Before Natty could finish these thoughts, the fellow suddenly called her name, then followed it with a barrage of groans and curses. Evidently every practical thing was always done for him in the degeneracy of the camp, and although once a very strong man, he had become almost entirely slack during the passage of the years. Even marching this short distance had puffed him out. “Damn me for a landlubber,” he gasped, between futile hoofs at the ground. “Damn this earth. Give me a good ship and a following wind; I’ll have none of this weight and clay.”
This outburst made Smirke so thoroughly exhausted, Natty thought for a moment she might be able to save herself—by plunging into the bushes and running away. When she felt Stone’s sword in her back, however, and heard the steadiness of his silence, she realized he would easily overtake her, then overpower her, and then in all likelihood deprive her of the very dignity she had just been celebrating to herself. She therefore kept to the path and continued walking, trying to occupy her mind by noticing how suddenly some of the blossoms around her had begun to close, now there was no direct sunlight to encourage them, and how the raindrops that had started to fall made a light tapping sound on the leaves, like fingernails.
After another few minutes of hard climbing, they left the belt of shrubs and came to a little wood of Scots pine. Here they felt the wind blowing more strongly, bending the crowns of the trees so that some of them began to scrape together—except where they seemed to step back aghast, and left a patch of open ground. As soon as Natty saw this, she realized it was Smirke’s destination—the great crack in the earth that ran down from near the summit of Spyglass Hill, the ravine we had found together with Bo’sun Kirkby on our reconnaissance of the stockade. Then we had been near the shore, where the depth of the thing was not more than forty feet, but still terrifying. Here it was more than twice as much.
“Stop here, lad,” said Smirke, pausing for breath between every phrase. “This is as far as we go. And as far as you’ll ever go.”
Natty turned around and saw Smirke crouched with his hands on his knees. Stone, on the contrary, stood cool and upright, swinging his sword like a pendulum; the blade was shiny with raindrops.
“We often bring our friends here,” Stone said, in his thin and piping voice.
Because this sounded reasonable, Natty thought for a moment they must come to see the view behind him, which was indeed beautiful. The stockade was entirely hidden by the bushes they had passed through, and the island seemed a paradise again. A stormy paradise, with loose purple clouds billowing up from the horizon, but gorgeous in the polished green of its vegetation and the prolific scattering of its flowers. If this was to be her final sight of the earth, she could think of nothing to match it.
When he had allowed Natty to gaze for a minute, Stone corrected her. “Behind you,” he said with a snigger. “The view is behind you.”
At this Natty turned—and found herself looking vertiginously into the black wound of the ravine. She lurched backward.
“Not back,” said Smirke, wheezing loudly as he levered himself upright again. “Not back, anymore, my lad—not for you. Only forward and down, forward and down. That’s the direction you’re heading.”
Natty said nothing to this, hoping her silence would be the last answer she had to give. Her legs were trembling so violently, they actually shook the fabric of her trousers.
“But then again,” Smirke continued, “you must be wondering: why here? Well, I’ll tell you why here, my lad, since your brains may not be working as well as normal. We’ve brought you here because we don’t want your friends to find you when they come looking. Always supposing you have any friends, of course.” He exchanged a glance with Stone, and a smile of congratulation, then went on with a quite unnecessary laboring of detail. “If we kept you behind with the rest of the swabs, and dealt with you there, we’d look … responsible for you. I mean, your friends would know we’d chopped off your head, wouldn’t they? They’d dig you up and take a look. If they exist, they would. Up here, they’ll never think of looking. And if they do look, they’ll never see. You’ll be too far gone into the earth. Unvisited, you know. That’s what you’ll be. Unvisited.”
The wind was now strong enough for Smirke to raise his voice as he unburdened himself of all this, which Natty knew must be his definitive attempt to frighten her. But the shouting did nothing to dry the strange wetness in his voice. Quick dabs of spittle, warmer than the rain, dropped into the tufts of his beard or flew directly into her face.
It seems extraordinary, when Natty had already suffered so much that was insulting and terrifying, but this small annoyance ended her patience with him, and so in a sense with life itself. Quite suddenly, she could not endure Smirke’s disgustingness any longer. Two steps were all it took to prove as much—two steps that brought her to the edge of the ravine, where a steady draft of cold air suddenly blew upward from its depths and fluttered against her face. She glanced across, wondering whether she might be able to jump and escape that way. But no, it was too wide, and the far side was too thickly forested with pines, all swaying in the wind, and shaking their hair like mourners.
She looked down. Twenty fathoms down and shockingly far, to where the pale green slimy walls, and the dribbles of white and gray left by roosting birds, ended in heaps of bone. Some of these had rags of clothing among them. They made Natty think: the world itself has died here. It is the end of everything. I know now how my own body will appear, when others come to look for me. Meaningless and forgotten.
“Damn you all,” she said, without so much as a glance backward at Smirke and Stone. “You will never hurt me.” Then she stepped into the empty air.
23
Walking on Water
WHEN NATTY WAS a child comforting her father, she sometimes dreamed of launching from his crow’s nest overlooking the city of London, and letting the wind sweep her along its currents. This fantasy came back to her in the first seconds of her fall into the ravine—the glide, the hush, the cushion of air against her breast. It gave her the leisure to inspect everything that passed before her eyes, with as much attention as if she were looking through a microscope. The green weed covering the rock face, which had been carved by trickles of moisture. Ledges on which a skin of earth had formed, and dwarfish shrubs taken hold. The grubby tail feather of a pigeon, snagged on a twig.
Then the silence ended, and the light dimmed, and her plunge was no longer a glide but a cacophony, and a tightening, as if her body had been ordered to squeeze through a crack in the air but would not fit, and finally lost all sense of itself in a sudden and stinging halt.
I am describing this as Natty told it to me, but I am withholding something, a thing she herself had hidden from Smirke. While he was jeering behind her back, and Stone was poking with his sword, she had looked into the ravine—hoping to give an impression of preparing to meet her Maker, while in fact devising her salvation. Although the drop to the bottom would certainly have killed her, she saw that several pine trees, which storms had uprooted and tossed into the narrow opening, were wedged in it crossways. These made a very rough sort of ladder, on which a person might climb toward the distant floor, if only they could reach the first rung and so begin their descent.
Natty’s intention, when she stepped into thin air, was to fling herself onto the first rung of this ladder, which was a tree she reckoned must have been felled by the recent strong winds, since the snapped wood around its base was still very white and clean; it lay some twenty feet below her. And this is what she managed to do. The fall I have just described, which seemed to last for a whole minute but in reality filled no more than an instant, ended not in the blackness of oblivion, but in the much more forgiving dark of pine branches. Their bark was the sudden halt she felt, and their needles the sting.
This might have been her salvation, but it knocked the wind from her lungs and the wits from her head. All the wits, at any rate, apart from those that told her to rouse herself as soon as possible, since
Smirke and Stone were likely to peer downward for evidence of her death. This made her wriggle through the branches until she had buried herself from view; when this was done, she waited quietly until her executioners lost interest.
When she was certain they must have returned to the stockade, she waited for the same period again, to make doubly sure, clinging to the branches like a squirrel. Her fear now was: the pine tree might be insecurely wedged between the two sides of the crevice, and tip her into the abyss—but its own weight had apparently been enough to guarantee it stuck fast. Her comfort lay in knowing the world above was growing darker and more heavily rained upon with every passing second, and so less hospitable to prying eyes. Crashes of thunder were now clearly audible, along with the hissing of other trees that remained on the edges of the ravine.
Natty was inclined to remain hidden until dawn, but she expected Smirke might suddenly return to enjoy the scene of her disappearance, or more likely Stone. This meant she must escape their reach more definitely—and therefore, after yet another cautious delay, she nerved herself to crawl onto the bare trunk of her perch; from here she could dimly see other trees arranged like lower rungs in the half-light beneath her.
Sliding herself over the side of the trunk she dropped through space a second time, only to knock the breath from her lungs a second time. As she recovered, with her head spinning and her face pricked and scratched by needles, the idea of a third fall and then a fourth became intolerable. There must, she thought, be an easier way to proceed—and set about finding toeholds in the wall beside her, and fingerholds, and assorted small ledges and shelves and platforms and outcrops. With their help, and all the agility she could muster, she made her way downward into the colder and darker air. When her feet eventually touched solid ground, she stood foursquare for a moment, allowing her eyes to become familiar with the gloom. As the outlines of boulders and smaller rocks grew more definite, and their various shades of gray or black became separate from one another, she felt the gratitude of a traveler who has met Death on the road but brushed him aside.
This was an especially strange sensation, because Death in fact now appeared all around her, represented by the bones and skulls of prisoners who had been forced to share her fate without having her fortune. In her nervous gaze they appeared to glow in the twilight, as if they possessed an unearthly interior power. Several had lain among the rocks so long, they had been picked clean by birds—and also, she thought, washed by stream water running over them, since they had been disarranged, and were now pointing in all directions. One or two, however, including one that must have been the body of a child—it was so small—were not yet disturbed.
Natty did not tell me this detail to prove her lack of sympathy, but to show how the mind, when it is shocked, retreats into a way of noticing that appears cold-hearted but is in fact the opposite. It places a value on everything, by paying attention to everything. This is a subject I might elaborate, since it interests me greatly—but I will resist the temptation, and mention instead that while Natty did not weep for the wretches around her, she saw enough of what they had endured to feel certain she would never forget them, and then turned away.
As the ravine jinked downhill, and the last flush of day faded from the narrow strip of sky overhead, and the walls gave back the reassuring sound of her own breath, Natty’s fear of discovery and recapture began to disappear. It was replaced by something akin to dreaming. She no longer heard the thunder above her. The rain only reached her in flicks and dashes. Sometimes, because the darkness around her was thickening steadily, she thought she must have become a kind of sleepwalker, whose way ahead had already been cleared for her. Sometimes she seemed entirely outside the familiar boundaries of the world. All she knew for certain was that her walk did not resemble any she had taken before. The earth—which a short while before had seemed indifferent—was now defending her.
When Natty first told me this, I thought the effect of her imprisonment and hunger, and the marvelous shock of her escape, must have combined to produce a hallucination of mercy. But what if it did? For as long as she stayed in that secret cleft, with the spirits of dead prisoners padding over the rocks behind her, she considered herself safe. And when a large white owl appeared out of nowhere, and floated before her for several paces, she imagined she had seen her own soul set free from her body, so that it could act as a guide, and felt nothing else would ever frighten her.
It was for this sort of reason, if reason is quite the word, that Natty decided she would not immediately return to the Nightingale and her friends. On the contrary. As her walk continued east, parallel to the stockade, she made a second judgment I have always found very surprising, but realize she believed must have been for the best. She persuaded herself that if she turned toward the pine woods when she came above ground again, and set off toward our ship, she would probably meet Stone, who would kill her as soon as he had convinced himself she was not a ghost. Either that, or she would lose her way in the storm. Or else she would encounter some other danger—such as a pit of the kind that had trapped Scotland, or a ferocious animal. In any event, and guided by her unhappiness, she decided she must delay her journey back to us until sleep and sunlight had made the world familiar again.
So it was, when the walls of the ravine eventually shrank to nothing, and the chill air began to grow warmer, and echoes that had been her companions gave way to bullying gusts of rain and wind, she did not come in my direction, but kept on toward the coast. I would later suggest she might have been led by the spirit of her father, for reasons that will soon become apparent. She has never told me I might be wrong.
Natty had emerged on the northern shore of Captain Kidd’s Anchorage, which she knew by seeing the curve of the bay to her right and—opposite the bulk of Skeleton Island—the walls of the stockade, and the roofs of the log houses, all reddened by the fire that Smirke had ordered to be built before he led her away. The poisonous glow of its flames, and the leaping shadows they cast, were enough to convince her that if she had been able to put a telescope to her eye, she would have found the same scenes of barbarity that the captain and I had previously seen together, no doubt with a few guards set here and there as a defense against “new arrivals” on the island.
This made her crouch down, in order to avoid being made visible by any moonbeams that might burst between the clouds, and then creep further around the bay. Only when she reached the next patch of cover did she dare stand upright again, and pay proper attention to where she was, rather than always staring at where she feared to be. The trees here were live oaks, all blown by the sea wind into contorted attitudes; their leaves felt hard in the darkness, and shone in the rain like fragments of jade.
At this safe distance from the camp, Natty was again tempted to lie low and rest, knowing she would have fair warning of any approach. But as before, her instincts prompted her onward, until she was through the trees and walking on softer ground. She had reached the rice fields, which she saw had been made very neatly, and were fed by streams running off Spyglass Hill.
Natty understood Scotland and the rest must have been brought here that same morning, when she had seen them marched from the camp. Each trim plot was their devising and their work. The thought of so much care, given under the threat of so much cruelty, made her stop and cover her face with her hands—until she realized her silhouette must be visible against the open sea, and she had better cower down again.
The sound that now filled her head was no longer only wind and rain, but the surf as it folded in long rollers along the crescent of the bay. As she paused to listen, Natty found she was filled with a kind of reverence. The density of noise, and the strange inward luminosity of the waves, and the repetition of their self-gathering, provoked her into feeling she must drop onto her knees and give thanks to her Creator. Thanks for her escape from Death, and for the world He allowed her to enjoy. But even as this feeling dawned in her, she knew it was not the moment for any such reflection, and hu
rried onward.
A hundred more paces and she came to another standstill—sensing immediately that she had found what she wanted, without having previously guessed what that might be. It was the beginnings of a sandbar, running out through the shallows toward the open sea. For the most part it was covered by the tide—but at the edge of vision, where she expected to see nothing but waves churning in the darkness, lay a sudden dark bump of land, obscurely crowned with ferns. It was the White Rock—the same that I had first seen myself from the deck of the Nightingale.
She stepped into the sea, where she thought the sandbar must be submerged, and felt it hard and ridged beneath her feet. This made her remember Moses walking through the waters of the Red Sea, and Christ himself gliding across the Sea of Galilee—but such ideas were soon washed away. Within a minute she was gripping long fronds of bracken that flopped over the edge of the Rock. Then she was hauling herself up the sheer sides and balancing on the rim, with the ferns and other plants swaying around her.
So far as she could tell, the little island was no more than half a dozen yards wide in every direction, and hollow like the mouth of a miniature volcano. But whereas a true volcano would have a crater as bare as the ravine she had just left, the declivity here was very spongy, because it was covered with the dead leaves of plants that grew above it.
When Natty stepped among these plants they seemed to embrace her eagerly, caressing her face with their long fingers, which had a delicious scent of rotten wood, and leading her down and inward toward the center of the nest. Here the noise of the storm was miraculously stilled, and the rain became a slowly falling dew. It was impossible for Natty to resist her weariness any longer; impossible not to stretch out and sleep. As she did so the latticework of leaves closed above her head, obliterating the storm entirely.
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