“Get in the cabin,” the boy said, voice taut with urgency. “There’s a big wave coming, I can feel it.”
They crowded into the cabin, grabbing at any stable surface, for Brian could sense it now too, a wave big and ominous rolling toward them, telegraphing its strength ahead of it through the agencies of air and sound. Their captain was positively grey beneath his patchy whiskers, hands wrapped around the wheel like tensile wire. If Brian hadn’t felt queasy from the waves and fear before, he would have after a glimpse of the man’s face. Not much scared an Aran man who had been to sea most days of his life.
“Are you all right, man?” Brian shouted over the roar of the coming wave.
“I’m not feeling just the thing,” the captain said, wiping his forehead onto his oil-skinned shoulder. Brian did not like the look of him at all. When an Aran man said he didn’t feel just the thing, it usually meant something only just the right side of the plague.
The man clutched his chest just as the wave hit them on the lee side, the boat starting a long precipitous slide down the face of the enormous wave. The wheel spun wildly and he stumbled back as the boat scudded down into an enveloping trough.
“Christ, I think he’s having a heart attack!” Brian caught the man as he fell and lowered him to the narrow space that held rope and tackle and net. The boy grabbed the wheel and peered out between long shreds of foam that coated the window, at the great grey wall that bore them helpless on its cusp. Brian spared him a frantic look, even as he sought for the man’s pulse.
“Ye said ye know boats?”
“Yes.”
“Can ye steer this one?”
“I can try,” the boy said bravely, bracing himself as the boat pitched to the side, spinning on the latest wave, so that suddenly they were in a beam sea, waves breaking over the bow. Brian wasn’t a sailor, but he knew this was a bad thing.
Brian compressed the man’s chest over and over, but the flesh beneath his hands was unresponsive and slack, and the heart itself no longer beating, not even the odd erratic thump.
“Hit him hard with the flat of your hand,” the boy said, hanging onto the wheel with the grim determination of a flea on the back of a wild dog. “It might re-start his heart.”
Brian was starting to feel that he had boarded a boat with a juvenile Lord Peter Wimsey. He drew in a breath, braced himself against the terrible rolling of the boat, and brought his hand down hard on the man’s chest. The body jumped a bit, but only from the force of the blow, not from any sudden return of life.
“Radio’s disabled,” the boy said, the first thread of worry in his voice.
“I doubt we could get any sort of signal across in this weather anyhow.”
“She’s sitting too low in the water,” the boy said, pulling the wheel over gradually to bring the boat side on to the waves. Brian could feel what he meant, it was like something heavy sitting deep in the bones of the boat, something that was causing it to drag and the waves to smack up against its hull with undue force. “We ought to be rolling with the waves, but we’re not.”
He turned and looked Brian in the eyes, his manner rather matter-of-fact. “I had a dream the night before my granddad and I got caught in that storm, I dreamt of a woman with kelp in her hair, standing in the rain, just standing and staring at me. I dreamt of her last night too.”
“Are ye sayin’ we’re goin’ to get caught in a storm? Because laddie, I think that’s no longer a matter for soothsayers.”
“No, what I’m saying,” he said in what now seemed an infuriatingly calm manner, “is that we’re taking on water and might well sink. I’m going down to check the bilge pumps. Take the wheel and just keep her side on to the waves if you can. We’re likely to get swamped no matter what we do, but that’s our best chance for now.”
Having little choice in the matter, Brian took the wheel. It was odd that a boy so young should feel like a stabilizing force, but he did. And Brian felt more at sea, forgiving himself the pun, the minute the fair head disappeared below.
They were about midpoint, Brian thought, halfway between the Islands and the mainland. The coast itself was a treacherous patchwork of rocky shoals hidden beneath the ominously dark water. Steering in this sort of filthy weather was akin to pouring water into a bucket without a bottom, but it steadied his nerves a touch to try and angle the boat to the waves so that they might not take the water at right angles.
The fair head had re-emerged in the cabin beside him. The grim look on the boy’s face told Brian all he needed to know.
“Pumps are swamped,” he said, “they can’t handle the amount that’s coming in and are going to choke altogether soon. The engines will go right behind them. Normally I’d say we should run down sea, but we’re too waterlogged for that. We can’t outrun these kind of waves in a compromised boat.”
As if to underscore the boy’s words, the boat went nose down into the trough of a breaking wave. The wave swelled up high, breaking hard over the hull, and blasted with the force of a cannon across the deck. All went entirely dark and he swore he could feel the boat taking the water into itself, drinking it deep, sealing their fate. The water was bloody cold any time of year, but on this autumn night it would be absolutely frigid. Foam was flying in great ribbons onto the wheelhouse windows, and sliding across the deck ahead of the madly rushing green sea.
Time ceased to have any sort of meaning after that, for the boat was running of her own accord, only it was hard to say if they were advancing or merely tilting queasily upon wave after wave.
They might have a prayer if they had stayed inside the channel between Inis Mor and the mainland, but if they had scudded far enough south to be clear of the Islands, then they were in trouble of a sort that required only prayer and acceptance of one’s watery fate. Because they would be on the open Atlantic then, with nothing between them and God, but the sea.
He checked the captain again, but he was most definitely dead, for surely the pitching and yawing, the screaming wind and the rivers of water breaking over their heads every few seconds ought to have brought him round from anything short of a coma. The boy had taken back the steering, much good it would do them, for the boat was rolling like a drunk, taking the waves at a terrible angle. She couldn’t nose up the face of the waves and couldn’t run down their lee side with any grace, so they were merely jerking along with the wind.
He thought wildly about the things he knew about drowning, that it wasn’t peaceful at all, that it was a panic-stricken suffocation, the body’s instinct so overwhelmingly strong not to take that final fatal breath, that it would only come right on the cusp of losing consciousness. At most, a person could hold out two minutes without taking that fateful indrawn breath. Dear Jesus, what a long and dreadful two minutes that would be though. There was, of course, no choosing at the end, that was how death came for most men, after all.
Even here in the cabin, it was impossible to tell up from down, there was so much water in the air, and air in the water, that it had melded into one element. His body was soaked, his lungs soggy with spray and salt. He knew, with a great and sudden fatalism, that this was it, this was how it ended and it was not going to be gentle, nor kind. It would not be kind to the boy either, and for that he felt a terrible sorrow.
A strange light lit upon the deck, a phosphorescent glow within the heart of the storm, as though to show him his world before taking him from it. The boy stepped out of the cabin, the knowledge there for him too, that there was little they could do to alter their fate at this point.
“I can smell land,” the boy shouted, his cap lost, hair streaming water in the strange eldritch light. How he could smell anything in the midst of this maelstrom, Brian didn’t know, but he was willing to believe it just for the sake of his panicked mind.
“Get rid of your coat and boots,” the boy was already stripping himself of said articles, “we’re going to have to jump.”
Brian knew the boy was right, for he could feel the boat tilting, gi
ving itself over to the water, ready to begin the long slide to the bottom. He dropped his coat to the see-sawing deck, and stumbled a few times trying to get his water-slick boots off his feet. They were good boots and he had only just worn them to the place where they were comfortable. But a dead man had no need of boots, comfortable or otherwise.
He looked back at the cabin one last time.
“He’s dead,” the boy said practically. “Jump as far clear of the boat as you can, or it will suck you down.”
Brian jumped with the boy, a waterlogged vault that took them clear of the boat and down, down into the night-black sea. Despite being soaked and freezing, the enveloping water was still a shock to his body. He thought wildly that it might well have been better to go down with the boat.
Between the swamping waves, he could see the boy’s bright head bobbing above the water like a cork. He followed in his wake as best as he was able, swimming uphill and then plunging swiftly down the face of the next wave, shoved under and then pushed up again to gasp in the watery air, foam coating his eyes, salt streaming from his nose.
His muscles were screaming, the cold so terrible that it bit like razors into his nerve endings. His body was heavily weighted and he could not see that fair head ahead of him any longer. Had the boy gone under? A flutter of panic passed through him, along with a mouthful of sea water. On the crest of the next wave he caught sight of the boy again, head glimmering against the dark water. Would it be easier to drown out here, if he was so exhausted that he could no longer fight? Would it come softer when his muscles and flesh were numb with the struggle? A wave swamped his head and the panic bolted through him, hard as lightning, giving him his answer. No, it would not come soft, no matter how exhausted he was. He kept swimming.
The boy had an amazing nose, to be certain, because he felt the land under him before he could actually touch it with his feet, felt the gentle slope of it, more welcome than his next breath. It was still a struggle, but suddenly there was an end and a purpose to it. And then there it was, land beneath his knees, glorious land.
He crawled up out of the sea onto the shore, the waves still surging hard behind him, shoving him face first onto the rough shingle. Land. He had never been so glad to feel anything in his life as he was this rough trough of sand beneath him. He lay prone for a moment, without the strength in his arms to lift his face from the soaked and freezing sand.
“Are you all right?” The boy was up from him a bit, sitting upright, a ghostly silhouette against the dark and the shrieking wind.
“I’ll live,” he said, which was in fact, the salient point.
The boy started to laugh, though it sounded more like a howl, mixed with the wind and the flying bits of sea that were pelting them. He wondered if this beautiful boy was a wee bit mad, laughing the way he was, but then he joined in, for the boy’s joy, crazy as it might seem, was utterly infectious and he was just as happy as he for the fact of their survival.
They staggered up the shingle, wind shoving them relentlessly along their course. Sand was whipping up at their backs, stinging their eyes and noses, scrubbing down their skin.
They ran into the cottage in the dark, putting a sharp halt to their search for shelter. Brian felt his way along the stones, one by one, not wanting to step off into the dark beyond, for fear he would not find the cottage again in this mad storm. There was a door, wedged part-way open with sand. He yelled to the boy.
“This way, lad!”
They got themselves inside, and then spent several moments clearing the sand in the pitch dark that surrounded them, so that they could shut the door against the wind. The windows by some miracle were still intact, though Brian thought it had likely been many years since anyone had lived here.
He took a minute to catch his breath and assess the environment. If the former inhabitants had left quickly, if the island had been evacuated, which seemed the most likely scenario, then it was possible debris had been left behind, some of which could be very useful.
“You go clockwise around the walls,” he told the boy, “and I’ll go counter, and we’ll see what we can scavenge.”
Fortune was found in the corners of the old cottage, for the boy came across the remnants of a splintered crate, and Brian found a box of matches stowed up inside the sand-clogged hearth as well as a half gunnysack of coal that had been left behind.
Brian cleared the hearth out by feel, for the inside of the cottage was black as the underside of a nun’s habit. He could start a fire if the wood hadn’t taken the damp to its core. He had to do it, or they might well die of hypothermia. He splintered the wood against the rough stones of the hearth, catching at the splinters carefully and peeling them back one by one to the protest of his trembling hands. The matches were damp, and their sulphurous heads unwilling to catch. It took a great deal of patience on his part, but one finally caught and he managed to get the shredded ends of the board lit before the match burned down. They watched with intense anxiety as the curled bits of wood caught, then the larger bits of kindling and finally the coal itself. Within a short time it was throwing a good heat, both of them huddled close to it, wisps of steam rising from their damp clothes. They had each retreated to their own corner and wrung their clothes out as best as could be managed, putting back on what was necessary and spreading the rest to dry.
“How old are ye, lad?” he asked.
“Fifteen,” the boy replied. “Just turned in March. Do you have children?”
“Aye, I’ve two wee boys at home. The oldest is six an’ my little one two.” His stomach churned at the thought of them, Deirdre would be half mad when he didn’t arrive home tonight. The thought of not being there to raise his boys, to see them grow, to watch Casey’s stubborn curiosity develop into something that Brian thought might be a natural gift for leadership, or to see Patrick discover the world bit by bit, made him feel queasy with fear. He needed to be there to teach them the things that boys needed to know in this world.
“Are you all right?”
“Aye,” Brian said gruffly, “I’m fine.” He didn’t need to be showing uncertainty in front of this child, he didn’t want to frighten him. Though, if there was a more self-possessed boy on the face of the planet, Brian thought one would be hard put to find him.
“We’ll be fine,” the boy said, as if to confirm Brian’s summation of him. “Someone will find us, if not tomorrow, surely in the next few days. What time do you think it is?”
“Near to midnight, maybe,” Brian said, grateful to the boy for his light tone, his youthful assurance that there was a way out of this pickle.
He thought about the captain of the boat, thought about how even now he was sinking down through eons of ocean, sinking toward a lonely, anonymous grave.
“Don’t feel guilty,” the boy said, green eyes sharp, “he meant to kill you. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Aye, I figured somethin’ wasn’t right, when ye knocked my tea flyin’ from my hand. Ye hardly seem the clumsy sort after all. I do wonder what was supposed to happen though, had the storm not come up and him havin’ a convenient heart attack.”
“Probably he was meant to hand you off to someone else. I suspect I was going to be collateral damage—wrong place, wrong time, it’s a talent of mine.”
“What makes ye think he’d want to hand me off to someone?”
The boy didn’t answer at once and Brian could almost feel him mulling over what was wise to say.
“I saw you up on the headlands today, looked like you picked something off the underside of that ledge. What do they call it in the spy world—a dead drop?”
Brian felt his blood chill in his veins just a little. “Were ye spyin’ on me?”
“No, I was up climbing the cliffs, there are steps down there, if you know where you’re going. I like to do it from time to time.”
That did chill his blood. Brian knew that some of the more sure-footed Islanders would climb portions of the cliffs in pursuit of seabird eggs, but
you had to know every rock and crevice intimately in order to risk it, and even then there were those that had plunged to their death off those steep, slick faces—half a misstep, a gust of wind, a slick rock was all it took. The boy must have some sort of death wish or the footing of a gannet.
“I was curious, but nothing more. You don’t,” the voice was slightly sarcastic, “have to kill me or anything.”
Brian laughed. The boy was a wee bit too smart for his own good or anyone else’s come to that, but he found he quite liked him.
“It would be just as well, lad, if ye weren’t to mention ye’d seen me pickin’ anything up on the island, if it’s all the same to you.”
The green eyes, dark in the firelight, looked at him.
“Aye, it’s all the same to me, I won’t say anything. I give my word on that.”
Young as he was, Brian believed him, he seemed the sort to keep his word once he gave it.
They sat in silence for a bit, both exhausted and mesmerized by the heat and movement of the fire, as it webbed and slithered through the coal. It was beginning to settle with him, what had just happened and that they’d had the luck to survive it.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” the boy asked, voice low. The wind had begun to die back, though it still fretted and moaned around the thick stone walls of the cottage.
Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series) Page 2
