Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  If so, it worked. I stopped.

  “Tim!” David’s voice squawked from the radio.

  “Listen.” I was not replying to David, but rather turning to appeal to the bearded men, but my words were interrupted by a second rifle shot, and this time the bullet whacked into the damp earth even closer to me.

  “Go,” the man with the black beard said.

  “Where’s my daughter!” I shouted at him, and I took a threatening pace forward, but immediately the gunman on the hill fired a third round, and this bullet hissed menacingly close to my head. I froze.

  “For God’s sake, what is happening?” David asked plaintively over the radio.

  I thumbed the transmit button. “They won’t talk, they won’t say where Nicole is, and the gunfire is calculated to make me leave.”

  “I think that might be a very good idea,” David said in a dispassionate voice, “because I’ve spotted another gunman in the house itself. He’s on the top floor, left-hand window. I suggest you withdraw, Tim. We’ve done what we could, now let’s do as we agreed.”

  “Like hell.” I was feeling stubborn, stupidly stubborn. I put the radio back into my pocket and looked defiantly at the black-bearded man. “I have sailed ten thousand bloody miles to see my daughter, and I’m not leaving without speaking to her. Where is she?”

  The man’s only answer was to raise a hand in an evident appeal to the gunman hidden on the escarpment’s crest, who now switched his gun to automatic fire and loosed a whole clip of bullets at me. The sound of the shots crackled in the still air as the bullets churned a patch of nearby ground into a morass. The rounds came so close that I instinctively twisted away and half fell.

  David, thinking that my fall was evidence that I had been shot, fired back.

  The old British army rifle made a much louder report than the gunman’s assault rifle, and, long before the echo of his first shot had faded from the bay, David fired again.

  The effect was extraordinary. The three men who had been confronting me turned and fled.

  Even the man with the ginger beard limped away, still sobbing and gasping. The gunman on the hill began placing single shots very close to me. It was impossible to see where that gunman was hiding because the top of the escarpment was an horrific tangle of rocks and crevices. I decided he was not trying to kill me, but only to drive me away. The Genesis community just wanted to expel me, and, under the encouragement of their marksman’s wicked aim, I turned and walked toward the beach. The hidden gunman, seeing my retreat, instantly ceased fire. David, after his first two warning shots, had also ceased fire. I took out the radio as I walked. “It’s been a bloody washout,” I reported to David.

  “Just get back here,” he said, and I could hear the nervousness in his voice.

  I reached the bluff above the beach. I hesitated there for a few seconds. One part of me, desperate for news of Nicole, wanted to go back and hammer at the door of the house, but when I turned to stare at the ugly building I saw that David was right and that there was indeed a gunman on the upper floor. The man had opened a window and was mutely watching me. The message of his unmoving menace was very clear: that I should go away.

  I went away. I climbed down the steps and started hauling the dinghy toward the water and as I did, one of the gunmen opened a furious fire.

  David responded.

  I stared in horror at Stormchild, expecting to see the bullets chewing up her hull and deck, but Stormchild was untouched, the water around her un-scarred by bullets. David, standing in the cockpit, was working the Lee-Enfield’s bolt furiously. His shots echoed flat and hard from the far hills.

  I left the dinghy and ran halfway up the wooden steps to see what had caused this sudden firefight. Then, crouching so that I was hidden from both Genesis gunmen, I very cautiously peered over the bluff’s edge.

  A single figure dressed in one of the drab gray boiler suits was running frantically toward the beach. It was a young woman who had run from the woodcutting group and now struggled with extraordinary clumsiness toward the sea. For a second I dared to hope it was Nicole, but then I saw this girl had hair as black as night, while Nicole was fair. The fleeing girl tripped and fell, and I was sure she must have been hit, but then she struggled up again. David kept firing, then the second Genesis gunman, the one in the house, saw the girl and opened fire.

  He had seen her too late, and the range was too great. The girl was already close to the concealing bluff. She took one panicked look behind her, then half jumped and half fell over the earthen cliff. For a second I thought she had knocked herself unconscious, but then she struggled up and ran toward me.

  I shoved the dinghy into the water. David was now firing at the house and his shots dissuaded the gunman in the upper window. The farther gunman, the one on the high ridge, had also ceased fire, but only, I suspected, because he was reloading. “Anchor!” I yelled at David. “Get the bloody hook up!”

  The girl, her eyes huge and terrified, swerved into the shallow waves toward the dinghy. She stumbled and fell full-length into the cold sea. She was gasping as she struggled up and scrambled clumsily over the dinghy’s bows. I clambered after her, grabbed the oars, and rowed hard toward Stormchild. The girl, sensibly, was curled on the dinghy’s floor and hidden from the Genesis gunmen. The one on the ridge had opened fire again, but the range was too great and his bullets went wide. The man in the house could have shredded the dinghy with his fire, and I flinched as I saw his gun’s muzzle appear at the windowsill, but then it jerked back as a bullet from David’s gun slapped a puff of stone dust and chips from the wall near the window. Stormchild’s anchor windlass was thumping away, clattering the pawl-dragged chain over the fairlead. David, who was now standing in Stormchild’s bows, fired again at the house. I knew he was not firing to kill, but only to scare, and his tactic seemed to be working.

  I rowed to Stormchild’s far side. “Over you go!” I told the girl. She obediently tipped herself into Stormchild’s scuppers, then slithered into the cockpit. As she wriggled under cover I heard a curious clinking noise and I at last understood why her escape had been so clumsy. She was wearing leg chains.

  I followed her on board, tying the dinghy’s painter to the nearest stanchion. The girl quivered on the cockpit floor.

  “Anchor’s clear!” David shouted at me.

  He had already started Stormchild’s engine, so all I needed to do was ram it into gear. Bullets whiplashed overhead. One clipped the backstay, but did no apparent damage. David fired back. The anchor chain was still clanking aboard, but the anchor was hanging clear of the seabed as Stormchild gathered speed. The water at her stern churned white.

  “I knew this would end badly,” David shouted at me.

  “It hasn’t ended yet!” I said, then ducked as a stream of bullets whimpered overhead. It was the gunman on the escarpment’s crest who was firing, but I suspected we were in much more danger from a group of armed men who were running toward the shabby trawler. Someone must have already been aboard the trawler, because black smoke had started to pour out of its slender funnel.

  “They’re going to chase us,” I warned David.

  David stowed the anchor while I pushed Stormchild to her top speed. Behind us the decrepit, green-painted trawler clanked away from the quay. David came back to the cockpit and winced as someone on board the ancient fishing vessel fired a clip of bullets toward Stormchild’s stern. “Forget the trawler,” I told David, “and take our guest below. Use the hacksaw on those chains and give her something to eat.”

  “Chains!” His eyes widened as he saw the leg irons. “Good Lord above!”

  David took the girl into the saloon as a last hopeless clip of bullets from the hills hissed overhead. Then we were hidden from that land-based gunman as Stormchild reached the tip of the pine-topped headland where a sudden tidal surge carried her out of danger at the speed of a racing dinghy whipping round a mark. I spun the wheel amidships and, with Stormchild’s big turbo-charged engine at ful
l throttle and with her hull borne along by that enormous tide, we traveled quickly away from the trawler. The fishing boat’s stack was spewing a filthy plume of greasy smoke, evidence that her old engine was working at maximum effort.

  A rifle fired from the trawler and the bullet clanged off Stormchild’s transom. A second bullet drove a jagged splinter of teak up from the coaming. That was good marksmanship, too good, and I snatched up David’s discarded rifle and fired two quick bullets at our pursuer. The rifle’s butt slammed into my shoulder.

  “For God’s sake! What’s happening?” With each rifle shot David could sense potential scandal: a man of God caught fighting a private war in Chile.

  “I’m discouraging the ungodly.” I fired again. “How’s the girl?”

  “She seems to be in shock.” David went back below. The gunman on the trawler splashed a clip of bullets into Stormchild’s wake.

  I fired one more time, then turned back to Stormchild’s wheel. The tide swept us on. I was tempted to escape the trawler’s laborious pursuit by turning into one of the high-twisting chasms that opened off the wide waterway, but I did not know which of the chasms were dead ends or which held shallows that might ground us, so it seemed wiser to retrace our steps and hope to outrun the trawler in our wake.

  “They’re calling us on channel sixteen!” David shouted up to me.

  “Saying what?”

  “That we’re kidnapping this girl!”

  “Then tell them to fuck off,” I told him impatiently.

  David doubtless told them to desist from their transmissions, but however politely he phrased his request, its only effect was to provoke another flurry of automatic fire from the trawler. I returned the compliment. The old Lee-Enfield was a wonderfully rugged and reliable weapon, but at that moment I would have given a fair chunk of money to have been equipped with an automatic rifle. Half the trick of winning fire-fights is to scare the other side with as much noise and mayhem as can be created, and a single-shot, bolt-action rifle was a poor producer of mayhem and noise. But, like David, I had always been a fair shot with a rifle and my slow, deliberate fire unsettled the Genesis gunmen, whose aim was made inaccurate by the labored shuddering of the panting trawler.

  “Be careful!” David kept appearing in the companionway to counsel me. “Don’t kill anyone!”

  In the end it was not my marksmanship that saved us, but rather Stormchild. She was by far the faster boat. Our enemies’ shots were falling short or going desperately wide, and after a few minutes their firing became sporadic. Their shots echoed forlornly from the cliffs and bluffs that edged the channel. Those shots did no damage, and soon, as Stormchild went even farther ahead, they ceased altogether.

  Our pursuers still did not abandon their attempts to reach us on the radio. I took out my handheld set and switched it to channel 16 to hear their message. “Genesis calling Stormchild,” the voice intoned, “Genesis calling Stormchild, over.” I assumed they had read our boat’s name through binoculars.

  “Genesis, this is Stormchild, over,” I responded.

  “We’re requesting that you heave-to.” The voice was toneless. “The girl you have on board is a member of our community and needs medical help. Do you understand me, over?”

  “Where’s Nicole Blackburn?” I asked.

  “We’re requesting that you heave-to,” the voice said again.

  “And I’m requesting that you fuck off,” I said, “out,” and I switched off the little radio. My parting insult produced a last fusillade of rifle fire, but the bullets just plopped exhaustedly in our wake. Five minutes later the trawler’s oil-burning engine slowed to a dispirited clank and I saw the craft turn away. We had escaped. It had been a tense few moments, but, as far as I could tell, no one in Genesis had been hurt and we were also safe.

  I went down to the saloon to fetch a thermos of coffee and saw that David had cut off the girl’s shackles, and that she was now wrapped in one of our blankets and sitting in front of the saloon heater. Her soaking wet gray suit was hanging over the back of the chart table’s chair. The girl, who looked to be in her mid-twenties, was glassy-eyed, pale, shivering, and terrified, like a creature dragged back from the grave. “Hello,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

  She offered me a scared look, but said nothing.

  David, his back to the girl, offered me a helpless shrug, as though suggesting that the girl’s wits had fled. David was a good pastor, but not a sensitive one. He offered his parishioners a robust certainty of salvation, but left Betty to deal with their emotional crises. David’s solution to a broken heart was a good brisk walk followed by a stiff whiskey, which worked with some people, but not with most, and was certainly not going to work with the waiflike creature who now shivered in Stormchild’s saloon. “Give her some hot food,” I suggested. “I’ll come down when I can.”

  By dusk we were thirty miles north of the Isla Tormentos. Our pursuers had long disappeared, and their final plaintive radio transmissions had subsided into a crackled silence. As the sun shadowed the ravines with a purple haze I nosed Stormchild into a narrow passage edged with towering black rocks. We seemed to be at the very bottom of the tide, for thick weeds and bunches of mussels showed high above the water-line at the channel’s edges. I crept forward, fearing to hear the scrape of steel on rock as our keel touched bottom, but at last the channel widened into a deep sheltered cove where I was able to rig our mooring lines and drop our anchors. I shut off the engines, and suddenly the world was a place of blessed and wonderful silence. There was not even a wind moaning in the chill, still air. The cliffs soared above us, making an amphitheater of sky in which a thousand thousand seabirds wheeled.

  I was tired and cold, but before going below I paddled the dinghy around Stormchild’s hull to inspect her for bullet damage. There were some holes in her stern and some long shining scratches on her flanks, but otherwise our escape had been miraculously unscathed. I painted the damage over with white paint, because steel rusts with an appalling swiftness if it is not protected from the salt air, then I went below to find that our guest was now fully dressed in a pair of my trousers and one of David’s thick sweaters. She was also weeping hysterically; her thin shoulders heaving and her breath gulping as she huddled on the cabin floor beside the starboard sofa.

  “Has she said anything?” I asked.

  “Not a word, Tim! Not a whimper!”

  David had been unsettled by the girl’s tears, so, to relieve him, I gave him the rifle and told him to go topside and keep watch.

  “You’ll get no sense out of her,” he warned me.

  “Go,” I said, “just go.”

  He went, and I sat down beside our guest to discover just what she might know about my daughter.

  The girl, when I crouched beside her on the diesel-reeking carpet, flinched away as if she thought I was going to hit her. “It’s all right,” I crooned, “it’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you. We’re friends, it’s all right.”

  She made a noise halfway between a choke and a sob, but she calmed somewhat as I droned on as softly and reassuringly as I could. She was a dark-eyed, black-haired girl, who, I guessed, had once been pretty, but now that prettiness had soured into a narrow, hurt face with sallow skin against which her sunken eyes were so big and dark they looked like bruises. Her hair hung lank. Her teeth looked caried and in desperate need of cleaning. Her bare ankles, protruding from the legs of my thick flannel trousers, showed horrid patches of open sores where the steel shackles had abraded her skin.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  She opened her mouth, but only succeeded in making another of the pathetic grizzling sounds.

  I raised a hand to stroke her hair, but she immediately flinched away and made another terrified noise. “I’m not going to hit you,” I said, “it’s all right,” and I put my hand very gently on her shoulder and pulled her toward me, and, after a moment’s initial resistance, she fell against me and began to sob with huge racking heave
s of her thin shoulders. I stroked her long hair, which was sticky with seawater, and kept asking for her name, but she made no response and I began to suspect that she spoke no English, and then, more alarmingly, I feared that she had somehow lost her tongue or vocal chords and could only make the pathetic glottal noises that intermittently punctuated her sobs.

  I stroked and soothed her for a full ten minutes before she startled me by suddenly finding her voice. And when she did manage to speak, she did so with an abrupt and astonishing clarity. “Berenice,” she said. “My name’s Berenice.”

  “Berenice.” I repeated the name, then remembered that Jackie Potten’s friend had been called Berenice Tetterman, and I softly pushed the girl away from me so that I could look into her bruised eyes. “You’re Berenice Tetterman,” I said, “and you come from Kalamazoo in Michigan. I know your friend, Jackie. She’s been looking for you. So has your mother.”

  My words only provoked another flood of tears, but mixed in with the sobs were enough words to confirm that our tattered fugitive was indeed Berenice Tetterman. She told me how guilty she felt about everything, and how she thought her mother might be dead, so I kept repeating that everything was all right now, that she was safe and her mother was alive. Berenice clung with dirty, chipped nails to my sweater, her face buried somewhere in my chest, and slowly, slowly calmed again. She even managed to blurt out a question that seemed immensely important to her. “Are either of you ill?”

  “No, of course we’re not,” I said in the tone one would use to dismiss a child’s ridiculous fantasy of gremlins under the bed or ogres in the night garden.

  She pulled away to look into my face. “You promise?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said very solemnly, “we’re both quite well.”

  “Because he says that people are dying everywhere. He says the AIDS virus is like the Black Death.” Berenice’s eyes had widened into terror as she spoke, and then she began to cry once more, but this time without the awful animal intensity that had made her earlier sobbing so distressing. These new tears were ones of exhaustion and sadness, but no longer of despair.