden and astonishing pang, but then even Jackie vanished from my thoughts as Stormchild cleared the pine-topped promontory and there, like an evanescent dream given unexpected shape and solidity, was the bay where the first
von Rellsteb had made his settlement.

  “Oh, God,” I murmured, and it was a prayer of thanks as well as a plea for help, for sunlight was dazzling us where it reflected from a windowpane. For suddenly, in one of the last wildernesses of earth, we had found the straight lines of human habitation. There was smoke above a roof. There was a rank smell that was the stench of people.

  Stormchild had brought us to Genesis.

  I had always imagined the von Rellsteb settlement would be graced by a grand Victorian farmhouse with carved eaves, turrets, and wide verandas. Common sense had told me that no house built to withstand the Patagonian weather could possibly have an exterior as fussily detailed as my imagined Victorian mansion, but nevertheless the fancy had persisted so that when I did at last see the building I felt an immediate disappointment, for it looked like nothing more than a range of overlarge and decaying farm sheds.

  The ugly house and its ragged extensions stood in the shelter of a semicircle of low steep hills and above a lawn that sloped down to the bay’s shingle beach. The house, which faced eastward toward the water, was made of a limestone so pale that it looked like concrete. It was an immensely long and disproportionately low house of only two stories, but with sixteen windows on each of those two floors. The house might not have looked as grand as my Victorian fancy had embroidered it, but the first von Rellsteb had certainly built large. Had he imagined a slew of grandchildren pounding down his long, echoing corridors? The building, except for its size, was otherwise unremarkable, unless one took exception to the bright red corrugated iron roof through which a dozen stone chimneys protruded. Two of those chimneys showed wisps of smoke, betraying humanity’s presence.