Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  I ignored his question. “Maybe I’ll offer to take her to face British justice,” I said, “instead of Chilean.”

  “And maybe she won’t want anything you offer,” David said, then he shook his head in a sudden horror. “You mustn’t go, Tim! It’s too dangerous.”

  I smiled. “I don’t want you to take risks, David. I want you to stay here. I’ve always thought you should stay here.”

  Relief showed on his tired face. “Truly?”

  “We don’t want to risk the bishopric, do we?” I teased him, then turned wearily toward Stormchild. “The reason I wanted you to stay here, David,” I told him, “is because there’s still one other Genesis boat at sea, and just in case it does get here before the authorities, it might be a good idea if you were here to hold the fort. Molly Tetterman seems a very competent lady, but I have a suspicion you’d be a more convincing threat with a gun.”

  “I think you should stay with me,” David said trenchantly.

  “I know you do, but I won’t.” I grinned at him, then stepped down onto Stormchild’s deck. We both went down to the saloon where I helped David collect and pack his belongings. He would deal with the Chilean Navy, then go to Santiago and tell the Australian Embassy about the pirating of the Naiad. I gave him Maureen Delaney’s passport, then warned him that he would have to field the attentions of some very curious reporters. “If you play it canny,” I told him, “you can probably persuade one of the newspapers to pay your fare home in return for some exclusive information.”

  “Is that how it works?” he asked, though very distractedly. David was not worried about the newspapers, but about me. He thought I was sailing to my death, and he did not know how to stop me.

  “Jackie will help you deal with the press,” I told him. “This is rather going to be her moment. All those self-important papers who turned her down are now going to be begging for her story.”

  “Only if they can find me,” Jackie said. She had boarded Stormchild and now crouched at the head of the companionway. “I’m going with you, Tim.”

  “No!” I insisted.

  Jackie half smiled, then produced one of the guns I had left in the cockpit. It was an M-16 and, with a newfound confidence, she switched it to automatic fire and aimed it at the array of instruments that was mounted above the chart table. One squeeze of the trigger and Stormchild would be without radios, log, depth sounder, Satnav, and chronometer. “I’m coming with you, Tim,” Jackie said, “or you’re not going at all.”

  “Put the gun down,” I said, “please?”

  “Well?”

  I sighed, then said what I had been wanting to say all day. “Dear Jackie,” I said, “please sail with me.”

  We sailed just after midday, sliding away from the settlement and past the burned-out trawler and out into the swirling eddies of the Desolate Straits. No Armada patrol ship had yet arrived. We left David with all our guns except one Lee-Enfield that I stored in a cockpit locker, then, after Molly had embraced Jackie and enjoined me to look after her, we cast off our lines.

  We used the big engine, pushing it to the limit in my hurry to escape to the open sea before the Armada arrived in the Desolate Straits. By mid-afternoon I had found a narrow channel that, according to the chart, led to the ocean and I plunged into its shadows. I doubted any patrol ship would find us now, and the clouds were too low for any helicopter to be useful. We had escaped unseen, and now hurried between dank, dark cliffs that funneled the gusting wet wind and echoed back the rhythmic pounding of our big engine.

  I gave Jackie the helm while I went below and, at last, took off the walking boots and peeled away the blood-encrusted socks. I hobbled into Stormchild’s tiny head, showered, then used an old cut-throat razor to hack off my stubble. I bandaged my feet, pulled on some reasonably clean and dry clothes, then heated myself a tinned steak and kidney pie and made Jackie a vegetable omelette. I carried the meal to the cockpit where I scoffed down the pie, drank a bottle of beer, stole some of Jackie’s omelette, had another beer, made myself two cheese sandwiches because I was still famished, and then, after wolfing down a tin of peaches slathered with evaporated milk, I brewed a pot of tea strong enough to scald the barnacles off a battleship’s bum. “Oh, Christ,” I said, “but that does feel better.”

  Jackie went below to wash and change, and I sat alone in Stormchild’s cockpit as the engine took us seaward. As we neared the ocean the narrow channel became choppy and, where rocks reared up from the sea bed, the water ran in slick, fast kelds to betray the presence of tidal rips. Jackie joined me on deck where, with our oilskin hoods over our heads, we watched sea otters, kingfishers, fur seals, and geese. “I looked round the galley,” Jackie suddenly said in a rather ominous tone.

  “So?”

  “I couldn’t find my sprouting kit.”

  “Your what?”

  “My sprouting kit. You know? The thing that makes fresh sprouts from seeds and beans?”

  “It disappeared in a freak wave,” I said. “I tried to save it, but alas.”

  “Tim?” she said sweetly, “you are so full of it, your eyes are brown.”

  I laughed. I could feel the tremor of the ocean in the way that Stormchild was breaking the channel’s chop now. We were getting close. Soon, I knew, we would hear the crash of the surf battering against the rocks, and then, under the day’s gray shroud of rain and cloud, we would be at sea. At our stern the faded red ensign slapped in the gusting wind. When it was all over, I promised myself, and the last questions had earned their horrid answers, I would let that ensign go into the deep waters and I would buy another flag to mark a new beginning.

  In the late afternoon, as the first shearwaters flighted back from the sea to their nests, Stormchild’s cutwater thumped into the open water. That first big, cold wave exploded white on Stormchild’s bows and ran green down her scuppers. To port and starboard the massive rollers broke ragged on black rocks under a sullen rain as Stormchild, like a tiny projectile, arrowed straight from the channel into the vast ocean’s wastes. The seas streamed at us in battalion formation, row after row of them, huge and ponderous, each shuddering our boat and making its engine labor, and so, while Jackie took the wheel, I hoisted Stormchild’s sails and immediately the yacht stiffened and, when the motor was switched off, settled comfortably into the ocean’s own undying rhythm.

  By dusk it had stopped raining and the far sun was staining the chasms of a ragged cloud bank with a scarlet touch. The wind was gusting strong and cold from the south, while the endless seas, like restless mountains of liquid slate, heaved Stormchild high as they roared blindly beneath her keel. We had left the land far behind, way beyond our sight, as now, alone on a tremendous sea, we reached toward the dying sun to find Nicole.

  I had learned the Genesis transmission schedule from von Rellsteb’s radio operator, so I knew on what channel and at what times the Genesis Four would listen and so, at nightfall, I went below and turned on Stormchild’s big radio. Jackie, at the wheel, peered anxiously down the companionway as I tuned the radio, and, at last pressed the transmitter button. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Over.”

  Nothing. A great wave rolled past Stormchild’s flank and I heard the sea scouring down the scuppers. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Over.”

  Still nothing. I sat at the console smelling the pervasive smell of the diesel oil that still reeked in Stormchild’s saloon carpet. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Come in please. Over.”

  Were the Chileans listening? Was the Armada monitoring all the medium and high frequency channels in an effort to find us and intercept us? If they thought I was trying to help my daughter evade their country’s justice then the Chilean Navy might very well have a lean, gray patrol vessel somewhere in this wilderness of sea and wind. Yet, I reasoned, the Armada would surely talk to me on the radio if they had intercepted this transmission, and so
far neither they, nor Genesis Four, had replied. Perhaps no one was listening. I pressed the key again. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Over.”

  “We hear you,” said the voice from the speaker, and it said nothing more. Just those three words. “We hear you,” but it was my daughter’s voice, curt and toneless, and I stared at the radio as though it had just transmitted the word of God.

  “Nicole?” I transmitted in wonderment. “Nicole?” but there was no reply, and I realized that though my daughter might listen to me, she had nothing to say in return.

  So be it. I closed my eyes, pressed the key, and spoke.

  I began by saying that I loved her. It sounded stilted, so I said it again, and afterward I told her I knew what she had done, not just to her mother, but to the crew of the Naiad, and I said that the evidence of her deeds had been given to her Uncle David, who was making sure it reached the proper authorities. I then explained that the Genesis community had ceased to exist; its leaders were dead, its members were homeless, and its settlement was destroyed. “You can sail back there now and you’ll find the Chilean Police and Navy waiting for you, or you can rendezvous with me and we’ll either go back together, or sail to the Falklands. I’m not offering you freedom, just a choice between British or Chilean justice. I would also like to meet you and tell you that I still love you, even if I hate what you’ve done.” My words still sounded lame, but the truth so often does limp off the tongue in times of crisis. Just when we most need to speak with the tongues of angels, we stumble with uncertain words.

  “I’m sailing southward now,” I told Nicole, “and I’ll clear the cape in six or seven days. If you meet me, I’ll escort you to wherever you want to go and I’ll do my best to find you an honest and good lawyer”—I paused—”and I love you, Nicole.”

  I waited, but there was no reply. “Nicole?” I begged the sky, but still no word came back. I left the radio switched on and its speaker turned full up as I went back to the cockpit, but no voice broke the hissing silence. If Nicole was going to accept my offer, then she was accepting it in silence.

  “She said nothing?” Jackie asked.

  “Only that she could hear me.”

  Jackie bit her lip, then gave me a decisive look. “I’ve been thinking about it, Tim, and I know it’s going to be all right. Nicole must know she’s got nothing to gain by hurting you? She knows it’s over, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s not a fool, Tim!” Jackie said passionately. “She probably won’t even look for us. I mean, the only choice you’ve offered her is between a British and a Chilean jail, so she’s much more likely to sail west, isn’t she? To try and lose herself in the Pacific?”

  “She might,” I admitted, “she very well might,” but somehow I did not think that Nicole would resist this final confrontation, and I suddenly wished I had not let Jackie share it with me. I wished I was not driven to the confrontation myself, for, by facing my daughter, I risked my new happiness in exchange for an old relationship that could never be restored.

  In the early hours of darkness the wind backed into the east, a sure sign that it would freshen. Jackie and I took in two reefs, and I was glad we did, for within the hour the wind was shrieking in the rigging as we slogged southward on a long port tack. Every slam of the bows reverberated through the steel hull and rattled the crockery in the galley and shivered the floating compass card in the cockpit’s binnacle. White spray slashed back to spatter on the spray hood.

  I sent Jackie below to rest and noted that, instead of finding a snug refuge in the forward cabin, she took her bag into the aftercabin where my own things were stored. Yet she must have found it hard to sleep, for, shortly after midnight, she came back on deck. The ship was dark as sin for I was sailing without any navigation lights and the stars were cloud-shrouded, so that the only illumination in our whole world was the tiny unobtrusive red glow of the instrument lights.

  Jackie groped her way to my side, then snapped her lifeline to the D-ring at the base of the wheel’s pedestal. As her night vision came she saw the sliding avalanches of white water that rushed beside our gunwales and the sight made her tremble. “Doesn’t it frighten you?” she asked, and I realized that this was her first experience of cold, gale-force sailing.

  I smiled in the darkness. “Oh Lord”—I quoted her the fishermens’ ancient prayer—”my boat is so small and Thy sea is so big. Protect me.”

  “That’s nice,” she said softly.

  “Besides”—I gave the wheel a twitch—”you should be cautiously afraid of the sea. A wise old fisherman once said that a man who isn’t afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, for he’ll go out on a day when he shouldn’t sail, but those of us who are afraid of the sea only get drowned every now and again.”

  She laughed, then was silent for a good long while. Perhaps the mention of drowning had put the thought of Nicole into Jackie’s mind, for she suddenly asked just where I thought we would meet Nicole, if we met her at all.

  “I know just where she’ll met us,” I said, because I had thought this whole rendezvous through, and I knew the exact place to which Nicole was even now racing in her fast catamaran. “She’ll be waiting at the Horn.”

  “The Horn!” Jackie echoed the two words, and I heard the wonder in her voice as though she could not truly believe that we were really going to that hell of a seaway where the big ships died and where the ghosts of sailormen never rested.

  We were sailing to Cape Horn.

  There are plenty of terrible seas on earth. I would not lightly sail the Agulhas Current off the African coast again, for there the sea shudders in a perpetual rage and its sudden watery chasms can break the steel spines of the hugest vessels. I would not willingly sail the North Cape again, for there the ice storms howl out of a white desert and the rigging freezes and even boats seem to get tired of fighting the savagery of that weather. Yet neither of those places, nor even the storms of the Tasman or the shallow hell of a North Sea winter storm can rival the bitter fame of Cape Horn.

  Now, racing southward with two reefs tied in our mainsail, Jackie and I were already in the cape’s feed-chute. Far beyond our eastern horizon the tip of South America bent ever more sharply toward the Atlantic, thus forming the northern lip of a funnel that compressed and savaged the great Pacific waves that had been fetched across fifteen thousand miles of roaring ocean, and which were there forced to squeeze themselves into the shallow gap between Cape Horn and Antarctica. That gap was the Drake Passage, the coldest, roughest and most savage waterway on earth. A sober man, a prudent man, would have taken the Straits of Magellan, but I would round the Horn, as I had first rounded it eighteen years before.

  Back then, fighting for a record, I had creamed past the Horn, running west to east, and cutting the corner close enough to see the flag flying at the small naval post that the Chileans maintained on the Isla de Hornos. My boat had flogged through wind-lashed spray, plunged through the Horn’s steep seas, then disappeared northward toward Plymouth, home and the ephemeral glories of a world record.

  Now, with Jackie, I would visit the Cape again, but this time to save a soul. Each cold morning I searched the sea for a sign of a strange sail that waited to intercept us, but all that week, as Stormchild neared the Horn, we sailed alone. The wind was cold and unrelenting, the seas gargantuan and dark, and the horizon empty.

  Then, at dawn on the seventh day, just as I was beginning to believe that Nicole had spurned my offer of help, I saw, off to our south, a scrap of something pale against the dark water and hideous black clouds. I seized the binoculars and trained them forward, but could make out no details of the far off boat, yet I knew I had seen a sail which waited to meet us at the very place where Stormchild must turn eastward to run the treacherous waters of the Drake Passage. I could not be certain yet, but a pursuit that had begun with a photograph in an English Sunday newspaper seemed about to end in the biggest seas God makes.


  Jackie, who had the eyesight of a starving hawk, came up from the galley and took the binoculars from me. “It’s a catamaran!” she said after a while, then she clung desperately to a stay as a huge sea thundered and foamed under Stormchild’s counter.

  The seas here were vast, carrying an ocean’s pent up violence into battle against two continents.

  Genesis Four, if the strange catamaran was indeed Genesis Four, sailed northwest to meet us and, a half hour after I had first spotted the strange sail, I could make out the twin hulls flying across the crests of the waves to spew a double cock’s comb of high white spray in her wake. The far boat was quick as lightning.

  And as mute as the grave. I attempted to talk to the catamaran on the VHF, but there was no reply. I went back topside and tried to calm the idiot excitement that was fusing my emotions. I did not know if I was glad or miserable, only that my daughter was close, and I felt full of love and forgiveness. I wanted to cry, but instead I hunched down from the freezing wind and felt Stormchild’s steel hull tremble nervously in the pounding seas.

  Those seas were building as they came to their battlefield. The wind was also veering to the west, piling up the seas higher and bringing wicked squalls of black rain which, when they struck, blotted the distant catamaran from our view. The wind, as well as veering, was rising, and the glass was falling, which meant the weather would probably turn even nastier. “Another reef?” Jackie shouted at me.

  “I’ll drop the main altogether!” I shouted back.

  For the last few minutes Stormchild had been heeling so far over that her port gunwale had been permanently streaming with green water and her boom, despite being close hauled, had sometimes drawn a gash of white foam in the flanks of leeward waves. I should have reefed a half hour before, but now I would lose the main entirely and depend on our number three jib to pull us through the Drake Passage. Jackie took the wheel while I, wearing twin lifelines, struggled to kill the big mainsail.