He felt he was about to fall, and he thrashed his arms and legs as if this would save him ... but he only turned laterally until he was facing towards the south. Hovering in this alien air, he looked across the Frome Valley towards the Purbeck Hills, and beyond these to the glistening sea, silver and sunlit.
He closed his eyes, forcing the sight away from him ... but when he opened them again nothing had changed.
Looking towards the ground, Harkman felt for the first time the vertiginous effect of his height, and as if this had released something which until then had suspended him, he began to fall. The air roared in his ears, and he felt the pressure of wind on his arms, legs and stomach. The ground seemed to rise up to strike him, and in real fright he clawed at the air with his hands, as if grasping for a rope or a net.
At once his motion ceased, and he was suspended again in the air, although noticeably lower than before. Now he could hear the traffic on the road; a motorbike was overtaking an articulated lorry, and the sound of its exhaust hammered at him.
Harkman wished himself higher ... and at once he felt the pressure of the wind on his back, and he soared upwards. When he had attained his former height, he made himself turn around again ... and he stared across at the quiet countryside, with its wooded hills and its verdant fields and pastures.
What he saw had no meaning for him: it was the product of some unconscious wish that he could not control.
It was something that had excluded him, something that he had in turn rejected.
Because it was from the unconscious past, unremembered, it was at once wholly intimate and voluntarily relinquished. It was the landscape of his dreams, a world that was not real, could not ever become real.
As once before, when he had unconsciously rejected this phantasm from his life, Harkman exercised a conscious option, and expelled the dream.
He looked down at his body: the shiny wet-suit appeared, and was clinging to him, the drops of salt-spray scintillating in the bright sunlight. There was a tightness across his chest, and a weight on his back. Something black and soft and padded wrapped itself around his head, and his vision dimmed as the visor of the helmet fell across his eyes.
Oxygen from the cylinder on his back began to hiss, and he breathed deeply.
He turned himself in the air until he was upright, and he felt for and found the roughened upper surface of the tide-skimmer. The throttle control wrapped itself around his right foot.
He made a few corrections of attitude: leaning forward and tipping the nose of the craft downwards.
The wind started to blow, and the streamlined shape of the skimmer responded, planing in the currents. Harkman kept control, shifting his weight and balance to maintain the craft on an even keel.
A penumbral darkness fell as the Blandford wave curled again over his head; below, the almost vertical rising wall of the wave was a multifaceted frozen mirror of sunlight.
The wave began to move above him, starting and stopping, like the frames of a film inching through a projector. Harkman, truly afraid of the wave’s elemental violence, halted the motion, still seeking to balance the skimmer in the cross-current of wind.
He began to fall, and he lost control of the wave. The nose of the skimmer was pushed up by the wind, and with a desperate outbalancing of arms he managed to bring it down again. The skimmer slapped heavily against the water, and at once he gunned the engine, staggering for balance. He glanced up, saw the black pipeline curling down above him ... and in terror of the wave he raced the skimmer down the slope, down and down and down.
Seconds later, the wave crashed behind him, and foam and spray deluged him, reaching out to clutch him. He was still upright, still racing the wave, still outdistancing it by a few crucial metres that saved him from being overwhelmed by the crushing, swirling spume. He was in the open waters of Dorchester Bay now, the skimmer leaping in spray from the crest of one swell to the next ... but still the wave tumbled and crashed and flooded behind him, dwarfing him even in its collapse.
As the wave spread and flattened it lost its forward speed, and soon Harkman had left it behind him. He turned the skimmer towards the west, and headed for Dorchester. In time he was passing the beaches, where a few tourists still sprawled beneath their multi-coloured umbrellas, and Harkman waved meaninglessly to the people, trying to convey the excitement that was in him.
He raced the tide all the way, and when he skimmed smoothly into the shallow waters of the harbour the visitors’ yachts were still grounded on the mud.
When evening came that day, he and Julia walked down to Sekker’s Bar for a meal of local sea-food, and on the way they paused to look at the goods on sale at the Maiden Castle stall. Mark and Hannah were standing behind the counter as usual, but today there was a new girl serving with them. She looked at David and Julia with curiosity but failed to interest them in buying anything.
As they left the stall, a young peddler dressed in the clothes of Maiden Castle stepped out of the crowd and approached them.
‘Would you look at a mirror, sir?’ he said, and held out a circular glass before Harkman’s face.
‘No, thank you, David Harkman said, and Julia, holding his arm, laughed and pressed herself closer to him. As they went up the steps to the patio of Sekker’s Bar, they heard a girl’s voice shouting angrily, and a few moments later there was a tinkling of broken glass on the paving-stones.
A Dream of Wessex Page 25