Austral

by Paul McAuley

  I told her that it wasn’t anything that rest couldn’t mend, patched her with painkillers and fed her a sleeping tablet. She didn’t protest or resist when I tucked a blanket around her, and I left her to sleep it off and fired up the boat’s engine and aimed due west.

  I’d switched off comms and radar and satnav, everything that might be used to track us, was plotting a course by compass and dead reckoning. Sweating through a bad couple of hours as the boat wallowed through the choppy ink-black sea against a fierce headwind. At last the solid shadow of Brabant Island rose against the night and I turned south, running parallel to the coast. By the time I had negotiated a way around the southern end of the island first light was seeping into the sky, and soon afterwards I motored into a cove in the north side of Duperré Bay, dropped anchor under the dripping belly of a cliff.

  The girl was asleep, blonde hair tangled on the filthy pillow, an arm dangling over the edge of the bunk. I rearranged the blanket around her and sat and watched her breathe for a while, hearing a faint catch, like the beginning of a hiccup or a sob, at each inbreath. Her temperature was slightly elevated but her pulse seemed steady. I knew that I should take her to a clinic, knew that I wasn’t going to. I told myself that I had saved her from the True Citizens and Keever Bishop. I told myself that I was back on track.

  I brewed a mug of tea in the filthy little galley, plenty of sugar and half a stick of butter dissolved in it, and shucked my jacket and shirt and examined my dog-bitten arm. After I washed away a crust of dried blood the crescents of raw punctures on either side of the muscle below my elbow began to weep straw-coloured liquid, and the skin around them was blackly bruised, hot and tender, but all I could do was douse everything with nanobiotics and cover it up with bandage spray and hope for the best. My arm was throbbing like a malignant engine but I decided against painkillers. I needed to stay sharp.

  The True People’s fone-blocker had welded itself to my wrist. When I pried at it with the point of the scissors I succeeded only in cutting myself, told myself it didn’t matter. I was hoping to get some help with setting up negotiations with the girl’s father, and if that didn’t work out I could use the boat’s comms, move from place to place so I couldn’t be tracked down …

  There was enough light now to take in the sweep of the stony shore of the cove. Along the strand line a small crowd of gentoo penguins stood watching the sea with inscrutable patience, as if waiting for the appearance of their penguin messiah. Beyond, a line of bare hills faded into the grey overcast. A bleak primordial place seemingly untouched by ecopoiesis or civilisation. And then I saw, tucked under a low rise at the far end of the beach, a small black hut.

  My first reaction was to haul up the anchor and hightail it out of there. But anyone living in that hut would have seen the boat come in, if they’d already called the police I wouldn’t get far on the open sea, and if they hadn’t it was possible that they’d help me out. I wasn’t so dumb that I’d forgotten my last run-in with a back-country hermit, but I reckoned that I was due some good luck, and bolted the hatch to the crew cabin and pulled a salt-crusted windproof over my uniform jacket and heaved the boat’s life-raft canister over the side. As soon as it hit the water the yellow raft unfolded and inflated with a tremendous hiss, and I hauled it close by its painter line and climbed down and paddled through the low waves to the shore.

  I hadn’t gone far, walking past a straggling fringe of indifferent penguins, stones crunching underfoot, strands of bull kelp rising and falling on the rippling wash of the tide, the stench of penguin shit heavy in the cold air, when I felt a familiar clench in my stomach and bent over, hands clutching knees, and threw up the tea. Nerves, I told myself as I rinsed the taste of spoiled butter from my mouth with a palmful of seawater. Nerves and exhaustion. I hadn’t slept properly for three days. I’d been stabbed and bitten and beaten up, the girl had gotten herself shot … It was a wonder I was still standing.

  The little hut, clinker-built and tarred black, its curved roof shaped from a single sheet of plastic, stood in the shadow of the cliff among a kind of garden of sculptures got up from metal rods, wire, feathers and penguin bones. A rowboat rested upside down on blocks among a scatter of crab pots. No sign that anyone was home.

  The door was propped open with a lump of granite. When I stepped inside I disturbed a couple of penguins, and as I shooed them out one gave me a vicious peck on my shin, dodged the kick I aimed at it and hopped out the door, cackling. Damn thing had taken a good chunk out of me, the wound was bleeding freely, and I sat on the narrow cot and bandaged myself with a strip of cloth torn from a mouldy sheet before taking stock.

  The place clearly had been abandoned for a long time. Its plank floor was crusted with dried guano. On one shelf a row of old paper books had swollen with damp into a single mass. On another, rusted cans had shed their labels like autumn leaves. But it wasn’t entirely cheerless. The walls were painted bright red and shingled with charcoal sketches of penguins and the profile of the mountain in different weathers, and oil paintings on scraps of wood were jigsawed over the cot. Views of the sea, portraits of icebergs, cloudscapes, apocalyptic sunsets …

  I found a grave on the far side of the hut, a mound of stones with a flat piece of rock for a headstone, a name painstakingly scratched into it. Agustyn Dos Santos Pistario. I imagined a small shaggy man (that cot wasn’t anywhere near big enough for me) sitting on the doorstep of his hut, dressed in patched clothes, stitching holes in a net or shaping the scaffolding of one of his funny little sculptures. A hermit who’d turned his back on the rest of the world, eking out a bare living by fishing and poaching penguin eggs, capturing the beauty of the place he loved in charcoal and oil paint. And after he died someone had found his body and had buried him, had left the door of his hut open so that his spirit could rove freely.

  I sat by his grave, with its view of the open sea beyond the cove’s headlands, and went over my plan one more time. It wasn’t much, relying as it did on the help of someone I hadn’t met for a dozen years, someone who might have moved away, might be dead, might turn me in to the police, but it was all I had. Thoughts of sailing the little fishing boat north to Chile or south and west to New Zealand were impossible fantasies. Back in the day, a band of tough old explorers had navigated from the mainland to South Georgia across winter seas in a leaking rowboat, landing on the uninhabited south side of the island and hiking across hard terrain in impossible weather to find help at the whaling station on the north shore. An amazing feat of endurance. But I wasn’t anywhere near as salty or confident as those heroes, I’d almost certainly be spotted and intercepted if I made for the open ocean, and in any case the damn boat didn’t have enough charge to go more than a couple of hundred kilometres.

  I dozed off, jerked awake. Maybe I could send the girl back across the strait after making her promise not to tell anyone where I was, and just stay here. Clean out Agustyn Dos Santos Pistario’s hut, break down his cot and rebuild it to fit me, use his nets and crab pots to catch toothfish and king crabs. I pictured myself tramping, swollen with pregnancy, across twenty kilometres of rough terrain to the island’s only settlement in Buls Bay. Giving birth to you in the clinic there, bringing you home. The two of us making gardens in the bare hills, greening the island as my parents and the other ecopoets had greened the fringes of the mainland. Another fantasy, an idle daydream of the kind of life Mama had wanted to find in the far south, but it was lovely and enticing and I fell asleep while playing with it, woke an hour later, stiff and cold, and walked back along the shore towards the boat.

  Often, when we try to weigh up the whys and wherefores, we discover that we’ve already made our decision. Everything else is justification.

  After I climbed aboard, the girl started to bang on the hatch set in the floor of the wheelhouse. I ignored the racket, fired up the skywave radio and put out my request for a one-to-one conversation and sat down and waited. The girl soon gave up on her protest, but started up again when I recei
ved a call-back.

  ‘Are you still living in Charlotte Bay?’ I said.

  ‘Where else would I be? Who is this?’

  I wanted to confess everything, wanted to know if she could help me, but this was the skywave net, anyone could be listening in, so I cut the connection without replying. The rest of my questions, the favour I needed to ask, would have to wait until I could arrange a face-to-face meeting.

  When I unbolted the hatch, the girl swarmed up the steps like a hornet escaping from a bottle, angry and upset, demanding to know where we were and what I thought I was doing, locking her up like that. She’d been scared that I’d abandoned her or had wandered off and had some kind of accident, said that for all I cared she could have died down there, so on.

  ‘You were asleep when I left you,’ I said. ‘And you seem perky enough now.’

  ‘It hurts to breathe, and that gadget said I needed hospital treatment. And your dog bite, you should get that looked at too. That kind of thing can get badly infected. You could lose your arm.’

  ‘I’ve dealt with it. And quit looking so hopeful. I’m not about to keel over.’

  ‘I don’t want you to die and leave me stranded out here. Wherever this is.’

  The girl was looking out of the window of the wheelhouse. Penguins clumped along the stony shore. Bare hills squatting under low grey cloud.

  ‘Brabant Island,’ I said. ‘And no one is going to strand you here. In a day, two days at the most, you’ll be back with your father.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  ‘This time I really mean it. Cross my cold black monster’s heart.’

  ‘If you’re planning to turn yourself in to the police, you could do that right away,’ the girl said hopefully. ‘I mean, this boat must have some kind of fone.’

  ‘Why don’t you go below and fix breakfast? There’s food in the galley. Some of it may even be the kind you can eat.’

  We stayed on the boat for the rest of the short day. I was certain that it had been reported missing, that the police must have realised that it had something to do with the ruckus at the harbour. Perhaps they’d arrested the True Citizens and Mike Mike’s crew. Perhaps they knew by now that I wasn’t part of Keever Bishop’s gang, that I was the one who had taken the girl. I imagined a fountain of little drones spraying into the sky above Charlotte Bay, scattering in every direction, searching along the coast, patrolling in fixed patterns above the open sea. Nothing I could do about that except sit tight under the dubious cover of the cliff and the low clouds and hope that the police would assume I’d head south, wouldn’t think to check out the islands on the far side of the Gerlache Strait.

  Rain briefly rattled on the wheelhouse window. Clouds rifted apart and sunlight shone on the hills to the north, the snowy flanks of the Solvay Mountains. And then the clouds closed up again and the rain came back, turned to sleet blowing slantwise across the cove.

  The girl lay on the bunk in the crew cabin, reading her book, and I dozed in the wheelhouse, stretched out on a sleeping bag that smelt strongly of a stranger’s sweat. As light faded from the sky, I hauled the life raft onto the foredeck and the girl and I ate a kind of porridge she’d boiled up from two kinds of beans. She took her portion plain. I crumbled dried fish into mine, sprinkled it with plenty of hot sauce, drank a big mug of sweet tea. The dog bite was still throbbing and my pecked shin sharply ached, but I was rested and ready to go.

  In the wheelhouse, with the anchor wound up and the motor churning water astern as I backed the boat away from the cliff, the girl reminded me that I still hadn’t told her where I was taking her.

  ‘I’m going to meet an old friend,’ I said. ‘In the last place the police and Mike Mike will think of looking for us.’

  24

  As our little boat ploughed through the sea’s dark swell towards the mainland I tried to jolly the girl along, telling her that we’d had a bit of an adventure all told, but we were almost at the end of it. Maybe things hadn’t gone exactly the way I’d hoped, there’d definitely been some setbacks, but it was all coming together at last. I’d get what I was due, she’d get back with her family, we’d never have to see each other again. I was stupidly cheerful, and like most stupid, cheerful people thought it would be easy to buck up those who weren’t.

  ‘Tell me about that book of yours,’ I said. ‘What’s happening there?’

  ‘As if you care,’ the girl said.

  She was still sulking about being locked in the crew cabin, was fretting about my plan, didn’t believe that it had any chance of working, said that it was desperate and ridiculous. Kid had serious trust issues.

  ‘After that thing with the poison,’ I said, ‘I do kind of want to know how it worked out. Also, the princess and the hero were on a boat, heading back to the court of the hero’s king. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Maybe I can learn something that will help me.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the two of them accidentally fall in love. And then there’s a shipwreck.’

  ‘Oho. Now you really do have my attention. You’re going to have to tell me the rest, because I won’t shut up until you do.’

  I had to dig it out of her in bits and pieces to begin with, but she gradually relaxed, started to get into the story. Explaining that as far as Princess Isander was concerned she was a prisoner on the ship that Tantris had stolen from her murdered uncle, sailing towards an arranged marriage to a man she’d never met, in a country she scarcely knew. She’d already tried and failed to poison Tantris while he had been recovering from the fight with the dragon. Now she tried again, ordering her body servant, Barbara, to add a drop of venom distilled from the slime of a certain kind of frog to Tantris’s wine. But Barbara, scared of what would happen to her if the murder plot was discovered, doped the wine with a love potion instead, hoping that once Tantris was besotted he would agree to take Isander wherever she wanted. Anywhere but the court of King Marsche.

  Isander insisted on sharing the wine. She wanted to poison Tantris, and she also wanted to kill herself rather than endure a forced marriage. So they both drank, and each saw the other afresh, and in a fever of mutual desire they fell into each other’s arms, kissing and rekissing. Isander guessed at once what had happened, but it didn’t matter. She had to be with Tantris. Ached for him. And Tantris knew that he was breaking his oath of loyalty to his king by sleeping with Isander, but he didn’t care. Nothing mattered but their hunger for each other.

  They thought that they would have only a few days of bliss before they reached their destination and preparations for the wedding began. But a storm blew up as the ironclad was making its way along the eastern coast of Palmis, driving it a long way off course. For a day and a night it pitched among mountainous waves, hail rattling like shot on its hull and decks, lightning playing about its masts, and as the storm began to die back on the morning of the second day a dragon stooped out of the clouds and breathed fire down the length of the ship and with its lashing tail broke the masts and smashed and swept away the smokestacks.

  It was a relative of the dragon that Tantris had killed to gain favour in the court of Isander’s father – some say that it was the dragon’s daughter, grown more monstrous and more powerful than her mother. The ironclad’s guns couldn’t drive her off. She made pass after pass, and soon the ship was on fire from bow to stern and beginning to sink, its rudder gone and its hull badly holed. All hands took to the lifeboats. Most were lost as the dragon picked off the boats one after the other, but Isander and Tantris managed to make landfall, and escaped into the forest that ran down to the shore.

  And that’s where they lived together for three years, the girl told me. They built a cabin in a clearing where a grandmother tree had recently fallen. Tantris hunted in the forest and fished in a nearby river. Isander tended her garden and collected wild herbs. One day, while searching for a certain rare plant in the forest, she heard horses approaching and managed to hide just befor
e a company of soldiers rode past, carrying shields with the armorial bearings of King Marsche. She tracked them through the trees, and when she reached the edge of the clearing saw that Tantris had already surrendered and was deep in conversation with their captain.

  That was as far as she had read, the girl said. Before she could go any further she had to decide what Isander had to do next.

  ‘She should kill the soldiers,’ I said. ‘Free Tantris and escape with him deeper into the forest.’

  ‘There are too many soldiers. And they are armed and she isn’t.’

  ‘But she has an advantage. Think about it.’

  ‘You mean her potions.’

  ‘Exactly. She could surrender to the soldiers, invite them to eat before they return, and poison their food.’

  ‘But then she would have killed innocent people for a selfish reason,’ the girl said. ‘And in this kind of story something like that always comes back to hurt you.’

  ‘So what do you suggest, Princess?’

  ‘In the opera I told you about? All of this happens before Isander and Tantris arrive at the court of King Marsche and the story really begins. Well, not the part where the dragon attacks the ship, or the part about living in the forest. Instead, Isander marries the king and sneaks around with Tantris behind the king’s back. The courtiers keep trying to catch them out, and eventually their tricks drive Tantris mad and he flees to his castle. The king sends a messenger to tell him that he’s forgiven, but Tantris thinks the messenger has come to kill him. They fight, and Tantris is badly wounded. Isander comes to heal him, but she’s too late. He dies of his wounds, and she dies of grief.’

  ‘So it doesn’t really work out.’

  ‘The point is, it’s the story of a great romance. A love that survives impossible odds. That survives death, even.’

  ‘I guess you think that Isander should surrender. Go to the court of this king, let fate take its course.’