Bernard Cornwell

by Wildtrack

  "Angry?"

  "When he said I had newly-wed nerves. Because he didn't believe me." She had brought a bottle of Irish from the cabin and she poured us each a glass. "Is this what's called running away to sea?" "Yes," I said. "So why don't you use the opportunity to give up smoking?"

  "Why don't you shut up?" So I shut up and we sat in silence for a while. The surge and fade of the great lights shimmered their reflection on the sea. "I married Tony on the rebound," Angela said suddenly.

  "Did you?"

  "From you." She twisted her head to look at me. "I shouldn't be here, should I?"

  "I wanted you to be here." I ducked her question.

  She smiled. "Shall I light the cabin fire?"

  "You want to be inside when God puts on this light show?"

  "You want to make love in the cold?" she asked. I hesitated, and she scowled. "Nick?"

  "You're married," I said awkwardly, not wanting to say it, and knowing that I wanted her to batter down my feeble moral stance.

  She closed her eyes in exasperation. "I'm cold, I'm lonely, I'm frightened, and I'm on a bloody boat miles from bloody anywhere because I wanted to be with you, and you play the bloody Boy Scout." She twisted on the thwart and looked angrily at me. "Do you know when I last needed to ask a man to take me to bed?"

  "I'm sorry," I said miserably.

  She wrenched the rings off her left hand and thrust them into a pocket. "Does that help?"

  Principles are fine things, but are soluble in lust, too. We lit the cabin stove.

  "Do you really believe in God?" she asked me the next day.

  "I don't know anyone who sails deep waters in small boats who doesn't," I said.

  "I don't believe." Her voice came down from the coachroof where she was catching the sun's small ration of mid-day warmth. I was in the cabin with bits of the engine spread around me. If we were to reach the place of Nadeznha Bannister's death and intercept Wildtrack's return, then I would need the bloody engine.

  Because in the night a flat calm had quietened the sea and by dawn the smoke from our chimney was drifting with the boat. The sails hung like washing. The glass was steady and the sky was palely and innocently veined with high wispy cloud.

  "I can't believe in God." Angela had evidently been thinking about it.

  "Stay on a boat long enough, and you'll believe." I wondered if prayer would help the engine.

  "Ouch," Angela said.

  "What?"

  "Vicky's claws."

  "Throw her overboard." The damned cat had spent the whole night in the sleeping bag with us. Every time I turfed it out it would come back, purring like a two-stroke and burrowing down for warmth.

  "If you think sailing encourages belief in God," Angela said pedantically, "then do you think Fanny Mulder believes?"

  "Deep in his dim soul," I said, "I expect he does. I agree that Fanny's not a very good advertisement for God's workmanship, but there you are; I have my theological problems just like you." I decided I also had a problem with the engine's wiring system. I began spraying silicon everywhere.

  "What are you doing?" Angela heard the aerosol's hiss.

  "Debugging the electrics."

  "Do you want to debug me of this cat?"

  "Why can't you do it yourself?"

  "Because I want you to do it."

  I pulled myself up to the cockpit and laughed. I'd been invited topsides, not because of the cat, but because Angela was lying naked on the port coaming. I threw the cat up on to the slack mainsail where she did her spider performance, then I leaned over and kissed Angela. "Do you feel like a debauched man?" she asked.

  "I feel happy."

  "Poor Nick." She stared out at the glassy sea. "Was Melissa unfaithful to you?"

  "All the time."

  She turned her face back to mine. We were upside down to each other. "Did it hurt?"

  "Of course."

  She stroked my face. "This won't hurt anyone, Nick."

  "No."

  "You are an ugly sod, Nick, but I love you."

  It was the first time she had said it, and I kissed her. "I love you."

  "But..." she began.

  "No buts," I said quickly, "not yet."

  We floated on an empty sea. The glass stayed steady. The North Atlantic had calmed.

  More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. The motor started.

  We went west under the engine, leaving a trace as straight as a plough-furrow in the sea behind. So long as the engine was charging the batteries I left the VHF switched on to Channel 16. Its range was no more than fifty or sixty miles, but if any boats were talking within that circle I would hear them, and then I could ask if they had news of Wildtrack. I heard nothing. I took the short-wave to pieces and discovered that water had somehow penetrated the case. The intricate circuits were now a mess of rust and mould. I gave up on the wretched thing. I lost my trailing log when it snagged on a piece of flotsam and tore itself free and, though I turned the boat upside down, I could not find either of the spares which I was certain I had stored on board.

  The sea was no longer smooth. A tiny wind rippled it and a long swell stirred beneath the hull. I tapped the glass again and saw the needle sink a trifle. The clouds thickened. I took running sights of the sun and, logless now, measured our progress between the sights with chips of wood. Angela timed the chips with a stopwatch as they floated past the twenty-five measured feet I'd marked on Sycorax's starboard gunwale. The chips averaged three and a half seconds which, multiplied by a hundred, then divided into the twenty-five feet times sixty, meant that the motor was pushing us along at just over 4.2 knots. We were running against a half-knot current, so our progress was slow.

  "Why, great mariner," Angela asked icily, "do you not have a speedometer?"

  "You mean an electronic log?"

  "I mean a speedometer, you jerk."

  "Because it's a nasty modern thing that can go wrong."

  "Stopwatches can go wrong."

  "Put it back in its bag," I said, "while I think of an answer."

  It was in those middle days of the voyage that Angela learned to sail Sycorax. She stood her own watches while I slept below. Life eased for me. And for her. The seasickness was gone and she seemed like a new woman. The strains of London and ambition were washed out by a healthier life. She looked good, she laughed, and her sinewy body grew stronger. The winds also strengthened until we were under sail alone, beating stiffly westwards, close-hauled all the way, but I knew we must soon turn south to run down on the place where a girl had died. Day by day we could see the pencil line closing on the cross, yet it still did not seem real that we sailed to a place of revenge.

  What seemed real was the two of us. It was a child's game that we played, only we called it love and, like all lovers, we thought it could never end. We had run away together for an adventure, but the adventure now had little to do with Kassouli or Bannister; Angela's naked finger on her left hand showed the truth of that. We were happy, but I suppose neither of us forgot the cloud that waited beyond the western horizon. We just stopped talking of it.

  We were busy too. A small boat made of wood and powered by cotton generates work. I repaired the broken cleat, sewed sails, and touched up worn varnish. Our lives depended on the boat, and there was a simple, life-saving rule that no job should ever be deferred. The smallest gap in a sail seam had to be repaired before it ripped into useless shreds. It was a life that imposed its own discipline, and thus enjoyment. "But forever?" Angela asked.

  I was caulking the bridge deck where the mizzen had strained a timber. "For as long as it takes."

  "For as long as what takes?"

  "I don't know."

  "Nick!"

  I leaned back on the thwart. "I remember waking up in the helicopter after I was wounded. I knew I was hurt bad. The morphine was wearing off and I was suddenly very frightened of dying. But I promised myself that if I lived I'd give myself to the sea. Just like this." I nodded towards
the monotony of the grey-green waves. "That stuff," I said, "is the most dangerous thing in the world. If you're lazy with it, or dishonest with it, or try to cheat it, it will kill you. Is that an answer?"

  Angela stared at the sea. We were under full sail, close-hauled and making good progress. Sycorax felt good; tight and disciplined and purposeful. "What about your children?" she asked suddenly. "Are you abandoning them?"

  She touched a nerve, and knew it. I bent again to the caulking. "They don't need me."

  "Nick!" she chided.

  "They need me as I am. Hell, they've got Hon-John, and Mumsy, and the bloody Brigadier, and the floppy great nanny, and their ponies, and Melissa. I'm just the poor relation now."

  "You're running away from them," Angela accused me.

  "I'll fly back and see them." The words were inadequate, and I knew it, but I did not have a proper answer. Some things just have to wait on time.

  We turned south the next day and our mood changed with the new course. We were thinking of Bannister now, and I saw that very same night how the two rings appeared again on Angela's hand. She shrugged when she saw that I'd noticed.

  We spoke of Bannister again. Now, though, Angela spoke of his innocence, telling me again and again how she had insisted on hearing the truth before they married. Nadeznha, she said, had been killed when a wave swamped Wildtrack's aft cockpit. The grounds of her belief, I thought, were as shifting as those of Yassir Kassouli's, but I said nothing.

  "If we don't find him," she said, "and he's all right, then I can fly home from Canada before he reaches Cherbourg?"

  "Yes," I promised her. She was planning her departure from me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My immediate worry was the glass. It had begun to fall fast, and I knew we were in for a bad blow and that, by sailing south, we sailed towards the depression's vortex.

  We won that race by hours. We reached our destination before the gale reached us. We reached the blank and featureless place where, a year before, a girl had died. The clouds were low, dark and hurrying. The sea was ragged and flecked. I hove to at mid-day as a kind of tribute, but neither of us spoke. There was no ship in sight, nor any crackle on the radio. I wished I had a flower to throw into the sea, then decided such a tribute would have been maudlin.

  "Are you in the right place?" Angela asked.

  "As near as I can make it, yes." I knew we could be miles away, but I had done my best.

  "We don't even know that Kassouli planned to meet him here," Angela said. "We only guessed it."

  "Here, or nowhere," I said. But the truth was that we did not know. We had sailed into nothing because that had seemed better than doing nothing, but now that we had arrived there was still nothing we could do.

  Angela, her face hardened by the sea and her hair made wild by the wind, pointed Sycorax's bows to the west. I let her choose the course, and watched as she sheeted home the foresails and pegged the tiller. The cat sharpened its claws on a sailbag.

  "Perhaps," Angela said after a few minutes, "they haven't reached here yet?"

  "Perhaps." On my Atlantic chart I had marked Wildtrack's presumed progress, and if my guesses were right then our meeting would have been a close-run thing, but the growing seas made any chance of a sighting unlikely.

  Angela stared around the empty sea. "Perhaps they didn't even come this way?"

  "Perhaps."

  The seas were growing and the visibility was obscured by a spume that was being whipped off the wavetops. Angela, without asking me, but with the new confidence born of the days we had shared, reefed the mainsail and stowed the staysail. The waves were running towards us; some of them smashed white on our stem and under their pounding Angela's confidence began to shred like the wavecrests. "Are we in for a storm, Nick?"

  "Only a gale. That isn't so bad. I don't like storms."

  By twilight we were under the heavy canvas of storm jib and mizzen staysail alone. Both sails were tiny, yet they kept the heavy hull moving in the churning water. Angela and I were both oilskinned and harnessed, while the cat was imprisoned below as Sycorax staggered in troughs of green-black waves that were scribbled with white foam. The sky was smeared with low quick clouds and the wind was loud in the rigging. Angela was shivering beside me. "Where are the lifebelts?" she shouted.

  "I don't have any. If you go over in this, you're dead anyway. Why don't you join Vicky?"

  She was tempted, but shook her head. "I want to see a gale."

  She would have her gale, and was lucky she was not in a full-blooded storm. Yet even so that night was like an echo of creation's chaos.

  The noise is numbing. The wind's noise is everything from a knife-sharp keening to a hollow roar like an explosion which lasts forever. The sea is the percussion to that mad music, hammering through the boat so that the timbers judder and it seems a miracle that anything made by man can live.

  The noise is bad, but the sight of a gale-ripped sea is worse. It's a confusion of air and water, with foam stinging like whips in the sky, and through that chaos of white and black and grey the great seas have to be spotted and the boat must be steered by or through them. After dark the wind veered to set up cross-seas. The main swell still roared from the west in big seas, but now the crests were saw-edged by the crossing waves, yet still Sycorax rode the waters like the witch that she is. We staggered up the sides of ocean mountains and spilt at heart-stopping speed down to their foam-scummed pits. I felt the tug of the tons of cold water on her keel, and once I heard Angela scream like the wind's own eldritch shriek as Sycorax laid over on her side and the mainmast threatened to bury itself in a skirl of grey-white water.

  Sycorax was upright, hauled there by the metal in her keel, the same metal that would take her like a stone to the ocean's bed if the sea won this night's battle. Except it was no battle. The sea had no enmity, it was blind to us and deaf to us, and there comes a moment when the fear goes because there seems no hope any more, just submission.

  Water boiled over the decks, ran down the scuppers, and swamped the cockpit drains. I made Angela pump; forcing her to do it when she wanted to stop, for the exercise made her warm. The cold would kill us before the sea did. The sea might flog, claw and tear at us, but the cold would lull us to death. I made her go down to the cabin to get warm and to fetch the Thermos and sandwiches we'd made ready. She brought me the food, then went below and stayed there, and I imagined her huddled in her bunk with the cat clutched in her arms. I pumped as Sycorax climbed the crests and I steered as we careened madly down the wind-crazed slopes. The wind was making my eyes sore. It was a wind born somewhere in the heartland of North America, brewed in the heat of the wheat fields and twisted into a depression that would race round the ocean's rim to take rain to the barley fields in England. Yet, despite the steepness of the seas, I sensed that this was not one of the great ship-breaking storms that could rack the Atlantic for days, but merely a snarling wildcat of a low that would skir across the water and be gone. On a weather chart this gale would look no bigger than the one in which Nadeznha Bannister had died.

  Even before the night was out the wind was lessening. It still seethed in the rigging and flicked the water off the crests, but I could feel the boat's motion easing. The gale was passing, though there was still a sickening wind and a cross-sea confusing the threatening swell. I opened the cabin hatch once and saw that Angela slept.

  I hardened the boat into the wind, took down the aft staysail and hoisted reefed mizzen and main. The wavetops slashed across Sycorax and rattled on her sails. Angela still slept, but I stayed awake, searching for a yacht running fast towards Europe.

  My search was merely dutiful, for I believed we had missed Wildtrack. The odds of finding Bannister's boat had always been astronomical, and so I expected to see nothing, and when, in the shredding dawn, I did see something, I did not at first believe my salt-stung eyes.

  I was tired and cold, and I thought I'd seen a lightning flash. Then I thought it was a mirage, and then I saw the ref
lected glow of the flare on the clouds above and I knew I'd seen that pale sheen before. It was a red distress flare that cried for help in the middle of nowhere. It flickered out, then another seared to burst against a dirty sky made ragged by the gale's wake and I knew that, either by ill-luck or by God's loving mercy, we had come to the killing place. I pushed back the hatch and switched on the radio, but there was only the crackling hiss of the heavens. Sycorax was juddering to the short steep waves that ran across the grain of the surging swell. Angela was still curled in a corner of the bunk. "I've just seen flares," I said.

  It took her a sleepy moment to understand. "Wildtrack?"

  "I don't know." I tried not to sound hopeful, but the look on Angela's face told me I'd failed.

  She struggled into her oilskins and came up to the cockpit. She closed the hatch to keep the seas from swamping the cabin, then hooked her lifeline to a jackstay and I saw her shudder at the height of the great green swell that was running down on us. Sycorax soared her way up the slopes and slalomed down again. At each crest I stared ahead, but saw no more flares.

  I began to think I had hallucinated. I stood in the scuppers, holding on to the port mizzen shrouds, and searched the broken sea. Nothing. The wind was slowing and veering. I was tempted to let go a reef in the mainsail, but, just as I was plucking up the energy to make the effort, Angela shouted.

  "Nick!" Her voice was snatched by a wind gust. "Nick!"

  I looked where she was pointing. For a second I saw nothing but the jumbles of foam on the waves' glassy flanks, then, a half-mile off, I saw the yacht.

  A yacht. It had to be Wildtrack.

  But not the Wildtrack we both remembered; not the great and gleaming rich man's toy, so sleek and proud and towering. Instead we saw a dismasted yacht, half-swamped, with warps cascading from decks awash with water. She rolled to each sea like a waterlogged cask. We had arrived, and we had failed, for she was nothing but an abandoned hulk. For a second I dared to hope that this wreck was of some other dismasted yacht, but then a heave of swell momentarily bared the hull's flank and I saw the distinctive bold blue flash. It was Wildtrack . We had sailed over seventeen hundred nautical miles and by a miracle we had found her, and by a cruel fate we had found her too late.