Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  I stood. It took me a long time, because I ached all over. No one responded to the rustle of leaves and the clatter of stones dislodged by my boots as I struggled upright. It seemed I was alone and, for the moment, at least, safe.

  I looked fearfully at my left wrist only to discover that it was my expensive wristwatch that had taken the full force of the blow and had been broken beyond repair. I took it off and tossed it into the black pool.

  My stomach was still a belt of agony. The pain lessened if I bent double so, crouching like Quasimodo, I forced my way through the undergrowth to retrieve the rifle. It seemed undamaged, but I dared not fire a shot to test it. At the seaward side of the quarry was a smaller rock face, no more than twenty feet high, that formed the outer wall of the small excavation. It was hard to climb, and even harder because of the pain in my stomach muscles, but I inched my way up and at last I hooked an elbow over the crest and could stare down into the Desolate Straits.

  The engine I was hearing belonged to the fishing boat which had vainly pursued Stormchild two days before and which now had steamed up the Desolate Straits and was berthed alongside the pier. Black smoke drizzled from her tall chimney.

  The sea kayaks that I had holed with bullets were now piled on her deck. Outboard of the trawler was a catamaran, while in the center of the waterway a stained and weathered sloop lay hove-to. I fished out what was left of my binoculars and trained the single lens on the boats. The sloop turned as I watched and, with a burst of troubled water at her stern, began motoring down the straits toward the far settlement.

  I panned to the catamaran, daring to hope it was Nicole’s boat, but instead I saw that it was the old catamaran in which von Rellsteb had come to my English river so long ago. I recognized neither of the men on board who now cast off from the trawler and, their engines going, turned to follow the sloop.

  The trawler alone was left. Lisl was standing on the pier by the fishing boat’s gangplank, from where she stared toward the factory ramp down which I had tumbled. It was evident that she was waiting for something or someone. Above her the gulls wheeled and screamed in the rain. The Desolate Straits looked gray, greasy, and cold, while the colors of the far hills, which only two days before had seemed so bright and heavenly, were now dulled by the rain into a dun drab. I shivered.

  I assumed that, obedient to von Rellsteb’s parting instructions, the Genesis crews were retreating to the settlement. There they could rendezvous and assess what damage, if any, Stormchild’s visit had caused them. If von Rellsteb had captured my boat, then that damage would have been minimal, whereas if David was still free and threatening to carry Berenice’s testimony to the authorities, von Rellsteb would urgently need to start his pursuit, and I wondered if the departure of the two yachts was the commencement of that urgent pursuit.

  It did indeed look as though every Genesis boat and every Genesis crew member was being committed to Stormchild’s chase, for, as far as I could tell, they were leaving the mine workings unguarded. That implied there was very little at the workings worth protecting, but it also indicated that Lisl believed me to be dead. That misconception was my one small advantage over Genesis.

  I watched Lisl stamp her feet against the cold, then, panning my broken glass right, I saw what it was she waited for. Two men were struggling toward the fishing boat with the body of the gunman I had wounded, and whom, I suspected, the Genesis group had themselves finished off. Now one man held the corpse by the shoulders of its coat while the other grasped the dead man’s ankles. The cadaver’s bearded head hung backward so that its long hair brushed at the pier’s stones and its huge beard jutted pugnaciously toward the rain clouds. Lisl seemed to shudder and back away from the body’s passing. The two men very nearly dropped the corpse into the water as they shuffled across the makeshift gangplank, but at last they had the body safe aboard, and Lisl, still keeping her distance from the dead, cast off the trawler’s mooring lines. The engine smoke thickened as, with an awful wheezing and clanking, the decrepit vessel steamed away up the wide straits.

  When the fishing boat disappeared I rolled over the lip of the quarry.

  No one shot at me. It seemed that no one had been left behind to guard the mine against my ghost. I lay panting and pained on the thin turf, then slowly, when my stomach muscles uncramped, I gathered my strength, stood up, and, using the rifle like a crutch, I limped toward the mine buildings, where I still had a daughter to find.

  It was in the low stone buildings, which were built into the hillside at the back of the quay, that I found the first signs of Nicole. The buildings were single-storied, and crouched against the spite of the sea wind like a row of Cornish fishermens’ cottages. The buildings were locked, but not locked well enough, and inside I discovered crude and uncomfortable living quarters. Some effort had been made to decorate the five bedrooms; one boasted a livid mural showing a humpback whale venting beside an iceberg, while a second was decorated with a painted effigy of an Indian god, its colors bright as the sun, but mostly the rooms were as characterless and cheerless as an army barracks. I wondered which of the beds Nicole used, though the barrenness of the small bedrooms suggested that they were used only when the severity of the weather drove Nicole’s crew out of their boat and into the shelter of the cottage’s stone walls. There was a small kitchen equipped with a woodstove, a cupboard which held nothing but packets of dehydrated stew, and a battered enamel washing bowl, in which a large evil-looking spider lived. There was also a wooden table, six chairs, and a wall that was covered with peeling paper, or so I thought until I pushed back the kitchen’s shutters and saw that the peeling paper was, in fact, rows of curling photographs.

  I had found Nicole.

  I felt the sudden catch and choke of incipient tears, for there was my daughter’s face among the Genesis crews. “Nicole,” I whispered her name aloud like an incantation, “Nicole, Nicole.” I even reached up a tentative finger and stroked one of the photographs. Suddenly it was all worth it—the voyage, the cold, the pain, and the fear, for here she was, my daughter, and I had found her.

  Or rather I had found her face among the photographs, which showed a variety of Genesis activists. In some of the pictures they were attacking fishnets with grapnels and cutting gear, while in another a Genesis group in an inflatable boat was taunting a French naval patrol vessel which had presumably been guarding France’s nuclear-testing site in the Pacific. The pictures were amateurish, like fading holiday snapshots, and somehow that suggested that the Genesis eco-terrorists were a group of energetically carefree young people enjoying a most innocent and happy vacation; whenever two people were photographed together they inevitably had their arms about each others’ necks, and in almost every snapshot they seemed to be shouting good-natured insults at the camera.

  The pictures, I saw, were all of the same crew: Nicole’s. Nicole herself appeared in a dozen of the photographs, and in all but one of those she was either smiling or laughing. One photograph had been taken while she took a bucket shower on her catamaran’s foredeck. She had been naked, and had clearly not known that she was being photographed, for the next picture showed her indignant, but good-humored face as she attacked the photographer. In a half dozen of the pictures she was shown with a thin, flaxen-haired boy, who had a blunt face that reminded me uncannily of my dead son. The more I looked, the more the boy in the pictures looked like Dickie. It was unsettling, for there was something about the way in which Nicole and the blond boy had been photographed together that suggested they were lovers.

  I tried not to follow those insinuations. Instead I gazed for a long time at those pictures of my daughter, and I wondered just what thoughts and dreams moved her in this new life. None of the happy photographs revealed the answer to that question, but there was a clue in the one unsmiling picture of Nicole. That picture had been taken in an inflatable boat which had been thrashing through a choppy sea beneath a threatening sky. Nicole, sitting in the bows of the rubber boat, had just turned to face the
photographer, and the camera had caught her face in a grim and taut expression that put me in mind of Berenice’s timid description of my daughter as “fierce.” I had a horrible feeling that the grim face was the real face, a face that betrayed no forgiveness nor any love. The picture worried me.

  Not two hours before, in the wake of von Rellsteb’s ambush, I had been determined to take my revenge, but now I felt an immense hopelessness. Because, at last, I knew just why I had sailed ten thousand miles. The confusions dropped away. I had not come to take revenge for Joanna’s death, though revenge would indeed be sweet, nor had I come merely to find Nicole, but rather I had come for love. I had come to see the remorse on my daughter’s face. I had come to hear her speak my name. I had come to hear her say that I had not sent her brother to his death. I had come to wipe away her tears. I had brought her my forgiveness, and had never thought she might not want it. I had come to hug and to be hugged, to love and be loved. I had come to fill the void in my life that had been left by a bomb in the English channel. I had come for the worst of all sentimental and self-pitying reasons, but now, staring at my daughter’s snarling face, I knew I had wasted my time.

  Standing there before the photographs I knew that the very best thing I could do was to creep away. I did not want to know the truth any longer, because the truth would be very hard, and very hurtful. It would be better to remember Nicole as she was in the smiling photographs, to remember her as a cheerful, hard-muscled, and tough activist who sailed the far seas to save dolphins and to raise the world’s consciousness by sacrificing her own comforts. That, no doubt, was how she thought of herself, and that was how I should think of her. If I pursued her further, and if I caught her, then I might discover that she had become someone who believed she knew better than the world, and who was therefore beyond the world’s rules and beyond its condemnation. I might find that my daughter had become the tyrant of that one unsmiling photograph. I took that picture down, tore it into scraps, and decided to abandon my hunt. I would leave Nicole to life, as we must all, in the end, leave our children. I smiled at Nicole’s happiness in the other photographs, chose two of them as keepsakes, and then I left.

  I made a desultory exploration of the remaining buildings, but by now I was merely indulging my curiosity and did not expect to find anything useful, nor did I, though in one room that was stacked with coiled ropes I found an empty cardboard box that was lined with plastic sheeting and which carried the label “Dynamite.” The sight of the box encouraged horrible thoughts, so I closed the door of that room and tried to forget what I had seen. In the next room I found a pile of rusted anchor chain, while in a cupboard there was an ancient wooden-handled whaling harpoon with a corroded, but still wicked-looking barbed head. These were the old nineteenth-century storerooms. In the same room as the harpoon was a barrel of nails that had rusted into a solid mass and boxes of Hambro line that fell to pieces the moment it was touched. In yet another room was a cache of empty liquor bottles which had faded labels of long-forgotten brands of whiskey, rum, and aquavit; ancient solaces against the awfulness of a job at the earth’s end. The final rooms, closest to the old boat lift, were unused and held nothing but broken barrels, the bones of a rabbit, gull feathers, and hopelessness.

  I left the quay, crossed the twin rails of the boat lift, and climbed the hill to the mine buildings where von Rellsteb had ambushed me. The buildings were empty now. I lifted the tarpaulin off the tractor’s engine only to discover that the ancient cylinder block was a mass of rust. There was nothing more to find, or nothing more that I cared to find, and so, in the teeth of a rising wind, I left the mine and, with the rifle slung on my shoulder, I climbed beside the quarry’s northern rim. A small, black-feathered and bad-tempered bird of prey screamed at me from a nesting ledge as I began to slog my way up the sodden hillside.

  Once or twice I looked behind me, but the Desolate Straits stayed empty. The Genesis crews either were in pursuit of Stormchild or were celebrating her capture, and I was alone in a wilderness, doomed to a long, cold, soaking walk in the dying light, and then to a freezing night. I had stuffed my bag with some packets of the dehydrated stews I had found in Nicole’s kitchen, but without a stove the result would be about as appetizing as pigswill.

  I looked behind again and saw that the gray water of the straits, even though sheltered on all sides by high hills and wooded bluffs, was being whipped into whitecaps by the wind, while the rain, which had now fallen all day, stung my face with a new and even colder spite. I felt empty and drained. My quest was over and I was tired and hungry. I had also chosen the wrong route home, for this northern flank of the quarry was much harder going than the southern flank down which I had approached the buildings. The northern slope was striated with rock ledges, broken by small ravines, and made treacherous by slides of scree that forced me to make wide and wearying detours.

  Near the top of the slope was the largest and steepest field of scree I had yet encountered, and one which forced me to make a long detour to my right. Ahead of me now was the jumble of rocks that I slowly recognized as the distinctive peak which, only that morning, had so strongly reminded me of Dartmoor’s granite tors. I was now so tired that I began to hallucinate that I was back on that Devon moor, and that if I could just keep walking I would soon come to the hiker’s inn at Postbridge, where a huge fire would be blazing in the hearth and where I could buy a pint of beer and a deep dish of steak and kidney pie. It was only when I stumbled on a burrow, or when the torn muscles of my belly gave a foul twinge, that the comforting hallucination snapped away and I knew I was alone, wet, and hungry on a Patagonian island.

  The torlike stones barred my path westward. I rested for a time at their base, sitting with my back against the rocks and staring at the Desolate Straits, which were now so far beneath me that low clouds, wispy and gray, broke my view of the wind-fretted water.

  At last, fighting the temptation to remain in the small shelter of the high rock wall, I tried to go around it, but a steep slope of scree fell away to the north just as it did to the south, so, moving like a somnambulant creature in a nightmare, I clambered slowly up to where the wind and the rain shrieked their cacophony across the tor’s summit. The climb was simple, yet as my head poked over the crest the force of the wind almost stole my breath away. I dragged myself over the edge, banging the rifle’s butt on the rock as I clumsily moved, and then I went utterly still.

  For a second I thought I was dreaming. Then, for another second, I hoped I was dreaming. Then I retched emptily.

  A body lay in a cup of the rock.

  For a few seconds, for a few whirling seconds of madness, I thought the body was Nicole’s, then I saw that this woman had hair as black as the feathers of the bird of prey that had screamed at me on the lower slope.

  It was that black hair, which was long and gleaming from the rain, that told me this corpse was that of a woman, because her flesh had been stripped by scavenging birds and animals. The carrion eaters had left some sinews between the yellowing joints, but otherwise she was nothing more than discolored bones in a bleak place. She had been flensed.

  I fell to my knees. My sore belly heaved with a last lunge of sour vomit. I wanted to weep, but instead I shuffled forward and made myself examine the skeleton.

  There was a ring on one bone finger. I did not touch it. There was also a necklace, which I similarly left alone. The woman’s clothes had either been torn by carrion eaters or else had decayed in the weather, for her sweater and jeans were now nothing but faded and threadbare scraps that clung to her yellow bones. The only undecayed object in that high place was a common sack that was still hooked into the bony grip of her dead skeletal hands. One of her leg bones was broken, suggesting she had been unable to reach the shelter of the mine, and instead had died of exposure in this high, bleak place.

  I pulled the sack out of her dead grip, making her bones rattle as the frail cloth came free. The first thing I found inside the sack was a blue Australian passport,
in which was written the dead woman’s name, Maureen Delaney, and her age, twenty-three. The passport photograph showed a round, girlish face that smiled at the world with an astonished happiness.

  There was a stub of pencil in the sack, but no sheet of paper or notebook, so I leafed through the passport until I found some faint penciled letters on a blank page that told me how wrong I was. This girl had not died trying to reach the mine, but escaping from it. She had crawled up here, and died, because such a fate was better than staying in the mine. Maureen Delaney had been murdered.

  The blank page in the passport was headed Naiad, and under that boat’s name was a brief and pathetic message. “They killed John and Mark. There were four of them: two Germans, an American, and an English girl. They let others rape me. And rape me.” The words were ill-written and very eloquent, as eloquent as any voice that speaks from the grave. “It is November,” Maureen Delaney’s message continued, “they say they’ll kill me. The girls won’t help me.” I turned the passport’s stiff page to find some words addressed to her mother.

  I closed my eyes as though I could stop the tears.

  I tried to persuade myself that there might be another English girl in the Genesis community, or that this Australian girl’s dying testimony was mere imagination, but I had deceived myself for long enough, and there could be no more deception. Maureen Delaney’s companions had been murdered, and she had been driven to this cold, lonely death, which was as bad as murder, and my daughter had been a participant. For what? For a boat, I assumed, for possession of Naiad, because, like all terrorists, my daughter believed that the foulest means were sanctified by the nobility of the cause.

  I turned back the passport’s pages until Maureen Delaney’s smiling, sun-tanned face again stared into mine. She looked, I thought, enthusiastic, like someone who had taken life with both hands as a gift. She must have been an adventurous girl, independent and tough, for she had sailed far seas, keeping the wind’s tune and knowing the sea’s measure, but then she had been raped and killed. With my daughter’s compliance. I imagined the Australian girl begging for help and Nicole’s cold face turning away, and that thought made me want to put the Lee-Enfield’s cold muzzle in my mouth and blow my brains out, but instead I put the murdered girl’s passport into my pocket. It would have to go to the Australian embassy.