Wildtrack

by Bernard Cornwell

  I hesitated. I wanted to vent my anger at Kassouli over the air, I wanted to accuse him of murder, I wanted to tell him that I did not think his daughter had been murdered, I wanted to tell him that his perfect American Princess had chosen a Boer brute for her lover, but somehow, in this stinging ocean, the truth seemed out of place. There had been too much killing, too much anger, and it was time for it all to end. Revenge breeds revenge, and I had the chance to end it now. So I hesitated.

  "Are you receiving me, Sycorax? Over."

  "Bannister's death was an accident," I lied, and only after I'd told the lie did I wonder whether my motive was simply to stay alive for, if I'd accused Kassouli of murder, then the great Leviathan might have returned from the north and crushed me like matchwood. I pressed the button again. "All three deaths were accidents, Kassouli, all three."

  Kassouli ignored my protestation that his daughter's death had been an accident. He was silent. There was nothing but the wind and the sea and the hollow emptiness of the gale's dying throes. Kerak had vanished and the radio only hissed. I watched for a few minutes, but nothing appeared in the north. Kassouli, I thought, had succeeded and his daughter's soul could fly free. It was over.

  I killed the engine, took down the shredded storm jib, stowed the gallows, and set the reefed mainsail while Angela hoisted the mizzen. She pegged the tiller, then helped me down to the cabin where, before I could put butterfly sutures on my cut hand, I first peeled off my wet, stiff, torn oilskins. I was shaking with cold and fatigue. Angela found the strength to make oxtail soup, to wrap me in a blanket, and then to hold me tight as though she could pour her own body warmth into me.

  "Tony was dead?" she asked at last.

  "He was dead."

  "And it was an accident?" she asked, and I realized she must have heard my words on the radio.

  "It was an accident." I shivered suddenly, remembering the slit throat, then the image of the blood boiling up from Sycorax's stern drove the memory of Bannister's body from my mind. I closed my eyes for a second.

  "Tell me the truth, Nick, please." Angela was staring very gravely into my eyes. But I did not know what cause the truth would serve now. If I told Angela the truth there was no saying where her intense nature might take her. It was over and she would live better in ignorance. I tried to move off the bunk, but Angela pressed me back. "Nick!"

  "I need to set a course for St John's," I said.

  "What happened to Tony, Nick?" Angela asked. The seas were hammering our hull, shaking us.

  "The boat was knocked down." I made the story up as I went along. "Mulder broke his leg. Tony was struck on the head. I don't think Mulder tried very hard to save his life, but it was an accident. He was unconscious. I think he died of exposure in the end. It's the cold that does it. It can be so bloody cold." I was shivering as I spoke.

  "Mulder told you that?" Angela asked suspiciously.

  "I saw the body." I closed my eyes. "It was an accident."

  I think Angela believed me. It was better that way. If I'd told her the truth about her husband then I do not think she could have resisted using it. She would have mocked Kassouli for his daughter's choice of lover, she might even have tried to take Kassouli to court. Wherever her life went now, I thought, she did not need Yassir Kassouli's enmity to haunt her. Thus, at least, I justified my untruths to myself.

  Angela sat back on the other bunk and dragged a thin hand through her lank hair. "I need a bath. God, I need a bath."

  The metallic squawk of the VHF startled us both. "Yacht Sycorax. This is merchant vessel Kerak, over." I did not recognize the man's voice that had an American accent.

  Angela picked up the microphone. "Kerak. This is Sycorax, over."

  The voice betrayed no surprise that a woman had answered his call. "Our determination is that Wildtrack's hull is a danger to shipping. Can you confirm that there's no one aboard? Over."

  Angela looked at me, I nodded, and she pressed the microphone button. "There's no one alive," she said curtly.

  "Thank you, Sycorax. Over and out."

  I could feel Kassouli's brooding presence like a threat. I slid back the coachroof and climbed to the bridge deck. Angela joined me. Neither of us spoke, but we both wondered whether the great tanker would come back to crush us for being inconvenient witnesses to a rich man's anger. We waited two minutes, then the vast shape appeared from the grey north. Kerak had turned and come back to us.

  She had come back to finish her rotten task. I saw the swollen bow wave pushing ahead of her, evidence that the engines drove the tanker at full speed. She was not coming towards Sycorax . I looked for Wildtrack , but could not see her among the broken waters. The tanker could see her, though, and was aiming all her weight at the half-sunk yacht. Angela's face was expressionless. "Is Tony's body still on board?"

  I took her hand. "Yes."

  Then the Kerak struck the floating hulk. I doubt if a shudder went through the hundred thousand tons. She hit the floating hull and I saw Wildtrack ride up the bulb at the Kerak 's prow and she seemed to be caught there like a piece of driftwood trapped by the steel bows.

  The Kerak ploughed on. The spinning windscreens on the bridge looked like the malevolent eyes of a machine. There were lights behind the windows, and figures moving there in the soft comfort of the huge boat.

  Angela cried then. She had loved Bannister enough to marry him. She had put flowers in her hair for a handsome man, and now she watched his dream being sunk into two thousand fathoms of water.

  Wildtrack freed itself of the tanker's bows. For a second the yacht's handsome, blue-streaked hull reared up, a toy boat against the steel wall that broke it, then, sliding and crumpled, Wildtrack was sinking down to where Nadeznha Bannister's bones lay, down to where there are no storms, and no light, and only silence.

  "Oh, Jesus," Angela said, and it sounded like a prayer. I said nothing, but just watched the tanker recede into the grey nothingness of the ocean. Only when it had at last disappeared did either of us speak again. "Is there an airport at St John's?" Angela asked in a small voice.

  I nodded.

  "Nick?"

  "It's all right," I said, "I understand." I'd always known that she was no girl for a small boat in a great sea, but I had dared to hope. Now I knew she would go home and so I set Sycorax's bows towards the west. West towards Canada, west towards parting, and west away from the unmarked place where the dead would lie in silence while the corroding salt dissipated their bones so they would drift as a nebulous part of the very sea itself until the dying sun would one day boil the oceans dry.

  Sycorax dipped her bows to the sea and sluiced green water down her scuppers. She at least had come home, while we sailed on, in silence.

  EPILOGUE

  It was a hard winter. Frosts, fog and a cold to pierce the very soul. Yet it was a hard winter in a good place. I liked Newfoundland; it had the virtues of a place where honest folk did decent work.

  Sycorax's stem had been undamaged by the collision with Wildtrack. One copper sheet had ripped loose, but it took just a few minutes' work at low tide to nail it back into place. I re-rigged the guardrails and had a new storm jib made from heavy cotton. The sail took the last of my savings, but Vicky and I did not starve. I found work, illegally, in a boatyard.

  Vicky grew. A rat came aboard and lived just long enough to regret the transgression. Vicky, blooded at last, disdained my congratulations and instead stalked along the frost-rimed scuppers with her tail aloft in victory. She was my company now; she and the photograph of Angela that I'd screwed to the bulkhead above the portside bunk.

  I stripped the engine down and rebuilt it. I welded a radar-reflector from scrap metal and fastened it below the spreaders. I made my boat ready.

  In the early spring I took Sycorax north; not on a voyage, but to test the engine and new jib. We sailed till the sky was brilliant with the reflected sun from the ice-fields. There was a stiff cold breeze coming from the north-west and, well short of the treacher
ous ice, and beneath a sky rinsed of colour and cloud, I backed the staysails and eased the main so that Sycorax , tractable and steady, lay hove-to.

  I had read Angela's letter a dozen times, now read it one last time. The inquest had blamed the deaths of Bannister and Mulder on the pressures of modern ocean-racing. Neither Kassouli's name, nor his presence at Wildtrack 's end, had been mentioned, and my notarized and sanitized affidavit had been given scarcely a glance. The verdict was that the deaths were accidental. Angela thought the film about me could be cut into a fifty-minute programme and would I consider taking Sycorax to England so she could shoot an end sequence? But she did not want me to go home just for that sequence. She had taken over Bannister's production company and she knew I could help her. Please, Nick, she wrote, come home.

  I sat there getting cold, and staring into the shimmer above the brilliant ice. There was a temptation to go home; to trade a medal for comfort and friendship and safety; but it was a temptation to avoid. I was one of life's plodders; no match for the glittering people who made television and money. Back home I would have to compete with bright, sharp minds. Back home was a world that Kassouli and his likes ruled.

  But I had said I would sail to New Zealand. There was no reason for New Zealand; it might have been Utopia or La-la land for all that it mattered, it was just a goal to keep me in the cockpit of my boat and beholden to no one. I'd gazed, one year ago, out of a hospital window and found a star to snare in a sextant's mirror, and now I was where the star had fetched me. I was lonely, alone with a sea cat, and happy. I competed with no one, felt no jealousy, and wished no man ill. Here, at sea, I could be honest, for to be anything less was to risk the sea's power. Here there were no bad dreams, no nights riven with tracer or seared by phosphorus, and my leg, like my rebuilt engine, worked most of the time.

  So here I would stay. I released the foresail sheets and Sycorax dipped her bows as we turned and as Vicky pounced on the fluttering sheets of Angela's letter. I picked her up and scratched under her chin as Sycorax caught the wind and drove forward.

  "So now that we've arrived," I said to Vicky, "where shall we go?"

  About the Author

  Bernard Cornwell is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Saxon Tales, which include The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North, and Sword Song, as well as the Richard Sharpe novels, the Grail Quest series, the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles, the Warlord Chronicles, and many other novels, including Stonehenge and Gallows Thief. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod.

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  WILDTRACK. Copyright © 1988 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader June 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-165082-6

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  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  Part Four

  EPILOGUE