Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  To my right the settlement was in tumult. Lights showed in almost every window. Most of the lights were candles, but there were a few powerful flashlights and two of those stronger lights now bobbed across the front stretch of grass as, too late, the Genesis activists ran around the bay’s edge to discover what had happened to their precious boat.

  I had thought that the rain might be strong enough to extinguish any fires that the explosion might have started; the very best effect I had dared hope for was that the dynamite might blow in the wheelhouse and shatter the steering lines, but the trawler’s old timbers had been so soaked in oil and tar that they were like an incendiary mixture, and now they blazed to dazzle the night. They rippled fire across the bay and flickered a scarlet flame-light against the house front, and across the wet fields, and against the rocks that edged the bay, and up to the low hurrying clouds. The night was suddenly shining, but I was already a shadow in the margins of the lowlands.

  I heard them lamenting their loss, but there was nothing they could do. Soon, I thought, their laments would turn to radio appeals for help, but they could not summon their leader, nor could they use their boat to escape. They were trapped, and I had just begun to play.

  “How’s Stephen?” I asked Jackie, “Giving you grief? You’d like me to kick his head in?”

  “He’s real quiet.” Jackie gazed wide-eyed at the flame-lit scenery. It had taken me the best part of a half hour to climb back up the escarpment, yet still the burning trawler was shuddering the water with the red reflections of its flames. The boat had gone aground close to the wooded promontory where she now slowly burned down to her waterline and from where her death streaked the black sea with bands of red fire and cast deep shadows into the settlement’s courtyard and into the tumbled rocks by the beach and into the woods above the burning boat. It was still raining and the flames gave a dark crimson sheen to the spreading puddles that made such a misery of the settlement’s vegetable gardens.

  I now wanted to add to that misery. I had used one stick of dynamite on the boat, I needed another later in the night, which left me with four sticks, which I now made into a single bundle tied with a strip of green cloth I had cut from Stephen’s trousers. “Getting cold, are you?” I asked him.

  He made an odd guttural noise from inside his gag. He was shivering. The flames, though burning over half a mile away, were just strong enough to reflect off his eyeballs. He watched me cut three of the four fuses off their sticks, then I fashioned the three into one long fuse which I spliced onto the fourth. I hoped that I had quadrupled the time between lighting the fuse and the resultant bang of the bomb with which I planned to attack the old earthern dam. I doubted whether the bomb would be powerful enough to destroy the dam, but, with luck, it would do enough damage to the spillway to make the settlement an even more uncomfortable place to live, and discomfort was the major weapon I was using to drive von Rellsteb’s followers out to where the world might hold them accountable for their actions.

  When the bomb was finished, Jackie and I slithered down from the rocks to the path beside the dam. I left her crouched by a pale boulder, while I walked along the paved pathway which ran across the dam’s top.

  The dam’s purpose was not to conserve water, for water was the one commodity that was never scarce in this land, but rather to save the fields from perpetual flooding by diverting the escarpment’s watershed westward instead of eastward. The dam also served as a gigantic header tank for the settlement, for which simple purpose it had no need of complicated sluicegates or turbines. Instead of such refinements I suspected that the dam simply leached its water into pipes buried deeply enough in the earthen wall to make sure that they were never blocked by ice in the wintertime. Some of the pipes would feed the conduits that irrigated the vegetable plots while others went to the house.

  To make sure that the reservoir never overflowed to cascade an unwanted rush of water down to the settlement, there was a spillway at the western end of the reservoir which drained the lake’s excess water into the island’s inner tangle of wetlands. The whole nineteenth-century arrangement was a low-technology water control system of admirable simplicity and efficiency. It was also, I suspected, fairly resistant to sabotage.

  That resistance was provided by the dam itself which was a massive wall of earth, doubtless reinforced with buried boulders that helped protect the pipes. I suspected I could not reach those pipes, so instead I planned to lower the sill of the dam.

  The sill was ten feet wide and had a central pathway which was paved, but the paving stones were old, moss-covered, cracked, and uneven, and it was no trouble to lever one whole slab free. Then, using my knife, I clawed and scratched and dug my way down into the dam’s sill. I dug like a dog, desperately scrabbling soil aside as I delved ever deeper into the cold, damp and hard-packed mix of shingle and soil. The burning trawler gave just enough ambient light to let me see what I was doing.

  When I had excavated as far as my arms could reach, I put the bomb into my newly made burrow, then, taking care to leave the fuse exposed, I swept loose soil and shingle over the bundled dynamite. Finally, leaving a space just large enough for my hand and a match, I pulled the flagstone back over the half-filled hole.

  “Are you ready?” I called to Jackie.

  “Go for it!” she shouted back, and I reflected that for a girl who went loose-kneed at the sight of a gun she was remarkably sanguine about dynamite.

  I glanced toward the settlement. The trawler’s flames were at last losing their battle with the deluge of rain and sea, but just enough flickering light remained to show me the house and its encircling wings. I could see no flashlights there, indicating that the Genesis people, knowing their fishing boat was lost, had withdrawn once more into the protection of the buildings where, doubtless, they were frantically and helplessly trying to reach von Rellsteb on the radio.

  So now was the perfect time to feed their panic.

  I struck a match in the space I had left under the stone. The flame struggled, then caught, and I touched it to the stub of fuse that suddenly hissed and spat sparks at my knuckles. The fire darted into the loose soil and I hoped to God that there was enough oxygen to keep the fuse burning right down to the old explosives.

  I ran. Jackie reached a hand toward me and I threw myself down behind her rock and put an arm about her. “Hold tight,” I said in unnecessary warning, then the fire bit into the explosives and the settlement’s troubled night became a whole lot worse.

  The dying light of the burning trawler was just sufficient to show us what happened. At first I thought the whole energy of the explosive had been wasted into a one-hundred-foot column of flame which belched straight into the sky like an incandescent geyser. Smoke boiled after the spear of flame, then, magically, the smoke seemed to evaporate, leaving nothing except the memory of that startling stab of fire that had pierced the wet sky and momentarily blinded us both.

  “Damn,” I said softly, thinking that the bomb had failed.

  I heard splashes as lumps of soil and scraps of stone pattered down into the reservoir to break the complex geometric design of the radiating ripples that had been generated by the explosive percussion in the dam.

  “Damn,” I said again, because I had just used four sticks of dynamite to achieve nothing more than pretty patterns on a lake.

  “No! Listen!” Jackie said excitedly.

  I listened and, above the sound of wind and rain, I heard an odd grinding noise which became yet louder and louder, and which seemed to come from the very heart of the mountain beneath us, and which suddenly turned into a titanic belch that, in turn, gave birth to an obscenely vast bubble which shattered the black surface of the reservoir hard by the sill itself.

  Then, extraordinarily, it seemed as though the hard-packed soil at the very center of the dam was being turned into a shivering and gleaming liquid. Jackie and I, huddled together in the rain, watched as the apparently solid wall began to quiver and glisten as the water infiltrated t
he bomb-loosened mass of earth. For a second a smooth, shining, fire-touched lip of water trembled and glittered at the outer edge of the liquefying dam, then the whole vast agglomeration collapsed.

  The bomb had done better than I had ever dared anticipate. I had hoped that the explosion might bite a chunk out of the dam’s sill, and that the consequent erosion of the spilling water would do the real damage by widening my small fissure into a gaping breach, but instead the whole construction now seemed to shatter and collapse over the escarpment’s edge in a single thunderous avalanche of earth, rocks, and water.

  “Bloody hell fire!” I said in delighted awe.

  Jackie was gripping my hand with a strength I would not have credited in her.

  The water deluged to the bottom of the escarpment, fed now by a veritable Niagara of draining floodwater that slid across the dam’s shattered brink. Spray bounced high to meet the rain as what was left of the old earthern dam wall was torn away in chunks the size of houses.

  The floodwaters churned across the fields, drowning the vegetables and pouring like a tidal wave toward the house. The released lakewater smashed into the courtyard and flooded into the settlement’s lower story as still more water poured in a smooth rush across the rim of the hills. The turbulent flood, touched red and silver by the flames, spread across the plain below, lapped against the big house, and reached with greedy shining streams toward the sea. The flashlights appeared again, but only to bob helplessly above the inundation.

  “Aren’t you proud of me?” I asked Jackie.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said, then touched my unshaven cheek with the tips of her fingers. “Be careful, Tim.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised, for now it was time for me to go down the escarpment again, but this time to visit the flooded settlement itself. Jackie was not coming with me. Instead she would stay safe on the high ground, where, in exactly thirty minutes, she would create a diversion by firing her rifle. She would not fire at the settlement, but into the sky where she could be fairly certain that she would not be shooting any people, bunny rabbits, or roosting sea gulls.

  I sent Jackie safe on her nonviolent way, picked up my bag with its baked-bean bomb, shouldered my rifle, and went back down the hill.

  I waded through the glutinous slough that I had fashioned from the settlement’s vegetable plots. Water still gushed from the destroyed dam, not with the terrible force that had followed the explosion, but still in a strong enough flow to make a curling silver stream that twisted through the mud to make a pool of the courtyard.

  I could hear children crying as I neared the house. I could also hear Molly Tetterman hammering on the door of her flooded prison. She was stridently demanding to be released, but I decided she was safer where she was and left her in miserable ignorance while I prowled round to the front of the house.

  No one challenged me as I splashed nearer and nearer the pale building. The yellow light of candles and lanterns shivered behind the windows of the upper floor, but the flooded lower story was pitch black. The trawler had at last burned out and the troubled night had slid back into its impenetrable darkness as I took the last remaining stick of dynamite out of my bag. Then I sidled along the front wall of the house and waited.

  Children cried above me. I heard a man’s angry voice demand that the damned kids be quiet. A woman protested against the man’s anger and was immediately hushed, then Lisl’s voice, strident and loud, demanded silence. “Listen!” she ordered, and for a second I thought she wanted everyone’s attention for some important announcement, but instead she wanted everyone to listen for any more sounds of trouble in the surrounding darkness.

  They did not have to wait long.

  Jackie fired. She told me later that she had fired the rifle so high into the air that the bullet had probably clipped an angel’s wing, but, more to my purpose, the crack of the gun was an unmistakable sound in the wet night and I heard feet stampede across the upper floor to the windows that faced inland. Jackie fired again, and, sure that my enemies had been safely diverted to the back of the house, I struck a match, lit the last fuse, then rolled the dynamite up against the front door before running desperately out onto the soggy lawn to put as much distance as possible between my body and the explosion. I ran twenty paces, then dropped.

  “Quiet!” Lisl shouted again, for the brace of rifle shots had prompted a babble of excited voices which, in turn, had started all the infants bawling again. “Look for the muzzle flash!” I heard Lisl shout. I could also hear the fuse of my dynamite spitting angrily, but I saw nothing, for I had my eyes closed and my face pressed hard into the damp ground.

  The dynamite blew. I felt the thumping, breath-snatching hot billow of the expanding gasses wash over me, then my head and shoulders were bombarded by scraps of soil. When I raised my head I saw that the trellised porch had vanished and the double front doors had been turned into a gaping and smoking hole. Desperate children were screaming like tortured banshees in the upstairs rooms. I worked the Lee-Enfield’s bolt, putting a round into the chamber, then turned the safety catch off.

  “This side!” a voice shouted, and a flashlight stabbed toward me in the rainy darkness.

  I fired. Not at the light itself, but into the window above it. I merely wanted to scare, not to kill.

  I heard window glass crash and tinkle as the light was jerked back inside the room.

  I ran toward the house. The door frame was a smoking mess that led into a hallway inches deep in floodwater. Light filtered down a stairway to show me bare walls on which paint of a horrid institutional green peeled sadly. I pushed into a room to see the same drab paint. The place reminded me of the English boarding schools where David and I had learned the merits of acute discomfort. I went back into the hall, splashed past the the splintered front doors that were lying across the foot of the stairs, and found the kitchen. Water and mud silted the floor, but the twin wood-burning furnaces of the long black range were both alight, making the big room wondrously warm. I doubted if these twin fires were ever extinguished for the furnaces probably supplied all the heat and hot water for the entire settlement. I almost burned my hand trying to open the nearest furnace door, and had to snatch off my woolen hat to use as a hot pad. The heat seared at me from the open door. I found a candle on the table, lit it from the stove’s flames, then, my business properly lit, I set about making the room uninhabitable.

  I started by hanging my bag, which held my vegetarian bomb, on a beam close to the kitchen door. I carefully arranged the bag’s contents, then I extinguished the settlement’s fires. I used an old cast-iron skillet to scoop muddy water from the floor and pour it onto the precious flames.

  The burning timbers hissed in protest. Water beaded and scurried across the stove’s red-hot iron as I went on ladling yet more water into the two furnaces. The kitchen filled with steam and smoke. I had flooded the valley, disabled the radio, now I would deprive them of heat and cooking. Short of burning down the house I could think of few things more calculated to destroy morale in this uncomfortable place.

  Once the fires were doused, I used the rifle’s butt to sweep plates, bowls, and cups off the dresser. I smashed the crockery into piles of creamy fragments, then yanked down the bunches of herbs that hung from the ceiling beams. I upset huge boxes of stringy red seaweed that, like the herbs, I trampled into the floodwaters. I bashed a metal chimney pipe clean off its stove, then used the rifle’s brass-bound butt to hammer through the old lead pipes that brought water to the kitchen. I stove in the windows, then opened a cupboard and spilled more of the settlement’s invaluable supplies onto the flooded floor. I tipped over a whole barrel of flour, then hammered at a basket of eggs.

  Every few seconds I suspended my activity to listen for the footsteps that would presage a counter-attack by the Genesis people, yet the group was so frightened or else so disorganized that I had virtually finished the wrecking of the kitchen before I at last heard the sound of feet on the stairs. I froze, then he
ard the scrape of the fallen doors being moved and afterward a cautious splashing in the hallway.

  I stepped silently back into a large scullery. A scrap of mirror hung by the door and I saw myself reflected in the tarnished glass, and for a second I did not recognize my unshaven face. It was so smeared with mud that it looked as though I had used a whole tin of army camouflage cream. My bloodshot eyes stared grimly back at me, then I looked away from the glass, raised the rifle, and waited to see who had come to investigate.

  Two people stepped through the door. One was a bearded man dressed in faded green, the other, a thin, frightened-looking girl in a baggy gray sweater and lank gray trousers. She hung back behind the man who was carrying a rifle. He stared appalled at the destruction I had caused, while his companion began to whimper. Neither of them saw me in the dark recess of the scullery.

  “Drop the gun,” I said, “or you’re dead.”

  The bearded man twisted toward me. I fired.

  I did not aim to kill. Instead I just filled the room with the noise of the Lee-Enfield, and my bullet buried itself harmlessly in the opposite wall. The girl screamed, I worked the bolt, and the bearded man dropped the rifle into the floodwater as though the gun had suddenly scalded him.

  I stepped out of the scullery. “My name is Tim Blackburn”—I held the gun on the man—”and I came here a few days ago seeking news of my daughter, Nicole. No one had the courtesy to give me that news, so I’ve come back to find it for myself.”

  The bearded man, his hands in the air, stared at me with a look of pure horror. The girl had cringed back toward the door.

  “Lift the flap of the bag above your head,” I told the man. “Do it very gently, and don’t dislodge the bag, just look under the flap. Quickly now!”

  The man very timorously reached up and lifted the canvas flap of my old fishing bag. The room’s single candle flickered, but it gave more than enough light to let the man see what lay under the bag’s flap, and what he saw terrified him.