Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  The house had two single-storied wings, one to the north and the other to the south. Those two extensions each added sixty feet to the long facade of the house before they turned at right angles toward the protective western hills, presumably making a huge three-sided yard at the rear of the house. The two wings were built in the same pale stone as the house and roofed with the same ugly sheet metal. The only structure that in any way matched my original expectations was a cast-iron gazebo, incongruously like a park bandstand, that stood in front of the house to offer anyone sitting in its shelter a long view down the Desolate Straits. The gazebo was an inappropriate touch, like a clown’s red nose stuck on the waxy face of a corpse, and its existence added to the sense of unreality that assailed me as we motored farther into the bay. All around the settlement were vegetable gardens, which, even in this day’s cheerful sunlight, looked forlorn and unproductive, while on the steep ridge that lay a half mile behind the buildings was a tall, slender radio mast that was strongly guyed against the island’s fierce winds.

  “What a godforsaken place,” David said in horror.

  I was thinking of Nicole living in this godforsaken place, and so said nothing. The settlement seemed deserted, the only sign that anyone lived in this awful place was the smoke from the stone chimneys. Nor was there any sign of the catamaran Erebus, renamed Genesis, though on the southern side of the bay, moored alongside an ancient stone quay, there was an equally ancient looking fishing vessel that was painted a lurid lime-green and had a high bluff bow, a low gunwale amidships, and a stubby wheelhouse astern, from which a tall dark chimney stuck skyward. For an ensign the fishing boat had a pale green scrap of cloth like that I remembered from the day when Nicole had sailed away. The trawler’s name, like the renamed Erebus, was Genesis and had been painted in black untidy letters on her bows. The only other boats I could see were a slew of sea kayaks drawn up on the beach.

  I throttled back Stormchild’s motor as the depth sounder betrayed the bay’s steeply shelving bottom.

  “We could berth alongside the fishing boat,” David suggested.

  I shook my head. “I’ll anchor and row ashore. You’ll stay here?”

  “Gladly.” David shuddered at the decrepit, uninviting appearance of the settlement. Now that we were closing on the land I could see a row of odd concrete tanks embedded in the sloping lawn in front of the house. David had also noticed the ugly containers and was examining them through his binoculars. “Fish tanks?” he ventured the guess, then gave me the glasses as he went forward to stand beside the main anchor.

  I waved to him when the depth sounder showed we were in thirty feet of water. The chain rattled and crashed its way through the fairlead as I killed the engine, then there was a wonderful silence as the chain at last stopped running and as Stormchild’s small forward motion dug in the anchor flukes. She tugged once, then gentled as we swung round so that our stern faced the apparently deserted settlement. We were just fifty yards from shore, while the house was another hundred yards beyond the small beach.

  “As a garden of earthly delights,” David said, “it lacks a certain lighthearted elegance, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It lacks people, too.” I unlashed the dinghy that had been stored on the after coach roof, then splashed the small boat over Stormchild’s stern. I did not bother with the dinghy’s outboard motor, but instead just lowered myself overboard with a pair of oars and rowlocks. I also took a handheld VHF radio which David would monitor on Stormchild’s larger set. He asked if I wanted to take the second rifle with me as well, but I shook my head. “I don’t want to antagonize anyone, if anyone’s there at all.”

  “White man come in peace, eh?” David said with a jocularity designed to hide his nervousness, yet there was a hint of truth in his jest, for we both felt like explorers touching a previously unknown shore in an effort to make contact with some elusive and mysterious tribe.

  “Wish me luck,” I said, then pushed away from Stormchild’s side. It was odd to look back at my boat. She had become my carapace, my security, and it was almost unsettling to be rowing away from her sea-battered hull. The woodwork of her cabin roofs looked faded, and her paint was grimed with salt, yet there was still something very lovely about the big yacht as she sat in that unnaturally placid bay with its long view of the Desolate Straits.

  A flurry of flightless steamer ducks fled from my dinghy as I neared the shingle beach. My heart was thumping and there was a nervous sourness in my belly. I had thought that my long solo journeys around the world had cured me of helpless fear, yet now I felt a kind of craven panic because I really was rowing into the unknown. I felt a temptation to return to Stormchild and let Genesis come to us, but instead I tugged hard on the oars until the dinghy’s bows grated at last on the beach. I stepped out and dragged the small boat safely above the tide line. The beach was edged by a seven foot high bluff of stony earth, up which someone had once built a flight of sturdy wooden steps.

  I climbed the weathered stairs with a growing sense of unreality. I had sailed ten thousand miles to what? To nothing? To a blast of gunfire? To Nicole? To tears of reconciliation? Or perhaps, if my daughter and I both behaved with true British reticence, to an awkward embrace and an embarrassed conversation.

  I reached the top of the wooden steps and started across the springy, short-grassed turf, where I was at once assailed by a stench of manure so overpowering that I almost retched. At first I thought the smell might be coming from the concrete tanks, which I now assumed were sewage settlement chambers, but when I reached the odd tanks I saw that one half were empty while the other half held malodorous and curdled mixtures of oil and water. The smell, distinctly that of sewage, did not emanate from the tanks but from the fields on either side of the house, and I realized that the Genesis community must recycle their own sewage by spreading it as topdressing on the settlement’s vegetable plots.

  I walked toward the house’s central doorway which was framed by a flimsy-looking wickerwork porch, a domestic touch as odd as the strangely festive gazebo. It felt weird to be ashore. The land seemed to be rocking like a boat. I was nervous, yet still no one challenged me, indeed no human sound disturbed the day’s peace. A gull screamed, startling me. Then, just as I reached the conclusion that the settlement must be deserted, the double front doors of the house burst open and two bearded men, both wearing identical green garments, emerged into the sunlight.

  For a moment we stared at each other. I suddenly felt happy. I was going to see Nicole! And in my happiness I felt an absurd urge to offer the two men a deep bow. “Hello!” I called out instead.

  “Go away,” one of the two men replied. Both men looked to be in their thirties and had springy, bushy beards. The one who had spoken sported a black beard, while his companion had a brown beard streaked with gray. Neither man appeared to be armed, which was reassuring.

  My happiness ebbed as swiftly as it had bubbled up. I started walking toward the two men and an unseen hand immediately slammed the doors of the house shut. I heard bolts slide into place.

  “Go away!” The man with the black beard said again.

  “Listen,” I said in a very friendly tone, “I’ve just sailed ten thousand miles to see my daughter, and I’m not going away just because you’re feeling unsociable. My name’s Tim Blackburn. How are you?” I held out my hand. “I’m looking for Nicole Blackburn. Is she here?”

  They ignored my outstretched hand. Instead they stood with arms akimbo, daring me to push past them.

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me?” I suggested politely. “My name is Tim Blackburn and I’ve come here to see my daughter Nicole.”

  “Go away,” the man with the black beard said again.

  I went to walk round them and the second man raised a hand to push me back.

  “Touch me,” I told him, “and I’ll break your fucking skull.”

  My sudden hostility made the man skitter out of my path like a frightened rabbit. I walked past him to the odd porch, wher
e I tried to open the front doors that proved to be very firmly bolted. I turned back to the bearded men. “Is Nicole Blackburn here?” Neither man answered, so I peered through the window nearest the door. The glass panes were very grimy, but I could just see into a room that was almost empty except for a bare trestle table on which hurricane lamps stood unlit. The stone window ledge was thick with dead flies. More ominously I noted that the window had stout iron bars set into the stone ledge.

  “Tim? This is Stormchild, over.” The handheld radio suddenly squawked in my oilskin’s pocket.

  “David? This is Tim, over.”

  “Tim. I’ve just seen one green-dressed fellow run to the hills behind the house. He seemed to be carrying a weapon.” David’s voice sounded ominous, as though the violence he feared had already started. “Do you hear me, over?”

  “I hear you,” I told him, “and I’ll go gently.”

  “Remember our agreement! We’re withdrawing if there’s trouble!”

  “Perhaps the fellow has just gone duck hunting,” I said, then put the radio back in my pocket and smiled at the two bearded men who had edged close to eavesdrop on my conversation. “Where’s Nicole?” I asked them.

  “Go away!”

  Ignoring the monotonous order, I trudged through the muddy soil toward the northern wing of the house. I noticed that all the ground floor windows were protected with the stout iron bars, and the thought occurred to me that this would not be an easy building to break into.

  I turned to follow the northern wing where it bent back toward the encircling hills. The single-storied extension was windowless, though here and there, and looking menacingly like loopholes, apertures had been crudely hacked through the limestone blocks. I peered through one such aperture, but could see nothing but darkness inside. My two bearded companions followed a dozen paces behind me, but no longer tried to stop me from exploring the settlement. I walked past rows of carrots, some small bean plants, potatoes, and a wilting patch of red beets. The gardens stretched to the very edge of the escarpment, which formed the near slope of the semicircle of hills toward which David had seen the gunman run.

  I walked to the rear of the buildings and saw that the long house and its two wings did indeed form three sides of an open courtyard. I took out the radio and pressed my transmission button. “David? There’s a courtyard behind the house. I’m going to have a shufti. I can’t see your gunman, so I assume he’s holed up on the ridge line. No one will talk to me and the house is locked, so I don’t know whether Nicole is here or not. We’ll probably lose radio contact when I’m in the courtyard, but if I’m not on the air within fifteen minutes then you’d better break out the guns and all of you should come and look for me. Out.” I thought it would do no harm if my unfriendly guardians got the impression that Stormchild was crammed with armed men ready to turn their dung-ridden paradise into a killing ground.

  I moved into the bare, dank courtyard. Nothing grew in that depressing space, not even a blade of grass. There was a child’s sandpit in one corner, which held some very old and faded plastic toy buckets and spades. Near the damp sandpit were a rusting iron swing, a wooden rocking horse, a doll without its head, and a heap of broken, rusting lobster traps. A cat hissed at me from the roof of one of the two low wings of the house.

  From within the yard the two wings of the house looked like rows of stables, each with a Dutch door. In one of the stable compartments were two huge vats and a stench so vile that the homemade manure smelled sweet by comparison. There were bundles of otter pelts hanging on hooks above the vats, and I assumed that this was the settlement’s tannery. But a tannery? Why would environmentalists be skinning sea otters?

  “You must go away.” The man with the black beard was clearly becoming ever more uncomfortable with my brazen snooping.

  “Where’s Nicole?” I asked him cheerfully and, as before, received no reply. “Is Caspar here?” I asked instead, but with the same result.

  I walked to the back door of the house, which, not surprisingly, was locked as firmly as the front entrance. I peered through a barred window to see a kitchen equipped with an ancient wood-fired stove. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling beams. I walked on to the next window and saw racks of guns that looked like assault rifles. Some of the spaces in the wooden racks were ominously empty.

  I strolled past a vast and disorganized woodpile, evidence of the community’s reliance on timber for their heating and cooking. I heard a child cry inside the house, the first sign that people other than my bearded followers were present at the settlement, but when I shouted a greeting through one of the dusty windows, no one answered.

  I explored the southern wing. Hens lived in two of the stablelike rooms, but otherwise I saw nothing alive except the vituperative cat that spat at me from the corrugated, rust-streaked roof. At the corner of the building I stopped to stare at the crest of the escarpment where the radio mast was built, but I could not see the gunman David had spotted, and whom I assumed must now be hidden among the tangle of rocks that crowned the ridge. Just to the north of the radio mast was an earth-faced dam, which suggested a reservoir had been created in a saddle of the escarpment, presumably to control the flow of water from the hills to the settlement’s vegetable gardens.

  I walked to the building’s southern flank and there I stopped in astonishment. A dozen young people were struggling toward the settlement with a big handcart that was stacked high with freshly cut logs. The clumsy cart was being maneuvered along a muddy path by a disconsolate group of women and children who all wore drab and uniformlike gray overalls. The work party was escorted by two bearded men, who, like the two guardians who still dogged my every footstep, wore green trousers and jerkins.

  The woodcutting group, who were still a hundred paces from the buildings, saw me and froze.

  One of the women gaped in such abject terror that I thought she would faint.

  I walked toward them. The man with the black beard tried to call me back, while the small children clung in terror to their mother’s gray trousers. I could not see Nicole among the women, who all looked lank, unhappy, pale, and ill-fed. One of the frightened children began wailing.

  “Hello!” I called aloud. “It’s all right! I’m a friend!”

  “Go away!” One of the green-dressed men seized an ax from the stalled woodcart and started toward me. “Go away!”

  I stopped some fifty paces from the big cart. “My name is Tim Blackburn,” I shouted, “and I’ve come here to find my daughter, Nicole. Do any of you know where I can find her?”

  None of the group answered. The gray-uniformed women huddled together and seemed to shiver with a collective fear of my appearance. They looked to me like zombies, and I recalled Jackie’s assertion how Utopian communities were very often based on one man’s idealism, which, to preserve itself, degraded into a fascist system of discipline. These people, the zombies in gray and their bearded guards in green, seemed evidence that von Rellsteb’s community was an example of that sad fate. The axman, who had a ginger beard, walked confidently toward me as though he planned to split my skull open. “Is Caspar von Rellsteb here?” I asked him.

  “You’ve got to go.” The axman, like the black-bearded man, had an American accent.

  “Where’s Nicole Blackburn?” I asked him patiently.

  “Go away!”

  “I’m fed up with all of you,” I said dismissively, and tried to walk toward the frightened women. The ginger-bearded man immediately swung his ax at me. His swing was wildly violent and came nowhere close to me. Instead the energy of the blow unbalanced my attacker so that he tottered helplessly backward. I took two quick steps toward him and brought the toe of my right sea boot hard up into his groin.

  His breath whooshed out, his eyes opened wide, the ax dropped into the mud, then he followed it with a sudden scream of pure agony. The other bearded men looked as terrified as the women and children.

  I picked up the fallen ax. “Where’s Nicole!” I demanded o
f all and any of the green-dressed men.

  “Go away.” The man with the black beard sounded scared. The man I had kicked was sobbing and whimpering on the ground. David, who could now see me again from Stormchild’s cockpit, was insistently demanding to be told what was happening, but the only answer I offered him was a cheerful wave.

  Then, because the men were evidently defeated, I tossed the ax into the mud and walked toward the gray-dressed group. “I’m Nicole Blackburn’s father,” I told them again, and in as comforting a voice as I could manage, but before I could say another word one of the green-dressed men ordered them to run.

  “Go!” he shouted. “Run! Quick! Go!” He flapped his hands at them as though he drove a flock of hens, and the women, with one last look at me, obeyed. They fled toward the southern hills, the children clinging to their mothers and screaming as they ran.

  I turned back to the men. “Are you all mad?”

  “Go away,” one of them said.

  “I’ll search your house first,” I said, and began walking toward the big sprawl of buildings.

  A rifle fired. It was not David on board Stormchild who had opened fire, but rather the gunman who was hidden at the crest of the western escarpment. The sound of his gun echoed and re-echoed around the wide bay, while his bullet thudded into the ground just five paces in front of me. At that range it was horribly good shooting and I hoped it had only been intended as a warning shot, calculated to stop me in my tracks.