disqualification.’
Then several happenings converged: a gurgling subterranean grumble slowly grew to a growl and then a roar; the water began to seethe as if coming to the boil; the sun’s rim emerged from the eastern hills and cannon boomed from the northern and southern gatehouses, belching out plumes of green smoke to mark the advent of spring.
Orelia decided to pole, keeping the paddle for emergencies. You had to be careful to keep your weight central, she’d quickly learned, or the coracle went one way and you the other.
Strimmer eyed the field and found little to trouble him. Jones would do the usual. Trimble he could deal with. Fanguin, surely too old to be a threat, would be further handicapped by the imbecile historian. Roc had pedigree, but no experience.
‘No dirty work, Strimmer!’ Trimble wagged a finger as she passed.
‘Now would I ever—?’
‘How about last year?’ added Miss Trimble fiercely.
Fanguin harboured similar thoughts to Strimmer about the value of his deputy. Oblong was not concentrating as a mariner should, being transfixed by the movement within the upper reaches of Miss Trimble’s Viking costume.
‘What are you gazing at?’ yelled Fanguin. ‘We’re being passed by the School Porter – how humiliating is that? – keep her at bay, man . . .’
Fanguin flung off his dodo beak as it clacked against his pole for the umpteenth time. Slowly but surely they picked up speed. As the boats turned back for the start, the water, silver as a fish’s back a moment earlier, shone like burnished copper.
‘Middle of the field,’ boomed Fanguin, ‘just where we want to be.’
Oblong kept terror at bay by musing on the origins of this tradition. Had Rotherweird been invaded by coracle, escaped by coracle, invented the coracle – or had some traveller arrived by coracle and set a fashion? Unravelling such mysteries was the historian’s task. He let his imagination roam as Fanguin, bent over with a hand on each side of the coracle, whispered, ‘She’s a-coming, boy, a-coming . . .’
Most had experienced the surge before, but it always differed in shape and timing – high left and low right, or vice versa, or high in the middle with curling sides. This year the river excelled itself, running high right and left, with a diminishing low point in the middle, which sucked all the coracles into a heaving mass before dispersing them one way or the other. In addition to achieving survival, competitors had to keep right or left of the town in accordance with their flag.
As the surge struck, Gorhambury cut the golden tape marking the start and chaos ensued. Everyone started yelling and gesticulating as their vessels spun and collided, rose and fell. A few unfortunate debutants put poles through the floors of their coracles; others toppled in with little chance of reboarding until the main fleet had moved on. Onlookers cheered and jeered; mariners cursed and encouraged, and Gorhambury noted all infractions, consulting, whenever necessary, his Rulebook.
Whether by luck or timing, the ribbon parted as Orelia swept through, giving her the privilege of an early lead. She felt the great-grand-paternal spirit in her veins as she ducked a side-swipe from Strimmer’s pole like a veteran. She crouched to make her centre of gravity low.
Many W numbers were pushed to the east and E numbers to the west, creating a scrum in mid-stream, even after the surge had passed. Several more tipped over. The Polk gyroscopes could not manage so much contradictory data and the fixed shoes hurled Boris to the left and Bert to the right. With a sound of tearing Velcro, the camel suit disgorged the Polk twins. On the floor of the coracle the shoes still twitched as if inhabited by ghosts.
The brothers hauled themselves ashore.
‘It just needs minor adjustments – so close,’ declared Boris.
‘If you kept the accounts, you’d not be worrying about minor adjustments!’ replied Bert.
Boris’ creativity contributed as much to the family business as Bert’s repairing and accountancy skills, but Boris accepted the hint of rebuke. After all, this looked to be a bumper Race for business.
‘. . . which sucked all the coracles into a heaving mass before
dispersing them one way or the other.’
Strimmer, meantime, was inflicting almost as much damage as the wave. He caught the poleman of a short-odds crew, a pair of frogs, flush on the head. Every successful bump and strike was greeted with a self-congratulatory cry. Leaving empty coracles in his wake, the wasp entered the eastern Rother with only Miss Trimble in front of him.
Fanguin kept low as Oblong shut his eyes: this was the worst of fairground rides. The coracle lurched to meet the sky, slid up one side of the bow wave, wobbled on the crest, then skidded down the back of the surge as it passed. Oblong’s stomach suffered as much as his balance. Fanguin looked unconcerned by being in the middle of the field.
Orelia trusted to instinct and rode the wave, the pole across her like a tightrope walker. Whether by luck or inherited judgement, she narrowly maintained her lead.
Despite the big talk, Fanguin allowed their coracle to drift towards the back of the pack of surviving W numbers. Having found space and plotted a route, he announced, arms akimbo, ‘Ladies and gents –
the “Fanguin rotator”!’ The dodo planted his pole and with a curious swivelling, dancing motion spun the coracle several times and then released, achieving a skimming forward lurch. Jeering and hilarity moved to admiration as in five minutes W4, now passing under the town’s western walls, overtook the parrot and edged ahead of the field on the eastern station.
‘Learned from the Bolivian waterbeetle!’ shouted the dodo-
biologist.
Many rushed to bet on Fanguin-Oblong and the cashiers happily took the money. Fanguin had a record of colourful near-misses in the Great Equinox Race – but they shortened his odds, just in case.
As the Rother split, taking W numbers one side of the town and E numbers the other, more committed supporters of the latter poured over the north bridge and on to Grove Gardens to keep them in view.
No mariner caught the eye like Gregorius Jones, who added his own chivalric code to the Rulebook, attacking only those who attacked him and shouting out warnings to anyone he judged vulnerable to sneaky attacks by the likes of Strimmer. Above all, he practised elegance with a twirl of the pole and a shimmer of the body after every manoeuvre, his resplendent tail opening and shutting all the while. From the bank and then the railings of Grove Gardens, peacock feathers waved as Form VIB cheered on their hero.
Miss Trimble held the lead on the eastern station in determined mood, staring fixedly ahead, until a cry from Jones and a glance behind confirmed that action was called for. Strimmer was closing, his pole shouldered like a lance, the squidgy ball bobbing nearer and nearer the small of her back. She feigned tiredness and then, with Strimmer poised to strike, she abruptly changed tack. Strimmer jabbed so hard at thin air that he lost balance and fell, just managing to stay aboard despite a painful blow to the shins.
In her exhilaration she did not see the recumbent Strimmer raise his pole and take careful aim. With a hiss of compressed air, the pole extended by a third of its length and caught Miss Trimble full on the left shoulder. With a large splash she fell overboard, to a groan from the betting tent. She had been fancied as a dark horse. The extension retracted so quickly that everyone assumed Miss Trimble had lost her footing. The wasp forged ahead to meet his rivals on the eastern side, confident that downing Trimble would deal a double blow.
Strimmer was right: as in previous years, the sight of a woman in the water proved fatal to Gregorius Jones.
‘Jones to the rescue!’ he boomed and plunged overboard.
Miss Trimble was in no mood to be rescued. ‘Go away, you silly man,’ she spluttered, bosom heaving with rage.
‘It’s all right, young woman, I teach river-rescue—’
‘Sod off!’
After further exchanges and a swipe from Miss Trimble’s paddle, Jones gave up. Both were out of the race as potential winners, although Mi
ss Trimble, now helmetless, righted her upturned coracle, hauled herself aboard and resumed. Jones, sitting disconsolate on a mudflat as detached peacock feathers swam away on the current to bring the news to his supporters south of the town, felt a tremor of desire. Angela Trimble had reboarded. She had shown pluck. She knew the code.
To Strimmer’s consternation, three W numbers had reached the confluence of the Rother before him and were only two hundred yards from the finishing line.
At this critical juncture a problem emerged with the rotator technique. After Fanguin’s sustained burst, advancing years and his new retirement diet of Sturdy and risotto were taking their toll. Speechless with exhaustion, Fanguin handed over to Oblong, who had not devoted hours to mimicking the movement of the Bolivian waterbeetle. Like a demented dancer without elegance or rhythm, the coracle jerked round and round the pole with no forward movement. Fanguin put his head in his hands and moaned as the crowd jeered or went silent (depending on their betting choices).
Orelia Roc had both rhythm and elegance. Her slight craft skimmed past Fanguin’s double. Her thighs and calves ached, but she was enjoying herself. To her left she could see Strimmer raising the pace. It would be close.
‘Passed by an antique dealer!’ snorted Fanguin.
Damp and humiliated, Oblong made a final effort. He ran two paces, planted the pole as hard as he could and pushed with his feet. By a miracle of timing the coracle shot forward. Fanguin, amazed, disappeared out of the back and Oblong found himself high in the air. The coracle skimmed on. From his privileged vantage point he surveyed the crowd, all of them laughing.
Oblong glanced down and a simple idea took root. He was a grasshopper. He landed in Roc’s coracle, accidentally tipping her into the Rother to join Fanguin, replanted his pole and flew high into the air once more. Strimmer surged on, left fist raised as victory beckoned.
As if by a miracle, ahead of him, Oblong’s empty coracle, the right way up, skimmed along. Adopting Fanguin’s surfing pose, he freakishly landed like a born gymnast. Impelled by his momentum the coracle accelerated alongside the wasp. They broke the finishing ribbon together. Snorkel, busy calculating his profits, broke his pencil in disbelief. A tie meant two winners, and well-backed winners at that. Roc had finished second (third in view of the tie) and Miss Trimble fifth after a pair of bats.
Gorhambury, peering through his telescope, could only agree.
‘Cheat!’ Strimmer screamed. ‘Stewards’ Enquiry!’
In the winners’ enclosure a scrum surrounded Strimmer and Oblong. A dripping Fanguin belatedly joined them.
‘He’s an outsider,’ protested Strimmer. ‘He can’t count, not alone.’
Oblong meanwhile was more concerned to apologise to Orelia.
‘Never apologise for a smart move,’ she said.
The Umpire’s chair drew up. Gorhambury savoured one of those moments where the Rule of Law struts in plain view on the popular stage. He spoke solemnly, a judge giving judgment: ‘Rule 37 says: The winning coracleer or coracleers hoists or hoist the summer flag on Rotherweird Church Tower at noon on the day of the Spring Equinox. There’s an asterisk to which is appended a footnote in the 1675 edition.’
‘Get on with it, Bore-em-very!’ shouted a wag in the crowd.
Gorhambury produced a worn diary-sized leather volume from under the lectern and turned up the relevant page. ‘In the improbable event of a tie, the first mariner to pass the line in each winning coracle shall race the other to the top of the Church Tower. The first to touch the flagpole shall have the honour and privilege of raising the Equinox flag . . . So it’s Mr Strimmer versus Mr Oblong.’
‘Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen,’ Strimmer crowed grandly to the crowd, ‘he doesn’t know the way and he hasn’t a prayer.’
The betting tents reopened, though not for long. Nobody would bet against Strimmer, although Oblong did receive a winding slap on the back from a soaked Miss Trimble. ‘Legendary leap,’ she said, ‘quite legendary.’
A press of spectators and competitors in their bedraggled costumes followed Gorhambury and the two winners up the Golden Mean to the church. Even the Polks abandoned their work to watch the first tie-break in the Great Equinox Race in living memory. Municipal workers swiftly erected a tape to keep the crowd back.
‘Nervous?’ said Strimmer. ‘You should be.’
Gorhambury replaced his megaphone with a starting pistol and declared the rules of the tie-breaker. ‘The flag is, unsurprisingly, where the flagpole is. First there raises it – and wins. Play fair, gentlemen. We don’t want accidents.’
Oblong could see no scope for accidents. Strimmer knew his way round the church and he did not. It would be over very quickly.
‘On your marks . . . keep to your lane . . . go!’
Oblong jumped as the pistol went off, much to the pleasure of the crowd. Strimmer ran to the front of the church, ignored the door and started to climb stone rungs set in the outside wall.
Oblong went to the door. Locked. More hilarity.
‘Lane!’ shouted Rhombus Smith in his direction. ‘West!’
Oblong blushed. He had not the slightest clue what was going on.
Then Fanguin’s voice boomed over the hubbub, ‘Climb, man, climb!’
He could see Strimmer walking along the spine of the roof over the nave towards the tower and the penny dropped. Strimmer was an E number – so he started at the front. He was a W number, so he must start at the rear, and not go through the church, but up a sheer wall.
Oblong jumped over the cemetery wall and located two parallel rows of stone rungs near the northern corner of the church’s rear wall. They rose to the parapet of the tower high above him.
The crowd, scenting that Oblong would provide richer entertainment, surged through the gravestones after him.
Cocooned in concentration Oblong looked only at the green-grey stone in front of him, climbing up and up until he reached the join of the nave to the tower, marked by a lip and a small gulley, a gap he had to cross to reach the next run of footholds. Wooden slatted windows just above marked the belfry.
Clambering over the ledge broke the spell as Oblong unwisely glanced down and then up. Sky and building spun. A clammy sensation gripped the small of his back. Frozen by vertigo, he used a tiny red spider to restore focus. He placed his right foot on the next rung and began to climb again.
The morning had been calm and the gust of wind caught him unprepared. His gangly legs flailed like a sheet in a gale and his right hand came away. Miraculously, he was thrown across, into and through the shutters. He clambered to his feet to see two large bells hanging beside four smaller ones – but they were nothing compared to the extraordinary frescoes. They were beautiful and, to judge from the colour and relative naïveté, very early.
The west wall illustrated husbandry – cornfields, harvesters, men with sickles, horses, cottages, fishermen, birds; an early version of Rotherweird with no gatehouses and no towers.
The south wall showed the Rother teeming with coracles, crewed by men and women, their urgency explained by a column of armoured soldiers closing on the island. Romans. He could make out the standard bearing the letters SPQR – Senatus Populusque Romanus.
The north wall resembled a doom painting – a soldier being ushered through a cloudy door, to emerge with snout and whiskers like a weaselman, while a second waited behind. Legionary prisoners, it appeared – but why dress the first in an animal mask? Oblong feared some ritual execution, a victory celebration.
The base of the east wall showed a single plant with spreading green stalks and one flower bud. Beside the plant a peculiar tree spread its arms, laden with blossom. In the opposite top corner, pipers played and dancers danced against a background of flowering plants and berries, an incongruous scene set against the others. The central section had been obscured by damp, reacting with the fresco’s paint to produce an explosion of purple, in which disconcertingly, due perhaps to a peculiarity of the particular pigment, is
olated arms and legs survived. Below there appeared the letters MXVII.
A thick carpet of dust recorded his footprints. Nobody had been here in years.
A cheer from the crowd declared Strimmer’s victory. Oblong could not face descending the outside wall again. He found a trapdoor, bolted on his side, leading down to another room with bare walls where a proper staircase delivered him to an alcove behind the choir. His luck had changed. The church door had been unlocked.
Outside, the crowd engulfed Strimmer, throwing him into the air. Strimmer grimaced, unamused by the vulgarity of it all, as Oblong ambled past, suffering no abuse, merely ignored. The spectators began to drift home. Oblong sensed a popular unease, not with the result, but with the aftermath, which he could not place.
‘Bravo, Oblong!’ The ever-loyal Boris Polk approached. ‘I assume Gregorius messed up again. Who was the lucky lady this year?’
‘Miss Trimble.’
‘He doesn’t understand that women wish to be impressed, not rescued. Sorry, gotta go – Bert’s overwhelmed, it’s a bumper year for repairs.’
Oblong walked to The Journeyman’s Gist to find a notice nailed to the door: Closed pending new management – By Order of the Licensing Committee. Now he understood: Rotherweirders must have been discussing the ins and outs of the Great Equinox Race over Ferdy beer in The Journeyman’s Gist for centuries. This year they were forced to drink homebrew in the churchyard.
He noted a telling clue: Snorkel’s name was missing – never court unnecessary unpopularity. Oblong peered inside. Men carried cabling, and on the bar stood a toolbox with the name SLICKSTONE ELECTRICS in red. He felt shocked that such a conservative town could bear such a change without protest.
Two notes awaited him on the front door mat.
Dear Honourable Second,
Support appreciated, performance adequate plus.
Yours in adventure,
The Skipper.
PS Shocking news about the JG.
The second was barely literate.
Rotherweird Page 17