Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  Berenice, her knuckles blanched white, clung to the safety rail that ran just beneath the collapsed spray hood.

  I stood behind the wheel, my legs braced against the boat’s savage roll, and tried to make some sense of the titanic battle of ocean waves that barred our passage to the fjord’s mouth.

  The pattern of that battle began in a simple enough fashion. The great swells, born deep in the Pacific, traveled for thousands of miles to hammer themselves into oblivion against the Patagonian rocks. That oblivion was not instantaneous. When one of the massive waves struck the cliff it dissipated some of its energy as airborne spray, but far more of its energy was bounced outward as a reflected wave that went head-to-head with the next thunderous roller. If the cliffs were irregularly shaped, as these were, then that pattern of wave reflection became tangled and unpredictable. Except I had to predict the pattern, or else Stormchild would be tossed aside by one of those waves and splintered into shattered steel against the spray-drenched cliffs.

  “Turn back! For God’s sake, Tim!” David at last gave way to his fear. “You agreed we wouldn’t take any risks! Turn, for the love of Christ, turn!”

  “Just pray!” I shouted at him, “pray!” And a second afterward it was too late for anything but prayer for, if we had now turned broadside to the swells, the suction of the waves would have dragged us down into the roots of the cliffs, there to be overwhelmed as thousands of tons of Pacific rollers hammered themselves to death around us.

  Where the reflected waves struck the incoming seas there were huge eruptions of foam that were like the explosions of gigantic artillery shells. The noises of the coast were deafening—the hammer blows of water striking rock, the seething clash of seas in turmoil, the racing of our engine, the crack as the wind took our foresail aback, and over it all, like the screams of devils waiting to pluck our souls to hell, the shrieking seabirds who swooped on long, thin wings through the wind-whipped mist of spray and air. The island’s cliffs appeared like gigantic ramparts crowned by wheeling seabirds. I whooped defiance, then, more sensibly, looked to make sure that my companions were wearing their lifelines. The boat itself was battened down with every hatch dogged shut and every item on deck double-lashed down, though such precautions were mere cosmetics, for surely nothing on God’s earth or in God’s sea could save us if I had calculated this approach wrong.

  A wave lifted Stormchild’s stern and I felt the raw power of a whole wide ocean surge us forward. I raced Stormchild’s engine in an attempt to keep her speed high. A mass of water slammed us from the left, breaking white foam as high as the radar aerial on the mast. The water crashed into the cockpit and swirled down the scuppers. I glimpsed the cliff’s wet rock face off to port and instinctively gave the boat some starboard rubber, but too much, for a reflected wave thumped us on the port bow and Berenice screamed because it seemed as if I was now steering the boat straight for the saw-edged crags on our starboard bow. I snatched the wheel back, but the helm suddenly felt loose and soggy, and I knew that the surging sea was overtaking us and stealing the power from Stormchild’s big steel rudder. Then, just as the great sea crashed past and just as it seemed that we must be thrown against the starboard rocks, the deck seemed to drop away to port like a falling airplane, and Stormchild slid hard into a trough and there steadied on her keel. The rudder bit, the engine raced, and inch by inch we fought our way into the rock’s gut.

  Behind us a new sea threw its shadow across our deck. The wave that had first carried us then overtaken us broke against the cliffs ahead, drenching us with water and deafening us with the sound of its destruction, yet, through the welter of its wind-born foam, I could just see a smooth, green-hearted black path. The path led to safety, and I pushed on the wheel’s spokes as though I could personally force Stormchild into the island’s calm heart.

  The wave that had been thrashing at our stern now picked us up and threw us forward. The rudder’s power vanished again. We had become a steel missile that was being hurled by a massive force into a rock cliff. Berenice crouched, David stared wide-eyed, and I felt the wheel quivering in my hands.

  For a few seconds we ran in the center of a whirlpool. To starboard a thousand tons of water shattered into flailing scraps. Above us the wet sail flogged. To port a sudden dark hole appeared at the base of a wave to reveal a black, jagged rock thick with seaweed and mussels. I heard Berenice scream in terror, then suddenly there were cliff faces to left and right, a smoothly heaving sea beneath us, and a maelstrom of foam behind us. We had made it.

  “Piece of cake,” I said, wondering if I would ever manage to uncurl my frozen fingers from the wheel’s spokes.

  “Nothing to it,” David said, but in a voice every bit as shaky as mine. “I’m sorry if I panicked.”

  “You didn’t,” I said.

  He laughed nervously. “I did, Tim, I did. And I’m already terrified of going back out again.”

  “That’ll be much easier,” I said dismissively, which it would, so long as no gale was blowing and so long as we shot the entrance at what passed in these seas for slack water. I throttled back the racing motor. The swells heaved down the channel, while behind us the breaking waves roared and growled and clawed at the fjord’s narrow entrance, but we had escaped their fury and were now running into the heart of an island where my daughter and all her secrets lay hidden.

  Berenice became demonstrably more nervous as we sailed further up the fjord and closer to the limestone workings. I asked her if anyone from the Genesis community ever visited the fjord, and she shook her head, but then added that such a visit was not implausible. “They’ve got two cross-country motorbikes,” she explained. “the bikes don’t always work, and they’re usually short of gasoline, but sometimes they ride all over the island.”

  I still doubted that the Genesis group would think it worth their while to patrol the seaward coast of their island. They had seen us flee northward, and would surely assume we had kept going toward Puerto Montt or Valparaiso. I did my best to reassure Berenice of her safety, but she was almost catatonic with fear as Stormchild nosed ever farther into the island’s heart.

  We used the engine, for, though there was plenty of wind, the fjord’s steep sides either cheated us of the wind’s power or else made its direction so fickle that the sails would have been aback as often as they might have offered help. The soft beat of our engine echoed back from massive black cliffs that were slashed by high white plumes of narrow waterfalls. Sometimes the fjord opened unexpectedly into wide lakelike basins that were dotted with tree-covered islands, and more than once we had trouble deciding which waterway from such a lake was the main channel. The charts were no help. They merely confirmed that the Canal Almagro existed, but no one, it seemed, had ever surveyed its tortuous course. “It’s possible,” I told David, “that we’re the first boat ever to come here!”

  “That’s a thought,” David said with pleasure. At my request he had broken out the second rifle from its hiding place in Stormchild’s bows, but now kept a nervous eye on the depth sounder. He also noted that the glass was dropping. “It’s not desperately worrying,” he said in a voice that belied his apparent confidence, “but neither is it entirely reassuring.” In any normal circumstance the fjord, with its bays and anchorages, would have offered the perfect shelter from a sudden gale, but any such gale would so heap the seas at the fjord’s narrow entrance that we ran the risk of marooning Stormchild inside. Then, if the Genesis community did discover our presence, our boat would be like a rat trapped in a barrel. We could not risk such a fate so we agreed that, should the weather threaten to lock Stormchild inside the fjord while I was making my reconnaissance of the limestone workings, David would take the boat back to sea and wait for a message from the handheld VHF radio that I would take ashore.

  David, even though we had run the major risk of negotiating the fjord’s entrance, was still opposed to my reconnaissance. “You have no certainty that Nicole will be there,” he protested, “nor that you’ll
find any news of her!”

  “And you’ve got no certainty to the contrary,” I said. “For God’s sake, David, just let me alone for one day. I promise that if I find nothing, or if what I find is bad, then I’ll sail north with you and we’ll call in the cops.”

  “But no heroics!” David warned me. “This is just a reconnaissance, and you are not going to take any risks, is that a promise?”

  “Scout’s honor,” I said, and gave him the Sea Scouts salute.

  “I know you, Tim!” David said in a slightly despairing voice. “You’re in a stupidly heroic mood. You think you can swan across the island, find Nicole, rescue her, then come back here and open a celebratory bottle of champagne. Well, it won’t work! No battle is won by irresponsibility.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” I agreed, but without the fervor my brother demanded of me.

  “Tim! Please!” David said in exasperation. “We agreed that at the first sign of violence we would withdraw, and yesterday we were fired on, but did we withdraw? Did we act upon our agreement? No we did not. You pulled captain’s rank and here we are taking yet another risk. So I want your promise that you will try no heroics. No stupidity! I want your promise.”

  “You have it,” I said, and meant it, too.

  It was almost dusk as Stormchild reached the fjord’s blind end where the water widened into a large rippled pool that was surrounded by gently sloping hills. The shingle beaches were edged by belts of woodland, where ferns, moss, and wild fuchsia grew in livid green tangles beneath wind-stunted beech trees. Streams tumbled white and cold from the hills. A kingfisher flashed bright across the gray water as Stormchild’s anchor rattled down to bite on the bed of a lagoon, where, I guessed, no ship had ever anchored before. The wide lake that terminated the fjord had no name printed on our chart, even the lake was not shown, so I inked in its rough outline and then added a name of my own devising: Lake Joanna.

  The evening light was gray and wintry. All day the clouds had been gathering in the west, threatening wind and rain, but suddenly, as Stormchild tugged at her bedded anchor flukes, the setting sun emerged from a chasm of smoky vapor to cast a red-gold wash of fierce light across our anchorage. The sunlight made the small mountain streams look like rivulets of molten gold spilling toward a cauldron of liquid silver, above which uncountable seabirds flew on gilded wings toward their nests.

  I waited until the glow faded and until the spilling streams of gold had turned back to cold white water again, then I went below. It was my turn to cook, then David would keep watch through the dark hours of the night before, in the first gray light of dawn, I would go to journey’s end.

  I had been at sea too long. The backs of my legs felt as though they were sinewed with barbed wire, while the breath rasped in my throat and a stitch agonized at my waist. I had plenty of strength in my upper body from wrestling with Stormchild’s wheel and hauling on her lines, but my stamina and my leg muscles seemed to have atrophied from the long weeks of being penned up in a small boat.

  It was dawn and I was climbing the steep slope above the trees that edged the fjord’s beach. I was carrying one of Stormchild’s rifles and a bag which held spare ammunition, my rigging knife, a torch, binoculars, the handheld radio, and a few rations. I also had forty feet of half-inch nylon line looped round my upper body, for Berenice had warned that there were places on the island that were inaccessible without a climber’s rope.

  Behind and beneath me, below the trees and scrub which had soaked me with their dew as I struggled through their entanglement in the night’s last darkness, I could just see Stormchild in the battleship-gray mist that steamed off Lake Joanna’s sheltered surface. It was my first sight of my boat this day, for I had woken and eaten breakfast in the dark, then exchanged my sea boots for an old pair of walking boots, and had put on two sweaters and an old waxed-cotton shooting coat that offered some rudimentary camouflage, before, still in darkness, David had rowed me ashore. We had used a lantern to search the beach till we found a distinctive pale-colored rock which was the size and shape of a dinner plate, and we had agreed that, should David be forced to move Stormchild to sea or to a different anchorage, he would leave me a note hidden under the stone. Otherwise he expected to see me at dusk. If I came back after nightfall I was supposed to signal my whereabouts with the torch. David had stood on the beach offering me instruction after instruction, all very prudent and laborious, and afterward he had rather formally shaken my hand and wished me good luck. “But no heroics, Tim!”

  “No heroics,” I had agreed.

  Now, six hundred feet above Stormchild and beneath a lowering gunmetal sky, I paused to catch my breath. The ground was uneven, tussocked and burrowed by nesting birds, while the rifle seemed to weigh a ton. I glanced up at the sky, wondering when the rain would come. The wind had suddenly sprung cold and fierce. If I had not known this to be the southern hemisphere’s summer I would have thought a fall of snow was imminent.

  It took me another half hour to reach the crest of the ridge. Once there I stopped, panting and sweating, and took out the small handheld radio. The set was tuned to channel 37, a VHF frequency that had once been used for contacting marinas and boatyards in British waters, and which I doubted anyone other than David would be monitoring. “I’m on your skyline,” I told him.

  David answered immediately. “Shore party, shore party, this is Stormchild, Stormchild. Took your time strolling up that hill, didn’t you? Can you see anything. Over.”

  “Nothing.” Facing me was not, as I had hoped, a long, shallow slope leading down to the mine workings, but rather a wide bleak saddle that looked suspiciously marshy. I took the binoculars from my bag and searched the high plateau, but nothing moved there except the long grasses that rippled under the wind’s cold touch. “What’s the glass doing?” I asked David.

  “Shore party, shore party, this is Stormchild. The barometer is still dropping. It is now showing thirty and a half inches. I say again. Three zero point five inches. Over.”

  “You mean a thousand and thirty-three millibars?” I teased him.

  “I mean thirty and one half English inches, and not some ridiculous French standard of measurement.” David was incorrigibly old-fashioned in such matters. “Over.”

  The glass had read 1042 millibars when I woke, which meant that it was dropping more steeply than I had hoped. That drop indicated that a depression threatened us, a threat heralded by the freshness of the wind that I thought was probably stiffening. “If the glass goes on falling at this rate,” I advised David, “then you’d better think of making it to sea.”

  “Shore party, shore party, this is Stormchild. I agree. I’ll read the glass again in one hour and then decide. May I now suggest you conserve your battery power? Out.”

  I dutifully switched off the little radio, shoved it deep into my bag, and marched on. From now on I would be out of sight of Stormchild, which meant that the VHF radios, which worked only on line of sight, would be blanketed into silence.

  The upland saddle proved to be more than just marshland; it was a stretch of ice-cold bog land that sucked at my boots and sapped what little strength I had left. At times, missing my footing on the firmer tussocks, I would plunge up to a thigh in the wet, peaty mess. It had begun to drizzle, but soon that drizzle turned into a chill rain that thickened into a miserable downpour that blotted out the horizon like sea fog. I had not thought to bring one of my old prismatic compasses, but I doubted I would get lost, for if the charts were right then the dead end of the Desolate Straits, where Berenice assured me the limestone workings were built, lay just beyond the saddle’s eastern ridge, which, in turn, was no more than a mile away, yet already the marshland had consumed over two hours of painful, wet, slow struggle. I tried to console myself that some people paid small fortunes to be just so discomfited as they stalked deer on the Scottish hills, but the consolation did not help.

  At last the going became firmer and the upward slope steeper, evidence that I was reaching
the far side of the saddle. Rain was dripping from my hat and my boots squelched with every step. The cold was seeping into my bones, while my heels had been rubbed into painful blisters. Off to my left I could see a rocky peak which looked uncannily like one of the granite tors on Dartmoor, while directly ahead of me the skyline seemed to be crowned with a rampart of ice blocks. It was not until I was within a few paces of the blocks that I saw they were actually pale limestone boulders that were scattered along the ridge line above the quarry and where, winded, sore, and tired, I collapsed onto the wet turf and stared eastward.

  Far off, dim through the smearing rain, were the slopes of the Andes, while nearer, though still watered into obscurity, was the labyrinth of islands and twisting channels that made this coast so tangled and broken. It was, despite the rain, a magnificent view, yet beneath me was something that interested me far more—the limestone workings. I had come, at last, to Genesis’s inner citadel.

  The most obvious, and the ugliest, evidence of the old limestone workings was the quarry itself—a vast open scar that must have been a full half mile across and six hundred feet deep, and which had been ripped out of the hillside to leave a curving artificial cliff that faced toward the headwaters of the Desolate Straits. Trickles of peaty-brown water made miniature falls over the cliff; falls that tumbled hundreds of feet to the quarry floor which was cut into vast terraces so that it looked like an amphitheater for giants, littered with jagged boulders, dotted with pools, and strewn with shale and the detritus of the explosions that had once ripped the limestone out of the hill’s belly. Dark holes in the quarry’s sides betrayed where mine shafts had been driven horizontally into the mountain. To my left, beyond the big quarry, I could see a second and much smaller quarry, which appeared to face directly onto the straits.

  At the seaward side of the larger quarry’s floor, where the amphitheater spilled its dark, wet litter of shale toward the sea, was a group of rusting and ugly buildings. The buildings were dwarfed by the quarry’s size, yet when I examined them through the binoculars and counted the flights of iron steps that zigzagged up the flank of the largest structure, I realized just how huge the old sheds were. The largest one, a great gaunt structure, seemed big enough to house an airship. The buildings were grouped together, sloping roof touching sloping roof, presumably so that the men who had once lived and worked in this god-awful place would never have needed to expose themselves to Patagonia’s merciless weather. I raised the glasses a fraction to see a covered loading ramp sloping down from the large building toward the stone pier that jutted into the Desolate Straits. The profits from limestone must have been huge to have made it worthwhile to bring in all that corrugated iron and timber and machinery.