by Jase Kovacs
Abruptly the horrific noises cease, and we're gliding through the water, running downwind to the northeast. The reef is a dark barrier to our starboard, and I start to edge closer to the north to make up distance. "Zac, you remember how to gybe?"
His voice is tight and high and he has to lick his dry lips before he can answer. "Uh… that's when we turn the boat's stern through the wind."
"That's it. We'll gybe and then come down on the canoe again. Stand by to gybe. I'll let off the leeward sheet, you stand by to winch on the windward when I tell you." As I speak, I pull in the main as tight as it will go. "Okay, let's go."
I spin the helm over to port. The yacht comes around and the genoa flaps and hangs loose as the stern comes though the wind. A vast pop above us as the main fills on the opposite tack and then I release the windward genoa sheet and Zac hauls in the leeward sheet, his teeth gritted in agony as he pulls in madly. Without prompting, he starts to winch, and I can't help but feel a small moment of pride to see him carry out the rest of the manoeuvre without further orders.
Reuben's crew have profited by our carelessness. They're under way again — another man has the steering oar under his arm. They're taking advantage of their shallow draft to run straight over the reef where we can't follow. "Goddamnit!" I shout when I realise this. "We'll have to go around."
It's late morning now. I can see, far out to the west, twin tiny triangles of Aotea's sails, hull down over the horizon. She's heading north; she must have made it out of the passage and will be home before dark. So close to home. Hell, we've been so close to home this whole time. I think that is why I'm so determined not to let Reuben escape; he knows all the secrets of our backyard. How dare they — Reuben, Deborah, all of them — serve those monsters that threaten our very existence?
"Blong, get up into the spreaders again. Let me know as soon as you see a way through the reef." I turn to give Zac his orders, only to find him watching me with a bizarre expression on his face.
"Matty. You shot Reuben. The others are running. We don't need to do any more."
I can't believe what I'm hearing. For a moment I think that I'm dreaming again. "Are you insane? They can't get away."
"They're no threat to us. They charged at us with knives when we had guns. That doesn't sound dangerous to me. It sounds desperate." On his face is a mix of emotion that I'm having trouble processing. Doubt. Fear. I even see a hint of pity there, something that fills me with a white-hot rage. "It sounds like they were fleeing for their lives, driven to a suicidal charge."
"Have you gone mental? We can't let them get away. They'll tell the Green Lord—"
"Tell him what? He drew Deborah here across a hundred miles of ocean. He must know she's gone. He probably knows everything that transpired here. You said so yourself — he is much more powerful than the Pale King."
"Zac, if you don't have the stomach for this war, then get belowdecks and out of my way. That suicidal charge was nothing but a fucking gambit to lure us onto the reef."
"You're giving them too much credit. Look at that canoe. Look at how thin and pitiful those people are. They're as much victims as those they hung from their crosses. Deborah's gone. Reuben probably too. How does it profit us to kill slaves? What sort of monsters would that make us?"
I catch sight of Blong, peering around the corner of the cockpit. "Goddamnit, Blong!" I shout. "I ordered you to get up the fucking mast!"
He flinches back, his eyes dropping down, shrinking as if I had just slapped him. Hot regret rushes through me, quenching my anger. Zac looks as shocked as I feel.
I feel my mouth working, but the words that should give shape to my feelings aren't there. I turn away to the canoe that races away to the south, its crew a row of hauned faces looking back at us. No sign of Reuben. Did I really see hate and hunger for me when they came at us? Or was it fear and desperation? Memories flit through my mind: the suicidal charges I've made, when I thought all were lost. What would Katie think, if she was here to comment?
As if summoned, I hear her voice float up from deep within. What would Mum and Dad say?
I turn back to them. Blong's eyes are dark, hurt, and soulful; Zac's burn with a fevered earnestness that I realise is a source of true personal strength and integrity. I try to say something again, to put into words my doubt and regret, and I understand the conflicting dark forces that are growing in strength within me. But nothing comes out, and I realise that hate and anger have been my motivating force for a long time now.
Zac puts out his arm and squeezes mine. "Come on, skipper," he says. "Take us home."
***
Later, we are sailing across the wide-open sea to the south of Madau. The sun blazes brilliantly overhead, yet the day is cool and the south wind refreshing. The shadows and dark places where monsters live are a strange and foreign concept, safely locked, for the moment, in our past. This afternoon, our world is a brilliant blue ocean of unfathomable beauty and potential, as is our verdant green island edging the near horizon. The petty political conflicts of the expats on Madau seem as distant and irrelevant as caves haunted by demons.
Other islands within sight hold horrors and threats that defy comprehension, and our memories are much like them: a confused mass of life and incident where danger can rise from shadows to overwhelm us and where people's motives and intentions, even our own, are confusing and unclear.
Blong comes to me warily, and I hold him until I feel the tension drain out of his slight form. He is bigger now than when I found him on Black Harvest. A proper healthy diet has a lot to do with that, but there is also the sense that he is growing into himself. A boy for whom I have made myself responsible. It was for him, if no other living person, that I realised I could not get lost in my own wrath. Because when he drew away from me, I saw that he was frightened not of my anger but of the beast he saw lurking within me. That lurks within us all.
Those dark thoughts seem to have no place in the afternoon we sail back to Madau. War is coming, and my future will be full of battles and loss and a desperate struggle for victory.
But for now the three of us are free of any obligation beyond sailing our boat home. The past drags us down like an anchor, but our sails are full of life and urge us onwards, always onwards, towards a bright new future.
THE END
A message from Jase
Thanks for reading Slack Water. The Southwind saga will continue with FLOOD TIDE, available on AMAZON in September 2016. Until then, you can get an exclusive free story set in the Southwind Saga world - see below:
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Also by Jase Kovacs
Ebb Tide - Book One of the Southwind Saga
Imagine the world ended while you were at sea. A two week blue water passage becomes a journey into an unknown future when a virulent plague wipes out humanity.
Where would you go? How would you survive?
And what would happen to your children?
Thirteen years after the Great Dying, a vicious plague that wiped out 99% of humanity, Matai is the last surviving member of a famous sailing family. Alone, she sails her yacht - Voodoo - through a shattered world. Battling the elements and vicious survivors, she struggles to keep the failing systems of her boat - her home - going.
She uses every ounce of ingenuity and knowledge gleaned from her passed parents to perform the day to day maintenance necessary to stay afloat. She has become a scavenger by necessity; searching deadly shipwrecks for anything that can keep her alive - or that she can trade with other survivors.
For the isolated islands of the Pacific are now the last scattered bastions of humanit
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Also by Jase Kovacs: A Dirty Peace
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In this powder keg of old grudges and bad memories, four people hunt a murderer:
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Elise, an aid worker healing from a personal tragedy.
Nestor, a child soldier lost in the country he fought to free.
Manasseh, a UN Police Officer forced to define himself by what he is not.
Their investigation plunges them deep into a web of international intrigue when Nick learns of a plot by Islamic terrorists to attack the UN peacekeepers.
Or does he? Caught between Australian spies, the United Nations and local police, they must examine their own pasts to discover the truth.
Poetic and haunting, A DIRTY PEACE draws from the deep tragic history of a beautiful land steeped in tradition and mystery and asks what happens when the war ends and the lustre of peace fades.
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Also by Jase Kovacs: The Silent Circus
1941. The German blitzkrieg plunges into Eastern Europe.
Ten year old Ulis’ childhood ended the night the planes burnt his city to ashes.
As he flees Nazi death squads and Soviet partisans, he is driven deep into an ancient, malevolent forest, his only companion a fellow orphan named Lidyja.
Lost in an endless mire, they are rescued by the strange denizens of a circus hiding deep within the forest. For a while, Ulis and Lidyja think they are safe, having found a new family, a strange and peculiar family of Siamese twins and silent ape kings and freaks and mystics.
But the Ringmaster is dead and the children soon learn that the war outside holds no monopoly on horror.
The Silent Circus is a dark fable in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy. Bleak and evocatively written, it examines the price of survival through the eyes of a child.
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About the Author
Jase Kovacs is a former infantry officer who now lives aboard an old sailing yacht in south east Asia with his partner, Jolene.
Together, they are the principle members of Team Labyrinth, a sailing conservation film making team that highlights local environmental issues and local heroes and gives them the publicity they deserve. By buying this book, you have helped Team Labyrinth continue its work.
Read more at Team Labyrinth’s site.