Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  And it was a struggle, for we were suddenly in a place of shortening and steepening seas that made Stormchild’s motion violently unpredictable. I staggered about the deck to gather in the billowing wet canvas. Spray was being sliced and shredded from the wavetops to mingle with the cold, sleety rain that whipped eastward in the rising wind. I tamed the cold sail, tied it down, then, fearing the rising malevolence of the seas, I bolted the storm-plates over the coach roof windows.

  “I haven’t seen the catamaran for twenty minutes!” Jackie shouted when I returned to the cockpit and the strange boat had vanished somewhere in the welter of spray and rain.

  “Go to 150!” I shouted to her. I was turning Stormchild back to the southeast, to the course we had been running when the catamaran first saw us. For a second I was tempted to try Stormchild’s radar, but I knew the storm-lashed seas would clutter the screen and hide the catamaran among a chaos of confused echoes bounced back from the sharp wavepeaks. Instead I stared south, wondering whether, after all, Nicole and I would now miss each other because of this rising gale that screamed across the sea to make the windward slopes of the waves into maelstroms of foam and broken white water.

  Those waves, monstrous after their fifteen-thousand-mile journey, were crashing in from our starboard side to give us a roller coaster ride. When we were on the wave crests it seemed as though we were surrounded by stinging whips of foam that streamed past our bows and smashed home on our starboard flank and filled the sky with white droplets thick as fog. Beneath us the troughs sometimes looked like sudden holes in the ocean with streaked, glossy sides of darkest green, and it seemed inevitable that we would soon topple sideways into one of those great water caverns, and there be buried by a collapsing wave, but Stormchild always slid past them to plunge down the next wave’s slope. She left a quick white wake that broke into creamy bubbles before it was overwhelmed by the gray spill of broken foam from the wave crests. In the troughs the wind’s noise would be noticeably muted, but then we would see the next crinkling, heaving, swelling, and overpowering wave coming to assail our starboard flank, and it seemed impossible that the tons of water would not break to smash down on our mast and sail and deck, but instead we would heave up to the windblown summit from where I would stare anxiously ahead for a glimpse of my daughter’s boat.

  If indeed it was Nicole we had seen and not some other catamaran thrashing up this lonely coast. After an hour, in which no other sail appeared, I decided that the strange sail had indeed been some other ocean voyager and not Nicole at all.

  I took the wheel from Jackie, who, eschewing a chance to shelter from the wind’s cold blast by going below, stayed with me in the cockpit. I had collapsed the spray hood to save it from being destroyed by the wind’s fury so that the two of us stared with salt-stung eyes into the blinding spray as we searched the mad chaos of wave tops for another sight of the catamaran.

  It seemed to have got much colder, and, despite the season, freezing rain was now mixing with the spindrift. I had a towel scarf tight round my neck, my oilskin hood was raised and its drawstrings tied, but even so trickles of near freezing water were finding their way through the defenses to run chill down my chest. Jackie must have been similarly afflicted, but she made no complaint; neither of us spoke, and I think we were both so frozen and so tired that we were beginning not to care about the missing boat. I even wondered if the strange sail had been an hallucination brought on by the strain of endlessly fighting the cold. My muscles were cramped and stiff, my thought processes glazed, and my corrections to Stormchild’s helm were sluggish and clumsy.

  Jackie shouted something. The wind snatched her words away and it took me an immense effort of will to turn my head, thus dislodging the temporarily satisfactory arrangement of towel, sweaters, and oilskins, just to stare blankly at her.

  She was gazing forward, her mouth open, her eyes huge.

  I turned to follow her gaze. Then swore. Because, like a shark slicing in to attack, or like a weapon aimed at our heart, the strange catamaran was riding up the southern flank of the wave on which Stormchild was poised. The catamaran was sailing under a scrap of storm jib and a close-reefed main, but was still traveling at racing speed. She was so close that I could see the pattern of her blue and yellow curtains through her small cabin windows. I could even read the name Naiad that had been painted over, but which still showed as ghost lettering under the hull’s pale green paint. I gaped at the boat, aware of my racing heart, then suddenly the catamaran turned north to run past our flank, and I saw four figures in her cockpit and I knew that one was my long-lost child.

  “Nicole!” I waved like a mad thing. “Nicole!” I shouted, and my voice was lost in the appalling sound of wind and sea and rain and flogging sailcloth.

  “My God!” Jackie screamed, and I suddenly realized that the flogging sound was not sailcloth, but bullets that were smacking across our jib.

  I did not move. I was staring at the figure who stood at the catamaran’s wheel, and who suddenly pushed back her oilskin’s hood to reveal her bright corn-gold hair and blue eyes. “Nicole!” I shouted as the catamaran, its twin wakes spewing quick foam, slashed up the waveslope we had just sailed down. The wheel spun neglected in my hands so that Stormchild bridled, jarred sickeningly, then fell off the wind as the catamaran finally vanished across the crest behind us. My last glimpse was of Nicole’s figure, tall and straight, and the name Genesis Four painted in crude black letters on the catamaran’s starboard transom.

  Jackie pummeled my arm. “There were two of them firing at us! Two of them!”

  I had not noticed the gunmen, only Nicole. Why shoot at us, I wondered, why? I was their best hope in a world that would hate them. I was their last chance of love, and they wanted to kill me?

  “Tim!” Jackie shouted at me, trying to snap me out of my reverie.

  “Go below,” I told her. “Get on the VHF. Channel 37. Tell her we’ve come to help her! Tell her I love her!”

  I did love her, too, and suddenly my memory registered that Nicole had not just looked at me as her catamaran sliced past Stormchild, but that she had smiled at me. “Oh, God.” I said the prayer aloud, but could not finish it. I was shaking. I was thinking of Nicole’s smile. It had been one of recognition, almost pleasure. Sweet Jesus, but what evil was in us? I had thought to meet her, and to sail with her to where we could talk, but my child had no time for remorse or reunion. She wanted me dead and I did not know why. Was it because I had destroyed Genesis? Or was she so steeped in blood that my death meant nothing more to her? I did not know, I only knew that I was in the worst sea on earth, and pursued by madness.

  Stormchild was lying on her side, shaking and pounding in the seas. Her head had fallen off the wind and her one sail was dragging her further round, so I snatched the wheel back and hardened her up into the wind and sea. We were in the foam-ribbed trough of a wave, then, as the hull began to move again, we labored slowly up the next vast slope and I glanced behind just in time to see the vengeful menace of Genesis Four’s twin prows, sharp as lances, spear up over the crest behind, then drop to slide down the wave in Stormchild’s wake. I heard a popping noise and looked up to see another line of ragged holes rip and tear across Stormchild’s jib. Why? I wondered, then I thought to hell with the why, Jackie and I would be dead within minutes if I did not do something. The catamaran was twice as fast as Stormchild, and carried twice as many guns. It was no good leaning on sentiment now, I had to fight back, and so I whipped a lashing onto the wheel, slithered across the cockpit, then yanked up the locker lid to find the gun. A bullet clanged off our gunwale and whined up to the clouds. I turned, worked the rifle’s bolt, aimed at the catamaran’s closest hull, and fired.

  Nicole had been overtaking Stormchild’s starboard flank. Her boat’s superior speed gave her the weather gauge, and she could choose her angle and come as close as she liked, yet suddenly, as I returned the fire and worked the rifle’s bolt to fire again, my daughter showed a scrap of good sense
and veered her course sharply away from Stormchild and my rifle.

  “They’re not answering the radio!” Jackie shouted, then gave an involuntary scream as a bullet ripped through the coach roof. There were two gunmen in the Genesis Four’s cockpit. I recognized one of them as Dominic, Nicole’s blond lover, and he seemed to smile as he opened fire again. I heard the sharp crack as his bullets struck our steel hull, then I saw a jagged rent splay open in the metal boom above my head. Another strike of bullets whipped foam from the dark heart of the wave beyond the cockpit. I fired back, but the Lee-Enfield was a slow, clumsy weapon compared with the assault rifles in Nicole’s boat.

  Stormchild, her wheel lashed now, slashed through the broken crest of another wave. The Genesis Four had gone past us and was now racing far ahead of our slower hull. Her two gunmen ceased fire and I knew we would have a few moments peace because Nicole, sailing ahead of us into the shrieking gale, would not dare jibe her boat, but would, instead, have to tack the Genesis Four back into our path. I guessed we would not see her for fifteen minutes.

  I went below. The cabin was unusually dark because of the stormshields on the windows, and in that unnatural gloom I could see three sparks of daylight where bullets had punched through the hull. I had a sudden terror that Jackie had been hit, and whirled round to see her hunched over the radio consoles. I shouted her name, she did not move, then I saw she was wearing earphones so as to hear better through the gale’s turmoil. “They won’t answer.” She at last saw me and took off the earphones.

  “Are you OK?”

  She nodded. “I’m OK.”

  “We won’t see them for at least ten minutes,” I promised Jackie, “because even Nicole isn’t crazy enough to jibe a boat in this bitch of a wind.” I took the microphone and pressed its transmission button. “Nicole! Nicole!”

  There was silence, except for the sea’s maniacal fury thundering beyond our steel hull. Stormchild shuddered in a wave, slid through a screaming horror of foam, then jarred sickeningly into a trough.

  “Nicole!” I called. “Nicole! For God’s sake, this is your father! I’m trying to help you!”

  Nothing. Emptiness. Silence. I glanced back up the companionway, to where the rain slanted down out of a gray-black sky. At times, as Stormchild rolled off a wave, I would see a vast cold sea toppling behind us, and against it the bomb-riddled ensign would look shatteringly bright.

  “Nicole!” I pleaded into the radio, but she was not listening, or maybe she was listening, but just refusing to talk to me, and I knew I had just ten minutes to touch some old nerve of affection in my daughter, or else she would come back, she would kill us, and then she would sail away to take her chances among the far, anonymous Pacific islands. “Nicole!” I said to her. “I love you, I love you, I love...”

  I stopped because a terrible harsh battle percussion was filling Stormchild and I twisted, aghast, to see more holes being punched in the far side of the saloon and I knew that Nicole had done the unimaginable; she had jibed her boat in this awful gale. She was a better sailor than I, and she had a crack crew, and she had turned her boat in front of this ship-killing wind, and she had done it to prove she was a better sailor than I, and that was why Jackie and I had to die in this awful place. Suddenly it was all so clear; we had to die so that my daughter could prove she was a better sailor than her father.

  A bullet ricocheted into the galley. Another clanged through the stove’s stainless-steel chimney. Water pulsed through the bullet holes as Stormchild dipped to the wind. Jackie screamed.

  I ran topside and clipped on my lifeline. I worked the rifle’s bolt, but the Lee-Enfield was puny against our enemy’s automatic fire, and Stormchild’s slow hull was no match for the speed of my daughter’s twin keels, and my seamanship, God help me, was not a patch on hers. At that moment, as I watched the slicing hulls come straight at us, I knew that Nicole was going to kill us. She would do it to prove she was the better sailor, and so she was, I thought, as I stared at the approaching boat that flicked so lightly through the spume and sea scum. The two gunmen were using the cabin top as a firing step, the third crew member was by the sheet winches, while Nicole, bareheaded and happy, stood tall at the helm beneath the strange sea-green ensign of Genesis. Nicole did indeed look happy. She had taken our measure, and now she would win because she was more daring than her father.

  The Genesis Four was sliding toward us down the face of a wave. Stormchild was on the opposing face. We would meet in the trough. Once again Nicole held the weather advantage, but this time, throwing caution to the wind, she would use it to come so close that her gunmen could not possibly miss. They would pour their fire into Stormchild’s cockpit, riddling it with ricocheting bullets to overwhelm our cockpit drains with blood. Jackie, terrified of the clangor of bullets down below, had come to crouch beside me. She frowned at my gun, perhaps wondering why I did not fire it, but I knew the rifle would not help me now.

  Genesis Four seemed to leap through the water, eager to bring us our death. I laid the gun down in the cockpit and smiled at Jackie. “Hold tight!” I told her, for I had chosen to outdare my daughter.

  I stood up straight, not caring about the gunmens’ bullets, and I stared at my daughter. If I did not beat her now, then Jackie would die, and I would die, and Stormchild would sink to join the legions of Cape Horn’s dead.

  “Hold on!” I shouted to Jackie, and, with fingers numbed by the cold, I unlashed Stormchild’s wheel.

  Christ, but the catamaran was close. Jackie held my arm and I could feel her shaking and shivering. And no wonder, for the catamaran was scarcely forty yards away now. Nicole, braced at its wheel, was aiming to slide her starboard hull just inches from our starboard gunwale, and, at that range, despite the jarring of the sea’s pounding, Genesis’s last gunmen could not miss. Nicole doubtless expected me to turn away and run downwind, and when I did, she would follow. I could see her winch-handler poised to loosen the jib sheets and I knew that the moment I turned to run, the catamaran would pounce on us like a striking snake.

  And then we would die, and Nicole would take her chance for freedom in some far, warm sea.

  But there was another way.

  And I chose it.

  I dropped the wheel’s lashing, and, when Genesis Four was just twenty yards away, I spun the spokes to drive Stormchild’s tons of steel straight at the speeding catamaran.

  I saw Nicole’s eyes widen in alarm. She shouted in anger and snatched at the wheel to turn away, but she was too late. The two gunmen clutched for support at a handrail on the cabin roof and one of their two guns skidded into the scuppers and bounced overboard, then I was shouting at Jackie to hold on for her dear, sweet life.

  Someone screamed. I think it was my daughter, because she knew I had beaten her.

  Stormchild slammed into the turning catamaran. We smashed her starboard hull, breaking it into splinters of fiberglass. A wire stay whipped skyward. The catamaran’s mainsail was suddenly demented, filling a noisy sky with its maniacal thrashing, then, inevitably, the Genesis Four’s mast began to topple. I saw Dominic whirl round, face bloody, as the catamaran’s severed backstay whipped its frayed metal strands across his eyes. The mast was cracking and falling, and still Stormchild was driving into the catamaran’s belly like a great killing axe. I heard the tortured screech of steel on steel as our sharp bows slammed into the main beam that spanned the catamaran’s twin hulls. I staggered with the impact, while Jackie, her fingers hooked like claws, clung to my arm. Stormchild’s forestay snapped, slashing our jib into the ship-killing wind. A sea thundered across our joined decks, sweeping gear off Genesis Four’s scuppers and filling Stormchild’s cockpit with a crashing, icy whirlpool. Our bows churned sickeningly in the wreckage of the catamaran. I was sobbing for my daughter, for what I had done.

  The great sea turned us broadside, thrusting our stern eastward. Our bows were trapped by the catamaran’s broken hulls. I threw off Stormchild’s jib sheet as the two boats screeched on each o
ther, but our boat was afloat and the Genesis Four was breaking apart. Already the catamaran’s cockpit was awash and her starboard hull under water. A blue and yellow curtain floated free of the shattered saloon. Stormchild’s mast was swaying horribly, but her backstays and shrouds were holding it upright and the damage would have to wait.

  “Lifebuoys!” I shouted at Jackie. I could see two yellow-jacketed bodies clinging to the catamaran’s wreckage and I could see a third person in the foam-scummed water beyond. I could not see Nicole. The catamaran’s mast had collapsed to trail the reefed mainsail and a tangle of lines in the foaming sea.

  “Nicole!” I shouted, then hurled a life buoy into the wreckage. I slashed with my knife at the bindings of Stormchild’s life raft, and Jackie helped me push the big canister overboard. Another thunderous sea crashed cold across the two boats and when it had passed I saw that the two men who had been clinging to the wreckage were gone. I pulled the life raft’s lanyard and watched as the bright orange raft began to inflate.

  Another toppling sea hammered like an avalanche at our beam. Stormchild’s tortured bows were still buried in the Genesis Four, but the lurch and twist of the awful sea loosened and prized us free, then the gale snatched at our jib which still writhed at the end of its halyard, and which now turned us fast downwind. I sliced through the line which tethered the life raft to Stormchild, thus leaving the bright orange raft for my daughter. “Engine!” I shouted at Jackie, then I hurled the last buoy overboard and slapped my lifeline onto a jackstay to work my way forward.

  Jackie turned on the ignition and, above the throb of our automatic bilge pumps that were dealing with the water let in by the bullet holes, I heard the harsh banging as the starter motor turned over. A wave broke on our counter, swamping the cockpit and crashing white down the companionway. The engine would not start and the wind and sea were carrying us so fast that already the wreck of the Genesis Four was hidden by a spume-fretted wave crest.