Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  David dropped down the companionway. “All quiet outside,” he reported.

  “I can’t believe they’ll find us in this cove,” I said, “but I reckon we should keep watch through the night, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “I’ll keep watch until midnight, you until four, then me again?”

  “Sure.” I was stroking Berenice Tetterman’s tangled and salt-ridden hair. “Has she eaten?” I asked David.

  “She had some toast and coffee.”

  “Why don’t you make us all some soup?” I suggested.

  David switched on the lights in the galley while I went on stroking Berenice’s hair, and slowly, so very slowly, drew her story out from the thickets of her terror.

  Her first fear had been the risk of catching the awful contagion with which Caspar von Rellsteb had terrified his followers. He had somehow persuaded Berenice and the others in the settlement that the outside world had been so stricken with the AIDS virus that normal life in so-called civilization had become impossible. He had persuaded his disciples that their only safety lay in clinging to his barren island. He had succeeded in using the fear of AIDS as a superbly effective means of control; so effective that, even now, faced with our robust denial of von Rellsteb’s terror stories, Berenice half suspected we were deceiving her.

  David found a news magazine that had been jammed into a drawer to stop the cutlery rattling. “Look through that,” he told her. “I think you’ll see the world is still fairly normal.”

  She leafed through the stained, damp pages, which told of wars and hostages and terrorism, but not of a worldwide plague as awful as those that had decimated medieval Europe. Slowly her look of fear was replaced by one of puzzlement. “We never see magazines or newspapers,” she explained, “because Caspar won’t let us. He says we mustn’t contaminate ourselves with things from outside. We have to stay pure, because we’re going to change the world.” She was crying very softly again. “Some of us wanted to leave a long time ago, when we first came here, but he wouldn’t allow us. One girl tried, and she died, then the AIDS came outside..”

  “Who died?” I interrupted her. “What girl died?”

  Berenice was puzzled by the swiftness and intensity of my question. “She was called Susan.”

  “Do you know Nicole Blackburn?” I asked anxiously.

  Berenice nodded, but said nothing.

  “Was Nicole at the settlement today?” I asked. Berenice shook her head, but again said nothing, and I sensed that the urgency of my questions was somehow frightening her, so I made myself sound calm and reassuring again. “I’m Nicole’s father,” I explained, “and I’ve come looking for her. Do you know where she is?”

  Berenice seemed scared of answering. “She’d be at the mine, if she was anywhere,” she finally said, then launched herself into a long and involved explanation about how she and the others were not really allowed to visit the mine, “although I went there once,” she added, “when they wanted us to clean off a boat. It isn’t really a mine at all,” she explained lamely, “only a limestone quarry with a few shafts, but there are some old buildings there as well.”

  “And Nicole lives at the mine?” I asked.

  “The crews don’t really live there”—Berenice frowned as she tried to frame her explanation—”but Nicole does. Most of the crews come to the settlement when they’re ashore, but not Nicole. She stays with the boats, you see, and they shelter at the mine because they had real bad trouble with southerly gales at the settlement. The anchorage at the mine is much safer, and they’ve got an old slipway there so they can haul the boats out of the water if the weather gets really awful.”

  David brought us each a mug of oxtail soup and a hunk of hot buttered bread, and I remembered, too late, that both Berenice’s mother and erstwhile best friend were vegetarians, which meant this girl could very well be an herbivore as well, but she made no objection to the oxtail; she gulped it down as though she had not eaten in weeks.

  Between spoonfuls she told us how strict the division was between the Genesis community’s yacht crews and the settlement’s workers. The workers, as Jackie Potten had envisaged, were virtual slaves to the privileged crew members. The distinction was even sartorial, for the yacht crews wore the Genesis green, while the workers were given the more utilitarian gray clothes. “He’s real strict about that,” Berenice said sadly.

  She began to tell us about the daily chores of the settlement, but I was not listening. Instead, in a state of half shock, I was assimilating a very unpleasant truth. The same truth had also occurred to David, who now watched me with a troubled expression. We had both traveled to Patagonia in the belief that Nicole was being victimized by von Rellsteb, but from Berenice’s description it was clear that our preconceptions had been horribly wrong, and that Nicole, far from being one of von Rellsteb’s victims, was one of his privileged crew members. “And Nicole,” I finally asked Berenice, “wears green?”

  “Of course.” Berenice nodded.

  Upon which answer hung a slew of other messy deductions, too messy to think about. “And I’ll find Nicole at the mine?” I asked grimly.

  “Unless she’s at sea,” Berenice said dubiously, “but we don’t really know who’s at sea and who isn’t most of the time. But Nicole does more sailing than most of the others. She’s the skipper of a boat, you see, and they say she’s the best sailor of them all, better even than Caspar!”

  I smiled, as if acknowledging a compliment to my family, while inside I was trying to come to terms with the destruction of one of my most comforting beliefs. Nicole was not being held prisoner! She was not a victim, but a free agent. She had her own boat. She could come and go where she pleased, and it had never pleased her to find me.

  David, realizing how hard it was for me to come to terms with Berenice’s news, took over the questioning by asking how many seagoing yachts the Genesis community operated.

  “Four,” Berenice said. “Two catamarans and two like this one.” She waved around Stormchild’s cabin. “I saw one of the catamarans a week ago, but I don’t know if it’s still here.” David pressed her for more details of the small fleet’s activities, but Berenice knew remarkably little about the movements of the four boats, only that they sailed away to make a better world, and that only those community members who wore green were allowed to crew the yachts.

  “How many people are in Genesis?” David asked when it was clear Berenice could tell us nothing more about the four yachts.

  “There’s thirty-one of us at the settlement, and I suppose there must be at least another thirty in the crews. And there are fourteen children at the settlement.” Tears came to Berenice’s eyes at the mention of the children.

  “Are you a mother?” I guessed at the reason for her tears.

  “I had a baby,” Berenice said, then her voice choked in a pathetically childlike tone, “but it was stillborn.” She began to cry, the tears streaming silently down her cheeks. We waited until she managed to sniff the tears away. “The children have to work,” she went on, “mostly they collect seaweed and mussels. And they help with the wood-collecting. We’re always cutting wood, and we have to go farther and farther away to find decent trees.” She shivered suddenly. “I’m so tired of cutting wood, but Caspar says that since I can’t breed children I’m no good for anything except fetching and carrying.”

  “Dear God,” David said in distaste.

  “Has Nicole had a baby?” I had to ask.

  “I don’t think so.” She sniffed back her tears and tried to drink more of the soup. “Lisl did.”

  “Who’s Lisl?” I asked.

  “She’s Caspar’s girl,” Berenice said, as though it was an important piece of information. “She’s German, too. She was the one who made me wear chains.” She gestured at the leg irons that David had slung into a corner of the saloon.

  “Was that a punishment?” David asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For what?”

  “I burned a stew
,” Berenice said, but in a voice that seemed genuinely penitent for such a grievous offense. She might have fled the Genesis community, but she was still thinking like one of the group, for she hastened to justify her punishment. “Food is very precious, you see, so one of the first rules we learn is never to waste any. It was mutton,” she explained, as though that made her offense worse.

  “So you cook for the group?” I asked.

  “I do everything. I work in the gardens, clean the buildings, collect shellfish, tan the pelts.”

  “Pelts?” David interjected.

  “They hunt sea otters,” Berenice explained, “and sell the fur in Tierra del Fuego. At first the fur was just for us, because it’s so cold, but now they sell it as well.”

  “Some bloody conservationists,” I said angrily, wondering how self-styled ecologists could hunt and kill harmless and playful sea otters.

  “He wanted to start a fish farm, but it didn’t work, and we used to do experiments”—Berenice paused—”but they failed.”

  “What experiments?” David asked with a note of dread, expecting, like me, to hear of some awful cruelty imposed on man or beast, but the experiments had merely been efforts to determine a bacteriological method of destroying oil spills at sea. The experiment had been tried in the forlorn concrete tanks in front of the house, but the tests had failed and the experiment had petered messily out. I wondered whether enthusiasm for the experiment, like Genesis’s ecological idealism, had been abraded and destroyed by the hardships of surviving the Patagonian winters, but Berenice, despite her desperate eagerness to escape from the settlement, still seemed proud of the community’s achievements. The yacht crews, she said, had destroyed drift nets, crippled Japanese whaling ships, and had even made commando-style forays into the Malaysian province of Sabah to spike hardwood trees threatened by the timber industry.

  “Spike?” David asked.

  “They hammer metal spikes into the trunks of trees marked for felling, and when the chain saw hits the spike it breaks the saw. And they have to stop cutting the tree.” Berenice concluded the explanation very lamely.

  “What happens,” I said laconically, “is that the chain saw rips itself into steel fragments that very often blind the log cutter and are quite likely to kill the poor sod.”

  “But it stops the forestry!” Berenice said earnestly.

  “Oh, whoopee,” I said.

  “Why did you run away today?” David, who rightly thought my disapproval of Genesis’s methodology was a waste of our time, asked Berenice.

  The girl tried to frame a sensible answer, but the best she could offer was a jumble of reasons: the horrors of life in the settlement, the eternal cold and damp, how all the luxuries were reserved for the Genesis crews, how tired she was, how she no longer cared whether she lived or died, how she hated the sight of cochayuyo which she said was a stringy red seaweed that was the settlement’s staple food. She explained how, when she had seen Stormchild anchored in the bay, she had decided then and there to run away. “Yours was the first strange boat I’d ever seen in the bay,” she said with a touching wonder.

  “The Chilean Navy never visits?” David asked.

  “They did at the beginning,” Berenice said, “but I haven’t seen a patrol boat in over two years now.” She hesitated. “There was another boat, I think.” She spoke very nervously, then stopped altogether.

  “Go on,” I encouraged.

  “I didn’t see it,” she spoke defensively.

  “Go on,” I said again.

  “I only heard Paul talking about it.”

  “Paul?” I asked.

  “He’s in one of the crews. He’s the nicest of them.” She paused, then evidently decided to plunge ahead. “Paul said an Australian yacht arrived at the beginning of the summer, and that it had three people on board, but they were all carrying AIDS.”

  “And?” I asked, though I knew the answer already.

  “They took the boat to the mine,” Berenice said in a very soft voice. “That’s what I heard, but I don’t know if it’s true.”

  “And the crew was killed?” David asked sternly.

  “No!” Berenice looked shocked at the accusation. “They put the crew into the sick bay, but they died there.” She looked from David’s skeptical face to mine. “They had AIDS!” Again she looked at our doubting faces. “That’s what Paul said, anyway.” Her voice tailed away into a silence broken only by the hiss of the cabin heater and the tiny lapping sounds as the small waves rippled down Stormchild’s hull.

  “What was the name of the Australian boat?” David asked very gently.

  “Naiad,” Berenice said. “It was a catamaran.”

  My suspicions about the Naiad’s fate made me wonder why David and I had not been killed the moment we appeared that morning. Berenice had already told us that Caspar had not been at the settlement when we arrived, and I suspected that, in his absence, no one else had dared initiate the killing. I also suspected that such a decision was reserved to von Rellsteb, for surely, as Captain Hernandez had suggested in Puerto Montt, the Genesis community would need to take great care not to foul their own nests. They could afford to offend many people, but not the country that gave them refuge. But that carefulness would change now, for Berenice was offering us knowledge that von Rellsteb would surely do anything to keep from the ears of the authorities, which meant that if the Genesis community found Stormchild all three of us would be dead meat.

  “The boat belongs to Nicole now,” Berenice said suddenly.

  “The boat?” I asked.

  “Naiad,” she said very fearfully. Then, after a long pause. “It’s called Genesis now, because they all are. Nicole’s is Genesis Four. Some of us were surprised that she kept that name, because she fell out with Caspar.”

  “Fell out?” I asked.

  “It was after the Australians died.” Berenice frowned as she tried to remember the details, then she shrugged helplessly. “That’s why Nicole stays at the mine instead of at the settlement. Paul told me that Caspar’s frightened of Nicole, but I don’t know if that’s true.” There was another long pause before, in a very timid voice, she asked whether we were going to take her away from the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo.

  “Of course we are,” I promised, then, after a pause, I asked where we would find the limestone mine.

  She shook her head, but said nothing. David, guessing the purpose of my question, frowned disapproval. He, I was sure, wanted to sail north and fetch help from the authorities, but I still had questions that needed answers.

  “Where’s the mine, Berenice?” I insisted.

  “It’s at the very end of the Estrecho Desolada, but you mustn’t go there, you mustn’t!” The terror that had erupted in her voice was quite genuine. “If you go they’ll catch me and they’ll punish me. Just take me away, please!” She began to cry again, and out of the sobs came an incoherent wailing that seemed to be about her dead baby, and about her mother, then she began to shake in huge racking sobs, so I laid her down, put her head on a cushion, and draped a blanket over her shivering body. Then, released from the need to soothe and calm her, I stood and stretched my legs and arms to fetch the cramp out of my muscles.

  “I think,” David spoke softly to me, “that we now have more than enough evidence of malfeasance to demand action by the Chilean authorities. And we should certainly have this girl’s affidavit delivered to the Australian Embassy in Santiago.”

  “Malfeasance?” I mocked David who, as a justice of the peace, liked to use legal terms. “You think I’ve just sailed ten thousand fucking miles to find evidence of malfeasance?”

  “Yes!” he said very sharply. “That’s what we agreed, Tim! We agreed to reconnoiter. We have! We’ve even succeeded in finding ourselves a first-rate witness. What more can we possibly hope to achieve? Our clear duty now is to fetch competent help.”

  “What you do is your business,” I told him, “but I’m going on watch.” I picked up the rifle that was propped a
t the foot of the companionway. “Sleep well,” I said.

  “We have to alert the authorities,” David insisted. “We were lucky today, Tim, because we got out alive, but we can’t rely on our luck holding. We have to go for help.”

  “I’ll wake you at four.” I still would not face his truth, because I had truths of my own to digest, so instead I went topside to where a million stars burned cold above a wilderness, and where, in the night’s sharp darkness, I mourned.

  I sat in Stormchild’s cockpit with the loaded rifle across my lap, and I reflected how easily the world divided itself into the exploiters and the exploited, and how that crude division was mirrored by the green and gray uniforms of Genesis.

  And Nicole, my beloved Nicole, wore green.

  Nicole did not have to eat the awful cochayuyo, Nicole did not have to work for long, cold, wet hours in the shit-stinking mud of the vegetable gardens, Nicole did not have to wade thigh-deep in ice-cold waters to gather mussels and seaweed, Nicole did not have to cut wood, Nicole did not sleep on an iron-framed cot in a damp dormitory that stank of drying diapers. Instead Nicole wore green and was trusted to sail in far waters. Nicole probably knew of murders. No, worse, and I could not face that last suspicion, but at least I now knew and now accepted that Nicole was not a victim. She was part of the control system. She was an exploiter. I had been wrong about her. I was not sailing to rescue her from von Rellsteb, but from herself.

  “High-minded crap,” I accused myself aloud when that neat thought occurred to me.

  I was sitting dry-eyed and bitter in Stormchild’s cockpit with my gloved hands resting on the wood and metal of the old rifle. High above me, seen through the wide chimney of the cliffs, a myriad of stars shone bright in the cloudless sky. The moon was hidden by one of the hills, yet it shone a silver light onto the edge of the western cliffs and a little of that light seeped down to shimmer the black water in the narrow entrance channel. Nothing stirred in the night until someone woke below and Stormchild moved as the person walked about the saloon. I saw a crack of light show between the companionway washboards, then heard the hiss of the stove. It had to be David who had woken, for I was sure Berenice would not have the courage to light the stove and make herself coffee. I waited, listening to the domestic sounds of spoon and cup and kettle-whistling, then, as the light snapped out, I heard David’s footsteps climb the companionway.