Storm Watch - A Tale of the Sea

by LM Cooke

  There was no time to throw him another rope. It took all the remaining four men had merely to keep the smack upright in the water as the cruel waters tossed it from side to side like a piece of driftwood. In seconds the spot where he had been lost was far behind.

  The cabin was filling, now ankle deep in freezing brine. If it was not bailed, the boat would sink without hesitation, so three of them worked frenziedly at that duty. Mr Fairweather, Master of his vessel, manned the tiller. It was lashed against the storm winds, but the weather was proving too much for the tether alone, and now he fought to keep the boat on some semblance of a course.

  The ship died quickly. The unrelenting waters upset the bulkheads and broke the ballast hold. With a noise like a charging bull, the hold splintered, and sixty tons of shingle ballast poured into the cabin with inexorable speed. From his vantage Mr Fairweather could not see, but he heard the noise and he knew that those within the cabin would have been smothered instantly beneath the shingle. The boat listed dangerously to port, slipping quickly now beneath the waters. Fairweather could have cut the rope that lashed him to the deck if he chose, but the rising waters would have soon finished him, and he chose to remain where he was, with the familiar deck of the Ambrosia under his feet. He held his post, held the tiller as steady as he could as the boat upended, his fingers white, his face whiter still. In seconds the boat was gone, lost with all hands. The storm died and the waters levelled. A weak yellow sun warmed the blue winter sky. All was calm once more.

  *

  That winter was a bad one for the village. The single boaters struggled against the weather, returning with empty nets for their pains. Often they limped back into harbour with masts broken and splintered, bulwarks gone. It was only the endurance and stamina of the little vessels that enabled them to return home at all.

  Mrs Fairweather waited in vain for news of her husband and son as winter continued to howl and growl. She developed a ritual of walking down to the rocks each morning, and peering out round the headland as far as she could, seeking a first glimpse of a returning mast. The rocks, though, were even more slippery and treacherous at this time of year, and the icy water numbed her feet. The wind whipped at her shawl, teasing frigid fingers into her hair, lashing her with salt spray, forcing the salty brine into her lips until her mouth was full of the taste of it, like blood on her tongue.

  One day, indistinguishable from the previous in so many ways, she glimpsed something white, moving, over in the rocks. She turned to look, hardly daring to imagine what it might be. Her eyes were more faded these days, and the wind filled them with tears so that all she could see was a blur. The rocks between her and her sighting looked savage, angular and dripping with freezing brine. She tucked her shawl about her, and clambered towards the object she had seen.

  Twice she caught herself before she slipped. Then her foot caught in a crevice and her ankle turned, and she knew she could clamber no further. Ahead the white thing moved again, much closer now; and she squinted to bring it into focus. It looked like a limb.

  Specifically a leg, white flesh, hung with a set of dripping, tattered breeches that fluttered in the stiff breeze, the movement that had first caught her eye. The limb itself did not move. But she knew, as she gasped at it, that it was the same limb she had first seen here twenty years ago, the limb of the foundling baby boy, now grown into her James. She called to him, clinging to her rocky perch, but he made no answer. She tried to go to him, but her turned ankle would carry her no further over the slippery rocks. Gasping for breath and heart in her mouth she clawed her way back to the village to seek help. Soon men were picking their way delicately over the savage rocks; soon there were urgent shouts for blankets and hot rum, and for Eliza Fairweather, James’s wife, to come from Mr Netherbridge’s house where she had been visiting. Mrs Fairweather had her second miracle; it was James all right. Even more miraculously he was still alive.

  He was freezing cold. Always his chest had been weak; now his breath came in great, hoarse gasps as if the sea-water had ruined his lungs for ever this time. He was as pallid as he ever had been, and his eyes, green as the sea, seemed to swim in his head. That salt smell hung strong about him, permeating his clothes. But otherwise, he was well. The water had not marked his flesh at all, despite his long immersion, despite the vicious sharks and other sea-creatures that often feasted on those washed overboard; despite the fact that the Ambrosia had been lost around him.

  It may have been a miracle. But it made the other men very nervous.

  Not so long ago, the sea had smiled on everything James did. Now, they whispered, she was singling him out. She had destroyed his father, taken his boat. And besides, who was James? He was not from the village, after all. The villagers began to look askance at him as he passed them in the narrow streets. Tight-lipped, fishermen regarded him with folded arms. There were vacancies on boats for experienced seamen, but right now, no one felt any urge to ask James Fairweather to fill them.

  James would not speak of what had happened. But neither would he return to the water, even if anyone have given him the chance. His father had been taken from him, along with the boat that was to have been his inheritance. The salt air hurt his lungs, causing him to gasp for breath, and his eyes streamed with water. The ocean had let him live; but these days he flinched a little when sea-spray touched him; and he stopped taking salt in his food. He stayed in his tiny house, allowed his pretty wife to provide for him with what work she could, and rarely ventured out.

  *

  Time passed. In the Fairweather household it became apparent that James did not quite neglect all of his husbandly duties, in that Eliza was delivered of a baby, a beautiful, golden-haired, blue-eyed daughter, named Emily, after Eliza’s mother. Emily was a fat, contented child. There was nothing evident of her father in her.

  The sea continued to rage at the village. But it seemed that the boats were not enduring the range of troubles they had when James sailed alongside them. Some muttered about his lack of employment (Mr Netherbridge was frequently heard to pity James’s poor, pretty wife for having such an indolent husband), but no one wanted to chance having him on board their boat. He was a Jonah, bad luck, they whispered. The sea had withdrawn her favour from him. Let him stay in the village with the women, where the wrath of the ocean would not reach.

  Occasionally, Eliza and baby Emily accompanied Mrs Fairweather on her morning walk. James had noticed that relations between the two women were strained, even more so since the arrival of baby Emily, although he did not know why. Mrs Fairweather found it difficult to take to pretty, strong-willed Eliza, who seemed to spend far more time at the Netherbridge household than she did her own. Why, baby Emily was more likely to coo at Mr Netherbridge than at her own father! Eliza sometimes invited herself along on the morning walks to placate both James and his mother, and prevent her own comings and goings from being curtailed.

  The winter had long passed; spring and summer too, in quick succession. Today was a clear day, a cool breeze heralding the onset of autumn. The sea was calm and green-blue, almost the exact shade of James’s eyes. Emily had her mother’s eyes – her father’s dark hair and his pale colouring had not taken upon her at all. No one was sure exactly where her blonde hair had come from, but with that and with her warm, honeyed skin, she would grow up to be a great beauty. When she giggled at her mother, Eliza giggled delightedly back at her. Even Mrs Fairweather was able to muster a smile at the beautiful little girl.

  From nowhere, the sea rose in a gigantic wave that swept over all three women, snatching their feet from under them and whisking them from the rocks. When the wave receded, they were gone.

  Those watching from the harbour simply saw them vanish. Small boats were swiftly launched onto the calm-again water; people ran to the rocks, calling. Despite his horror of the water James threw himself into the ocean time and time again to look for them, only to be repelled; swelling w
aves deposited him back onto the rocks that passed for a beach, over and over.

  None of the searching or calling made any difference. No sign of Emily, Eliza or Mrs Fairweather could be found.

  *

  Where before there had been whispering, there was now outright accusation. The villagers stopped what they were doing when James walked into a room. Men that he had grown up with openly turned their backs. At the memorial service for his family, the entire village turned out to pay their respects, but none stayed to shake his hand after, nor to attend the wake. James drowned his sorrows alone that night, and alone he stayed thereafter, in the home once filled by his family. He did not venture out to the harbour at all. Occasionally, by night, he left the tiny cottage, and picked his way up the treacherous cliff paths over the hills. The villagers presumed he found food there, set traps or picked berries, for he certainly earned no coin to buy any.

  He had clearly brought it upon himself, and on all of them as well. The sea detested him. He was a curse on the village.

  Without his presence to temper the gossip, speculation grew rife. The smallest incident was laid at his door; never mind that the sea had always been capricious and wayward. When a boy’s lobster pots were washed away, it was James’s fault (even though the boy had not been paying attention when he secured them). When the decking at the far end of the harbour splintered through, James had brought it on (even though the deck boards had been old and rotting for some time). The size of the catch, the colour of the sky, the slip of a knife when gutting a fish that severed the tendons in a woman’s hand, all of it was down to James.

  It was unfair of them. But they were tired and frustrated, and they had no outlet for their mood. Of course, neither had James, who had lost more than any of them; but that was immaterial. Things had been so much easier, they reasoned, before he had arrived (having conveniently forgotten those wonderful, bounteous years they had experienced for the greatest part of James’s life). He was not one of them, and he was no longer welcome amongst them.

  James, bereft of family and friends and livelihood, had no intention of leaving the village. All that he had left in the world was the home of his family, the home that contained all of their memories. So where else, after all, was he to go?

  The pitiless villagers, concerned for their own safety, took measures. First, they drove him from his house. Then, when he still could not muster the good grace to leave, when he raged in the streets, beating at doors with his fists and shrieking with incoherent rage and loss, they took him away and locked him up inside the village hall. It kept him quiet while they decided how they could make him leave.

  No one consulted the ocean. So she decided that she would have a say anyway. While the villagers within the local hostelry pondered hard into their ale, the sky turned from blue to grey to black, and a fierce wind drove the waters inwards towards the harbour. Violent waves crashed over the seafront. The boats in the harbour, unprepared for such an onslaught – the tempest had blown up out of nowhere! – were rendered into matchwood, such was the violence of the storm. When, only minutes later the villagers stumbled out of the hostel and into the streets, the storm was all but spent. The harbour – boats, stores, icehouse and all – lay in ruins.

  Silence fell over the village.

  Men staggered to the harbour, touching with trembling, unbelieving fingers the devastation that had been wrought in only a few short heartbeats. This was their livelihood. This entire village was built on the traditions and the needs of the small fishing smacks, the very smacks that now lay splintered in ruins before them. The harbour, too, was splintered, deck boards wrenched and tossed asunder, buildings ruined.

  One voice, uttering one word, broke the silence.

  Others heard it, and repeated. The word became like a chant, violent and angry. Fairweather. The curse on the village. Beyond them, beyond the harbour, the green water throbbed like a pulse, the scent and the taste of the salt in the air like the taste of blood in the mouth. The air felt low and thick as the tension spread and grew between them, desperate for some form of release.

  Eyes turned to the village hall. James Fairweather was in there. James, so detested by the ocean that she had taken his family; his wife and daughter from him. So detested that even now she wrought havoc on the village in his name. Let the water be appeased, then.

  The mob – for that is what they were now become – descended on the village hall in a bellowing frenzy, like a gigantic, single-minded organism with many arms, legs and voices. James fought them as they came for him, his watery ocean grey eyes wide with terror, his breath strangling in his chest. They dragged him from the hall, immobilised him between them, and hauled him back to the waterfront, in full view of the ocean.

  The broken mast of a trawler lay shattered over the remnants of the old ice-house. It loomed high over the ruined harbour at a dangerous angle. It was there that they looped the rope. They were fishermen; they knew how to tie knots; and the rope was made fast and safe over the broken mas. It would not slip. The other end they fashioned into a noose.

  James kicked, struggled and protested, but it availed him nothing. The will of the villagers was as inexorable as that of the sea, and he could not prevent his hands being tied behind him with more cunning fishing knots, while the noose was slipped over his head and tightened. A few heaves of the rope took up the slack, and he found himself winched up over the ruined harbour, legs kicking as the rope tightened around his windpipe and the breath that he habitually struggled so hard for began to be cut off. The villagers stood back to admire their work. Behind, the ocean had an unhindered view. They hoped she was enjoying it.

  *

  The storm began a long way offshore.

  Some of the boats were already out at sea. The storm of the previous night had not been aimed at them, and they had ridden it out with little difficulty. They had been on the water now for a week or more, and had no inkling of what the village had been suffering. But they had troubles enough of their own. Fishing was not going well. The nets were almost empty, save for a few miserable specimens of fish; and the boats were becalmed on unnaturally still water, stretching away, flat and silver, on all sides. Nothing moved. The only sound was that of the water lapping quietly at the sides of the boats. For all the world, it felt very much like the ocean was holding her breath.

  The stillness ended abruptly. The water around the boats grew choppier, gnashing rather than lapping at the boats. The men cast worried glances at the skies under which they fished, now grown ominously dark and threatening. Thick clouds, strangely, cloyingly scented, gathered out of nothing. They hung, lowering, so as to almost touch the sea itself, shrouding the waters with foggy tendrils. An angry wind whipped up, blowing thicker and thicker cloud across, lashing sea and spray across the boats. The thick taste of salt was like blood in the mouth.

  As one, each boat lurched violently in the grip of the bullying waters. A frozen instant, and then each shook again, more violently still, as the reaching waves rose around them. Decks slewed dangerously underfoot as men fought for their balance. And then, as suddenly as the waters had risen, they receded. The sea was calm about the boats once more.

  The crews resumed their duties with shaking fingers, laughing nervously amongst themselves. Above them, black clouds still gathered in silence. The nervous laughter fell flat, deadened and swallowed by the ominous silence of the sea. All of the men, from the most seasoned Master to the youngest Hand amongst them, were horribly, preternaturally aware that the sea beneath them was now too calm. Too flat. Flatter than was possible, calmer than they had ever seen it before. It was as if the boats sat on the surface of a gigantic, dark mirror. The still, silent water absorbed and reflected the blackness of the ominous clouds overhead, sucking any last vestiges of daylight from the air in its oceanic depths.

  Silence. Stillness. They waited anxiously. But not for long

  The unnat
urally calm sea began to boil around them. The angry wind returned, raging at the rigging, tearing at sails. The ocean quivered like a gargantuan animal, then tensed and flexed and folded herself together, compressing herself into one, singular massive body. Impossibly, that body rose, rose higher, sweeping with it the helpless fishing smacks that dangled, dwarfed in its grip. Hissing and seething, the monstrous wave greedily sucked more of the surrounding ocean towards it, into it, folding it all in to rise higher still.

  For all their frantic sail furling and net gathering, the crews stood no chance. In less than the time it took for a man to draw breath, the boats were balanced precariously on top of the gigantic wave, more than one hundred feet high. For what seemed heartbeats, but was assuredly much shorter, they hung there, high in the air, enclosed by the black clouds that had loomed so close. The strange, cloying scent filled the air; the taste of salt and seaweed together so like the taste of blood. Men screamed instructions at one another, their voices muffled, whipped away by screaming winds. They gathered ropes and lashed down possessions, as if anything they did would make a difference now.

  The gargantuan wave crested, smashing back down into the ocean below. Helpless, the fishing smacks were flung down with it, tossed like paper boats in a river. The cries of the men within were lost under the roar of the water as it plummeted back down, coiling and striking like a sea serpent, impacting with a rush of bubbles and foam. Implacably it powered on, propelling water and spray high into the air. The ocean seemed almost to groan as it pulled itself back into one. For a few brief, isolated instants as the waters swirled sickeningly, the ships were visible; or parts of them at least. A prow here. A broken mast there, the tatters of its sail hanging limp and heavy with water. There, the hull and keel of a ship upended, its crew and its cargo spilled into the black hungry depths of the ocean.