Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  I could see no one moving around the buildings, or on the hugely stepped floor of the quarry. No boats broke the wind-chopped surface of the straits beyond, though the lip of the quarry hid the closest stretch of water from my high viewpoint. The limestone works seemed deserted; indeed, they looked as though they had been deserted for years, and I felt a twinge of anxiety that Berenice might have invented her story of Nicole using the mine as her sanctuary.

  There was only one way to find the truth, and that was to descend into the quarry. I meant to keep my promise to David, so, before making any move, I used the binoculars to search the lip of the small quarry, then to painstakingly investigate the larger quarry and all its buildings again. I stared hard at every door and window, yet I saw nothing threatening, and the only movement in the quarry was the rippling of the rain-speckled pools under the wind’s lash.

  Still I waited as the rain pelted onto the empty landscape. I had a flask of cold tea and a great slab of fruitcake that I consumed as a second breakfast while I watched the old workings for any signs of life. I was soaked and chilled to the bone, yet I endured the discomfort for a full hour, seeing neither man nor beast. The only oddity, apart from the fact that the quarry and its buildings existed at all, was a tractor that was parked beside one of the ramshackle sheds, but even with the binoculars it was impossible to tell whether the machine had been abandoned fifty years before or just left there a few hours ago. After a further half hour, during which I became increasingly certain that the limestone works were deserted, I picked up my gun and bag and walked down the right-hand edge of the quarry.

  It should have been a moment of heightened apprehension, even drama. For years I had dreamed of finding my daughter, and now, miraculously, half a world away from home, I was carrying a gun into the heart of von Rellsteb’s mad empire. Nicole might be just a mile away from me, and, even if she was at sea, I still hoped that I would find some evidence that she was innocent of anything worse than a fanatical desire to cleanse the planet. I tried to buoy up my anticipation, to tell myself that I was on the brink of a dream’s fulfillment, but I was too wet and too cold and too aching and too tired to feel the proper apprehension.

  So, numbed by cold, I stumbled downhill. I splashed through peaty streams and tripped on thick tussocks of springy grass. My throat was sore and I prayed that it was not the first symptom of a cold. There was still no movement by the huge sheds, which, as I came closer, appeared more and more dilapidated. Whole roof sheets of corrugated iron had been ripped away by the winds to leave rotten holes, in which only the beams were left exposed. Other iron sheets, half loosened by the storms, creaked and flapped in the wind. Rainwater poured off the sloping roofs, cascading through the broken sheets into the shadowed shed interiors. Where there was paint on window frames or doors it was peeling and cracked. The place looked as miserable and deserted as an abandoned whaling station on a remote Antarctic island.

  I stopped a quarter mile from the rusted sheds and again examined them through my binoculars, but still I saw nothing to worry me. I gazed for a long, long time, but saw no one move across the sodden quarry floor or past one of the windows. The quarry, and its old works, seemed as empty as the backside of the moon.

  I reached the bottom of the hill. Now I was just a hundred yards from the sheds. Still nothing threatened me. If an ambush had been set, then the ambushers were being as silent as the grave, but I felt no instinctive apprehension of danger. I only felt the anticipation of disappointment, for it seemed ridiculous that I might find anything of value in this rusted, derelict place. I looked at my watch and reckoned I had time to search for three or four hours and still be back at the fjord long before dusk, and the thought of returning to Stormchild made me long to sit in front of her saloon heater with a hot whiskey-toddy. That tantalizing vision made me wonder whether Stormchild would be waiting when I returned. The rain was falling more heavily and the wind blowing more strongly than it had at dawn; the gale David feared might be swirling its way toward the coast and David might already have taken Stormchild to safety on the last of the morning’s ebb tide. I hoped he would be there nonetheless, for I was soaked through, the rain was leaking down the collar of my coat, and the temptation of Stormchild’s spartan comforts was a torment as I paused once more to search the quarry buildings with the binoculars. No one moved there, nothing threatened, and so, throwing caution to the wind, I splashed through puddles made milk-white by limestone dust to push open the nearest door that hung ajar off ancient rusted hinges.

  I found myself in an old stable, a reminder that these limestone workings must once have been powered by ponies or mules. No one waited for me. No one shouted a warning. I seemed utterly alone as I walked past the old stalls and under the cacophony of the metal roof being tortured by the rising wind. Water dripped and trickled onto the cobbled floor. Some of the stalls still had their iron feeding baskets, while in a couple there were even frayed head ropes hanging.

  Next to the stables, and in equal disrepair, were the bunkrooms where the quarrymen had slept. The windows were broken and the old wooden floor was rotted and covered with bird droppings. A faded calendar was tacked to one wall. I gingerly crossed the room, treading only where nail heads betrayed the existence of joists under the decaying floorboards, and I saw that the yellowing calendar was for the month of Dezember, 1931. The script was a big, black, ornate German gothic. There was a photograph, faded almost to invisibility, that showed a tram in front of a big stone building, while two uniformed men, presumably the vehicle’s proud crew, stood with chests thrust out by the tram’s steps.

  I walked through a door on which the faded word Waschraum was painted in the same black-letter as the calendar. The washroom consisted of lavatory stalls and two zinc-lined troughs. The lavatories were blackened and broken, while the troughs had collapsed under a welter of old water pipes. The roof of this room was almost entirely missing and the rain poured in to make a huge puddle on the decayed floor. Moss and weeds grew thick in some of the broken lavatories, while the stalls still bore their pre-war graffiti, mute wit-nesses to the lonely frustrations of breaking limestone from this quarry at the world’s bitter end.

  I went through another door and edged carefully down a passage from which a number of small rooms opened to my right. Some of the rooms still held the rusted metal frames of old cot beds, and I assumed that the quarry’s managers had once slept here. The windows offered fine views of the Desolate Straits’ blind end where the deceptive waterway widened into an immense and sheltered pool and in which a great ship could easily have turned its full length before docking beside the quarry’s pier. Berenice had told us how Genesis had begun using this anchorage because it was so much more sheltered than the bay at the settlement, and I could see the sense of that decision, for this great sea pool had to be one of the most secure anchorages I had ever seen. It was also an empty anchorage, unless I counted a half-sunken rusted barge that lay at the seaward end of the old pier. On the southern side of the bay was a stone quay which was backed by a row of low stone buildings. Beside the quay was a slipway up which two steel rails ran, evidence that boats could, as Berenice had said, be drawn safely out of the water in this place, but there was no sign of any activity on the quay or on the slipway. There were no yachts or dinghies in sight, just the wet wind, the cold rain, and the empty straits.

  The absence of any boats disappointed and relaxed me. I was disappointed because their absence surely meant that Nicole was not here, but it also meant that no one else from Genesis waited in this dreadful spot, and that, therefore, I could not possibly be in any danger. I decided my enemies must have sailed northward, gone to intercept Stormchild off Cape Raper.

  I went through another door and stopped in sheer amazement. I was also overcome with sudden fear because I found myself standing on a rickety wooden platform high above a machinery floor. The timbers under my feet creaked ominously, and it seemed as if one more step would splinter the old wood and tumble me forty fee
t down to the floor.

  I had entered the largest of all the quarry’s buildings, the tall gaunt shed, which I now saw had been built above and around an excavated pit, and it was in that huge stone pit, shadowed dark beneath me, that the quarry’s old machinery rusted into powder.

  The quarry had been dug to produce limestone. The great rocks, once they had been exploded and dragged out of the mountain, had entered the building to my left and then been processed through the massive crushers and grinders beneath me until, turned into rubble and powder, they had gone spilling down the ramp on my right and into the holds of ships waiting at the pier. Then, carried to Europe or to North America or to Australia, the limestone had been manufactured into cement, lime wash, or fertilizer. There was still something very impressive about the gargantuan and silent machinery, and its presence in this lost corner of a vast continent was evidence of a nineteenth-century determination to conquer the world and all its resources.

  Gingerly, fearfully, I crept down the ramshackle stairs. I became more confident when I saw that the old wooden treads were supported by cast-iron moldings, but it was still with a sense of relief that I reached the machine-hall floor and could walk among the huge, silent engines that were now useless rust. In their day they had been engineering marvels, massively powerful machines that still bore the proud cast-iron plaques that boasted of the towns where they had been forged: Essen, Dortmund, and Bochum. Above the great machines were the giant spindles which had once held the slapping leather belts that had carried power from a bank of huge steam engines built on the pit’s lip. Those old steam engines were still there, though they had clearly been the first of the machines to fall silent, their power supplanted by the row of squat diesel generators that looked as if they had come from some First World War battleship. The huge room was like a museum of industrial ingenuity, a great rusting museum. When I kicked a rusting bolt with my right boot the sound echoed forlornly in the huge, dank space.

  “How very clever you are to find us, Mr. Blackburn,” the voice said when the bolt’s last echo died away.

  “Oh my God! Jesus Christ!” I blasphemed, twisted down, and huddled into a rust-flaked corner of a machine where I unslung the rifle from my shoulder. My heart was thumping like a runaway jackhammer. I could not see the speaker, and the echoes of the great room made it hard to tell from where he had spoken, but I recognized the voice. It was Caspar von Rellsteb.

  “Von Rellsteb!” I shouted.

  “Of course! Who else did you expect to find here? Santa Claus, perhaps?” He paused, and, though I looked frantically around, I still could not see him. Von Rellsteb, as if comprehending my panic, laughed. “Or perhaps you expected to find Nicole and the pirated Genesis boats hidden here. Is that what Berenice told you? She has spun that yarn before. Last year she hitched a ride on a visiting Australian yacht and told a wonderful tale of enslavement, and of a worldwide AIDS epidemic, and of pirated boats that we hid at the very end of the Desolate Straits. Such an imagination for a little American girl, eh?” Von Rellsteb laughed again. “Her imagination brought the Chilean police here, and we had two or three weeks of unnecessary trouble before they realized the poor girl was simply unstable. We offered to fly her home to her mother, but, at the last moment, she chose to come back to us. I sometimes regret she made that choice, but we think of all our community’s members as family, and, as in every family, love cannot help but take the good with the bad. Isn’t that so, Mr. Blackburn?”

  I worked a round into the Lee-Enfield’s chamber. The rifle’s bolt made a very loud noise that echoed menacingly in the tall, dripping, wind-chilled chamber.

  I heard von Rellsteb’s footsteps grate somewhere close by, but the acoustics of the shed made it almost impossible to detect just where he was. He sighed. “Your caution is misplaced, Mr. Blackburn. Do come out. I’m entirely alone, and I have no weapons. But I need to apologize to you! My people were stupid to have fired on you when you visited the settlement two days ago. It was purely a reaction of fear and nervousness. Our little community lives a most sheltered life here, and any incursion from the outside world tends to unsettle us.”

  I slipped off the rifle’s safety catch. Was von Rellsteb’s voice coming from the right? I peered that way and saw nothing.

  “Did you hear me, Mr. Blackburn? I apologize most profoundly, and am only glad that no one got hurt at the settlement. We’re re-evaluating our policy on guns, so I hope it will never happen again. Please do come out. Please.”

  I straightened up, then edged very cautiously round the ponderous rock-crushing machine that had sheltered me. I still could not see von Rellsteb. I thought how furious David would be, for I had done everything I had promised him I would not do, and everything that he had warned me against, which meant that all our careful planning had been shot to hell.

  “Good morning!” the voice said behind me, and I whipped the rifle round to see von Rellsteb standing just thirty feet away. He smiled, then spread his empty hands to show that he was indeed unarmed. “Good morning,” he said again, and with an intonation that chided me for not responding to his first friendly greeting.

  I still did not respond, but just watched him. He was wearing red and black oilskins, sea boots, and a black woolen hat into which he had crammed his long gray hair. He seemed amused by my wary scrutiny. “If I was going to kill you,” he said, “I would already have done so. Please put your gun down. I fear that Berenice has filled your head with the most nonsensical fancies. No doubt she told you that Nicole might be found here? Is that right?”

  I said nothing. I was again struck by the intelligence in his face, and I had the weirdest and most uncomfortable impression that he was reading my thoughts.

  “You’ve come to see Nicole, of course,” he went on as though my silence was an agreeable response to his remarks, “and I know she’s delighted that you’re here! It was the greatest pity that she wasn’t at the settlement when you visited two days ago, but she’s waiting there now.”

  “You lying bastard,” I blurted out.

  “Oh, Mr. Blackburn.” A look of injured sadness crossed von Rellsteb’s sensitive face. “What has Berenice told you? That Nicole and I have arguments? That Nicole has taken refuge here, while the rest of us live at the settlement? What nonsense. Nicole very nearly wrote to you after she received the letter you gave me in Florida, but in the end she decided that our policy of separation should be preserved. But when she heard you were here! She was excited, so excited! And she still is! In fact she’s waiting at the settlement right now!” Von Rellsteb looked at his wristwatch. “If we hurry we might reach the farm by mid-afternoon, and we can have tea with her. Nicole is very fond of her afternoon tea. It’s a rather English trait, and one that the rest of us often tease her about.”

  I aimed the rifle at his long, thin face. “Say a prayer, you smug bastard.”

  “Would you rather I brought Nicole here? I will, of course, if you insist.” His German-accented voice implied I was being unreasonably difficult, and his self-possession and charm were beginning to make me doubt my own reason. “Fetching Nicole will take time,” he went on calmly, as though I was not threatening him with a rifle, “and frankly I can’t do it in much under five or six hours.” He paused to let me admit the force of his objections, but I said nothing, which prompted von Rellsteb to offer me a disappointed smile. “You’re lucky she’s here at all,” he went on, “because she was planning to spend some days on the lower islands to conduct some seismic studies for the government. That’s a great nuisance. When we first came here we were welcomed by the Chilean authorities”—he laughed confidingly, as though he was about to make a private jest that only he and I might under-stand—”or rather by the old General, el Presidente, Pinochet. He liked all things German, you see, so I was definitely flavor of the month.” Von Rellsteb enlarged his explanation by clicking his heels together and putting a forefinger like a moustache on his upper lip. He chuckled. “Now we must make ourselves welcome in more usefu
l ways, and the Ministry of the Interior believes there may be silver deposits in the archipelago, and they asked us to make the survey, so, naturally, we’re complying. But to be really honest with you, Mr. Blackburn, I’m not sure we want to find any mineral deposits, because exploiting the discoveries is certain to threaten the ecology of the islands, so I rather think that Nicole is falsifying the returns!” He chuckled. “A small deception, but one that is surely justified by the scenery of these islands. It’s magnificent scenery, isn’t it?”

  “Does the Chilean government supply you with the necessary explosives for seismic tests?” I asked.

  I had hoped the mention of explosives might unsettle von Rellsteb, but he seemed entirely unfazed by my suspicions. “The Ministry of Mines issues us with the necessary operating permits, of course, but, in fact, we fetch our dynamite from commercial suppliers in Valparaiso.” He looked at his watch again. “I’m enjoying talking to you, but if I’m to fetch Nicole I really should leave.”

  “Radio the settlement,” I said. I was staring at him through the open ring battle sight of the rifle.