Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

  Suddenly, through the ominous ruin of gloom about us, I caught a glimpse of a darker, sharper outline and knew it must be Raoul. I screamed over the wind for Aulani and when she appeared and took the tiller from me, I immediately went forward, harnessed to the jackline, and unhanked the trysail. We would manage with motors only now. Fighting the heaving deck and the constantly fouling tether, I made my way back to the cockpit and found her calmly steering, the motors already on, maintaining only enough speed to secure headway in the raging seas. Heavy rain began lashing us as if to scrub us from the very face of the Earth.

  We sat braced against the driving rain and the sea, watching intently as Raoul began revealing itself; its sharp, ragged outline providing no sense of comfort to me. It seemed every bit as stark and foreboding as the storm that raged around us. I could see no evidence whatsoever of shelter, no coves, no hint of a harbor, and despite Aulani’s assurances I couldn’t push back a growing sense of doubt. Where was the channel?

  We continued driving straight for the northern shore and closed to within a kilometer before I saw the first evidence of settlement; two low buildings overlooking a barren coastline. They stood at the top of a rugged, heavily castellated bluff angling westward down to the sea. I could make out no opening anywhere, no possibility of a safe landing, and turned to Aulani, screaming over the shriek of the wind.

  “Where’s the channel?”

  She put her face up close to mine, the hoods of our jackets jammed together so that we could see each other.

  “The channel,” I yelled again. “Which way?”

  She hesitated. “Just east of the buildings, I think.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No. But the lake is east, inside those peaks, so it must be.”

  There was nothing for it then, except to push onward. As if we had any choice; with these waves and wind, we were being blown on bare poles well beyond ten knots, surfing uncontrolled down the face of waves, with a feeling very much like sledding down an icy hill, helpless to do more than simply point in a straight direction. The feeling of certain doom grew within me; I grew increasingly certain that we sailed to our destruction.

  We were closing very fast, the wind and waves driving us toward land, toward the cliff. I still could not see a channel, and if we were to avoid being smashed onto the rocks we had to somehow come about, bring Windswept more parallel to shore, hold her off long enough to look for the opening. And if for some reason we couldn’t find it, or we came screaming into it at an angle, out of control? Well, that’d be the end of it.

  Do it now, I thought, and shoved the tiller to starboard, to the stops, and we slewed sickeningly on the face of a wave that moved beneath us like a freight train. For a moment I thought we’d broach, turn broadside to the wave and be flipped to our destruction, but we side-slipped enough to keep from tripping and slewed to a new heading across the face of the wave, traversing it as a skier would a mountain slope.

  But I was now in a dangerous dilemma, wanting the centerboard as deep as possible to hold our position, but fearful of the tremendous force of water leveraging us, threatening to overturn us. Abruptly, an image came to me of landing a plane in a strong cross wind, of crabbing sideways, and I tried doing the same thing with Windswept. I pushed her bow further up the face of the wave, pointing a little out to sea, then raised the centerboard high enough to let us side-slip. And it worked; though we were now angled awkwardly out of position, we were at least progressing more or less parallel to the shore.

  Straining to see any details of land through the rain and spray, I could see nothing but grey cliffs. There were just no options left, no other maneuvering I could think of to forestall being smashed against the rocks. I was going to die now, after everything. And Aulani, too, had been saved from the brink of death only to drown. What had it all been for?

  Then, I felt her hand on my arm, pulling at me fiercely, turned as she pressed her face wetly against mine, heard her scream.

  “It’s there, Owen, it’s there!”

  I looked up, startled, to follow where she pointed but I could see nothing. I squinted through the rain at the black shapes on shore, wiping a hand across my eyes. Was there a lighter grey there?

  “Where?” I screamed back. “I can’t see a damn thing!”

  “There,” she shouted, pointing again. “Twenty meters east. Look at the water!”

  And I saw it. Where elsewhere all along this stretch of rocky cliff, the sea drove forward, impacted, and then recoiled in a returning explosion, there was a section without the white foam, a place where the sea seemed simply to disappear into the rocks. What it disappeared into was invisible to me, though apparently not to Aulani. Or maybe she couldn’t see it at all, maybe she just assumed. But we were closing so quickly to the rocks that if I didn’t make the leap of faith, we would be wrecked; there was no room left to come about or bear off – we were going in one way or another. The only question was what we met when we did.

  I shoved the tiller back to port, angling us more directly down the face of the wave. Immediately, we raced downhill in a breathless, intense free-fall of surging surf. We were either lined up within reach of the channel or we were going to smash ourselves to bits. I had little ability to control direction; Windswept slewed and yawed under the dominion of wave and wind, not my hand.

  Then, as I began bracing for certain impact, through the chaos I finally saw the channel, saw the opening into the rocks. It appeared just off our bow, a wild chute of violent water flowing at impossible speed into a black hole with no visible end, sheer wall rising overhead on either side, awash with waves. We were nearly lined up for it but sat badly canted at an angle; if I couldn’t get us straightened out, we’d never get into it. I tried the shoving the tiller all the way over, but we were held so tightly in the grip of the wave it had no effect.

  And Emma’s face, smiling confidently, rose like a beacon in the darkness of my mind. The motors; use those wonderful, powerful twin screws!

  What I did then, with the throttles, playing the motors against each other, the controllers screaming, orchestrating their forces, finding the one possible path down the sweeping course of that wave, reacting on pure, raw instinct, I can’t explain. I can only say it came from a place within me that wasn’t under conscious control; whether it was from an intervention outside me or some deep, primordial lust for survival, I’ll never be able to say. Perhaps it was all simply Emma, there to save us in the end.

  Windswept swiveled about, shivered and rocked, and lined up with the channel at the last possible second and shot into it with awful speed, the rock walls a blur on either side of us. Once in, it was evident that a terrible battle of currents was taking place between the water visibly flowing in, and the invisible, but equally powerful returning flow. Within seconds, I could see the lake ahead of us, survival at hand. Maybe.

  Unasked, Aulani went forward, holding desperately to the forestay; and at last we were through, surging forward with the unstoppable current out into the middle of the small lake. I saw that a heavy storm wave was surging up against the far wall, impacting hard, swirling up and around the sheer inner cliff, forming a horseshoe-shaped counter-current that drove back out of the channel beneath the incoming torrent. We needed to get out of this counter-current quickly. I let Windswept drive forward a bit further, then threw both throttles into hard reverse, giving us purchase to change course. Then, angling the tiller to starboard, and driving with the starboard prop only, we began rotating out of the current, breaking free of it, and began slowly backing toward the northern corner of the lake, which sat relatively calm, free of the raging torrents swirling inside the caldera.

  I shouted to Aulani to ready the forward anchor and when we reached a point within ten meters of the lake’s edge, I called to her to lower it. The water here was shallow; with no more than ten meters of chain out, it hit. I drove us forward a bit, then held her steady with the throttles and dropped the aft anchor over the stern, winching it
secure. Killing the motors, I waited to see if we’d come free, but they bit and held, even with the small amount of scope we had laid out. For several minutes I alternately pulled and pushed with the motors, testing and retesting that they were truly secure. Then there simply was nothing more I could do, and I shut down the throttles.

  I fell on my knees in the pouring rain, then slumped down against the cockpit coaming, tired beyond all sense of it, unable to move or even summon thoughts. It was as if some vital spark within me was extinguished, all life force exhausted. I could no longer hold my head up. And insanely, words from Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald came to me;

  Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

  Then she was there; I felt her arms around me, her face pressed wetly against my neck. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her words over the shriek of the wind high in the caldera walls. I hardly cared; it was the softness of her lips moving against my skin that I wanted. That I needed. Instinctively I sought the warmth of her body, turned into her, put my arms around her and clung to her. I let my face fall into her neck, pressed it against her wet hair. She smelled of the sea and the rain. We were, both of us, soaked to the skin, and sat huddled there together, sat as a single merged creature of water and exhaustion, without distinction between what was her and what was me and what was ocean.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  FOR FOUR DAYS, we stayed in the cabin, doing our best to ignore the shrieking of the wind and the rain drumming down on the cabin. The gusts swirled off the rocks into the rigging and lifted and shook Windswept as though about to launch her skyward. The fear that the anchors would let loose was constant; every shift in our position, every yaw, every creak and groan froze us in our tracks, trying to sense whether we’d broken free. Huddled below, the cyclone screaming around us, I couldn’t conceive of enduring this misery on the open ocean – or even anchored somewhere without the encircling peaks that now sheltered us. Aulani, too, shuddered at times at the power of the storm. Only the cat seemed completely unaffected, immune to the noise and with her appetite completely intact.

  Inside, confined together in this tiny space as the storm raged, I felt something had changed between Aulani and I. We had gone together to the edge of death, placed our lives in each other’s hands, and emerged alive. Nothing was the same. What reservations could exist, what worries over protocol or propriety, what hesitancy - when you have shared a rebirth with someone?

  We slept within arm’s length of each other, each to our own side of the boat. The awkwardness of undressing had disappeared. We kept the cabin lights off most of the time anyway to conserve power, and it grew dark so early, that when we were ready to turn in, she’d move a bit aft to the starboard bunk and I slightly forward to the port bunk, undress quietly and crawl into our beds.

  “Night,” I’d call to her.

  “Fai se miti malie,” she’d whisper back. She told me it meant ‘sweet dreams’ in Samoan. It was beautiful and musical, and it became a fixture for me each night; I looked forward to the sound of it in the darkness.

  On the fifth day, when I awoke, something seemed off; it took me a moment to realize the rain had stopped. I lay in my bunk, smiling to myself, and in the stillness heard the low softness of Aulani’s breathing. The cyclone seemed finally to have moved on.

  I jumped out of the settee naked, saw her lazily turning to her side, and pulled on a pair of shorts.

  “OK,” I said, “I’m decent.”

  “And I am still asleep.”

  I laughed and watched as she rolled back over toward me, the swell of her breasts sharp beneath the thin sheet, her dark hair falling in waves about her head. Her eyes in the low morning light – I couldn’t think of anything else on earth that color. She watched me watching her. Her eyes were indecipherable, inscrutable. I assumed I was an open book.

  “Coffee?” I asked. I turned to the stove, took my time lighting it to give her a moment to get out of her bunk and dressed and heard her rustling behind me. As I began to grind the coffee beans in the old hand crank, she was suddenly there next to me, smelling of coconut. She reached past me for the grinder, taking it from me, gently shoving me out of the way with her hip.

  “Was that coconut I smelled?”

  She smiled demurely, teasing. “Perhaps.”

  “Well, where on earth did you get coconut?”

  “It’s just how I smell.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her, started to protest, but she took my arm and began to turn me toward the companionway.

  “Go on deck,” she said softly. “I’ll do this.” She looked at me and smiled. “You know you want to go look at the weather.”

  And of course, I did want to. I grinned and went to the hatch and slid it back and was bathed immediately in sunshine. I closed my eyes for a moment, just reveling in the warmth of it on my face. Scrambling up the steps, I looked out over the lake; the center of it sparkled blue in the sun, the edges still dark in the shadows beneath the cliffs. In the clear light, the peaks above us, encircling us, were sharply drawn against the sky in shades of russet and grey. The air was clean and fresh, cool on my skin.

  I stood for several minutes, feeling the wind that still played capriciously about us, tugging noisily at the rigging. After all that time cooped up, I felt as if I were emerging from a chrysalis back into the world, the fresh coolness in the air reminding me again of autumn, of home. And truly, Windswept had begun to feel like home to me; a home on an endless journey. It came to me abruptly, looking out over that glittering lake, that I was happy. Here I floated in a volcanic caldera in the far south Pacific. Humanity was disappearing from the planet. I faced a wholly uncertain, undeniably Faustian future. But I was alive, the morning was as lovely as a dream, and the sweet voice of Aulani softly singing rose to me from the open hatch. How odd it all was, how irrepressible life was.

  I began the familiar protocol of checking anchors, rigging, lines, through-hulls – all the parts and places, all the gear that had been hammered by those days of howling wind and driving rain. And there were several small casualties - I saw immediately why I’d lost wind speed readings; pieces of the anemometer lay scattered like straw over the deck. I looked up and saw that the entire masthead assembly was awry, the anemometer and wind direction spinner entirely blown away. I had a spare for the anemometer but not the spinner; an antique, it was a remnant from boyhood and my first sailing days in Traverse Bay. I grieved for its loss; it’d come a long way since then, many years and many miles. And now it was probably at the bottom of the ocean somewhere.

  Staring up at the mast head, thinking that this harbor was probably the best place I was going to find for going aloft, I was brought up short by the sudden smell of coffee and quickly went below to find Aulani standing in the galley, anticipating, holding out a cup for me.

  “Bless you, oh island goddess,” I said, and took the coffee in one hand and her hand in the other and bent theatrically and pressed her soft hand to my lips. Her skin was warm and firm, smelling of spice and coffee – and faintly the coconut that I was finding so captivating. It was quite amazing, really, her skin…

  “Owen,” she said, laughing. “I need my hand.”

  I dropped it, straightening.

  “You’re blushing,” she observed.

  I felt the heat in my face. “Of course not,” I said. “That’s from the sun.”

  “It must be a very bright morning, then.”

  “It is, yes.”

  She watched me as I sipped the coffee.

  “How is the boat?” she asked. “Is there damage from the storm?”

  “There is damage to some of the equipment that sits at the top of the mast; the wind speed sensor was completely torn away.” I paused. “And we lost an old wind direction spinner that I’ve had for a very long time.”

  “It was important?” she asked softly.

  “No,” I said. “Not to the boat. It was just something I had some emoti
onal attachment to.” I took another sip of coffee. She watched me without speaking.

  “There is also the missing antenna, which I broke off on the crossing to Hawaii. I’ve a replacement, and it would give us the ability to receive shortwave, which might be useful at some point. If there are pockets of people surviving, or governments, they’d almost surely be using shortwave to communicate.”

  I paused for a moment, drinking more coffee.

  “Without satellites being maintained, we’re all back to mid-twentieth century technology for communication.”

  “Even so, how long will we have that?” she asked. “Would you know where to find parts if the radio failed?”

  I shook my head. “These days it isn’t about replacing parts exactly; it’s a matter of finding the correct computer board to swap out. If the radio went down, I’m afraid that’d be that.”

  “And eventually,” she concluded, “being so near saltwater, it will. Isn’t that so?”

  I nodded, and we both sat quietly drinking coffee in the little galley with the sun streaming through the hatch and the portlights. I was still thinking about the shortwave; was there anyone left to communicate with?

  After a bit, I looked up at her. “I could use your help, if you’d be willing. You could make it a lot easier for me to get up the mast.”

  “I’m not that strong,” she said doubtfully.

  I started to laugh, and she smiled. And I reached for more coffee and began to explain the process of winching someone up the mast.