A Far Country

by John Fletcher

  Mura turned, eyes wide and reflecting the colours of the dawn. A few steps from him he could make out in the gathering light the seated figure of Mingulta, facing the dawn and intoning gently, so gently, the song of the land. As the light grew stronger, so did the song: light growing, life continuing, the circle of creation rounded as it had been from the beginning.

  When it was fully light the party of men rose, took up the game they had killed the night before and set off together through the grass, the slender shapes of their hunting spears black against the storm-wracked sky.

  The world was water: cold, violent, implacable. Helpless in its grasp, Jason could find neither light nor warmth nor breath. He was flung upside down, rightway up, tangled round and round in the sinuous force of waves, and buried deep. Bubbles burst frothing about him. Choking blackness consumed him. He flailed futilely, lungs on fire, not knowing which way to go to reach the air.

  One breath. That was all it would take to end the terror, the unavailing struggle. One deep, choking breath, drawing the acrid water deep into lungs starved of oxygen. Peace. He would not. Would not.

  Jason’s head burst through the lethal skin of water. Immediately a wave slammed into him, burying him again, but in that second he had drawn a breath, one tortured breath, and it was enough. He surfaced again and this time stayed afloat long enough to see the Kitty’s topmasts as the barque sped away from him. It was two hundred yards distant, near as he could judge, and he remembered the captain’s warning. Go over the side, we shan’t be coming back for ye.

  Better if he had stayed buried by that first giant wave. Better to have drowned than this.

  Panic paralysed him. His face dipped below the water.

  NO! Frantic now, Jason clawed his way back to the air. I shall live! I … shall … LIVE!

  Jason heard a distant, grinding crash, a groan of timbers. He turned in the water in time to see the topmasts of the barque, only just visible beyond the rearing waves, topple wildly and come crashing down.

  Jason did not know what to do. His instinct told him to swim towards the vessel but he doubted he could make it through the breakers. In any case, he was frightened of being swept on to the rocks on which it seemed the Kitty had run aground. On the other hand if he stayed where he was he would surely drown. Already he could feel the cold working on his legs and arms. He had only minutes before his limbs grew too numb to support him.

  He had no choice: he must try to reach the ship. It represented his only chance of rescue in the wilderness of the sea. Fortunately he had been brought up on the banks of the Derwent and could swim like a porpoise.

  Porpoise or not, the waves were too high and violent for easy swimming. Every time he reached the top of one wave, another one, even higher, was there to take its place. He tried to swim with his face towards the waves so that he could see them before they struck him but this didn’t work. Perhaps because they were so close to the shoal where the Kitty had run aground, the waves had no pattern but came at him from all directions at once. Every time he opened his mouth to breathe a wave slapped water into it. It was infuriating. Worse, it threatened death. If he couldn’t breathe properly his strength would soon be exhausted.

  He was no longer sure where the grounded vessel lay. The waves cut off all visibility and he had been so buffeted by the water that he no longer knew in which direction he was heading.

  Cold and sick with all the water he had swallowed, helpless and alone, he could see neither ship nor land. There seemed no prospect of rescue and, as he had feared, his strength was running out. The temptation to give up was almost overwhelming.

  He tried to turn on his back, to float while he regained his breath, but the movement of the waves was too violent and erratic for that. A bullying wave submerged him.

  This time it took him a lot longer to regain the surface. In his fatigue, the weight of his clothes dragged him down. He should kick off his boots but was afraid to do so: he had seen the wrecked feet of men who had been brought ashore on rocks. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to him.

  Jason thought he heard Captain Hughes speaking to him in words similar to those he had heard him use to the mate when he had brought him his last draught of hot rum.

  Talk sense, mister. This rate ye’ll be drowned long afore ye reaches shore. What difference do it make what state your feet be in?

  Jason was too tired to argue but his boots stayed on. He was much colder now. There was still no sign of ship or shore, no sign of anything. Hadn’t the captain said they were near land? Where was it, then?

  A wave broke over him, followed immediately by another. Once again, gasping, he fought his way up to the air.

  I SHALL LIVE.

  His strength was going fast now. His legs hung lower in the water. He could not feel them, neither warmth nor life nor movement. There was only weight, drawing him down.

  I shall live.

  He was no longer sure he believed it.

  He began to feel warm, almost cosy in water that lapped his chin. Even the waves no longer seemed so violent.

  I shall live …

  Jason floated vertically in the water, eyes shut.

  TWO

  It was twenty feet long and four wide, each end armoured with jagged splinters a foot or more in length where it had been ripped out of the Kitty’s main deck. It was heavy, potentially lethal, potentially life-saving, and was flailing up and down in the waves like a stupendous hammer.

  A blow from it would kill.

  Nearly unconscious, Jason did not see the wreckage as it bore down upon him. It came so close that as it reared in the waves one of the long splinters ripped a ragged six-inch gash in Jason’s shoulder.

  It was what saved him. The sudden pain startled Jason into opening his eyes. He saw his danger and managed, despite cold and increasing torpor, to eel himself out of the way as the massive fragment crashed down in the very place where seconds earlier Jason’s head had been.

  It reared again. He tried to grab it, hands snatching and slipping over the planking, but it eluded him. He was like a small child trying to mount a giant brumby yet Jason knew that this fragment of decking represented a spark of hope in what until then had been a situation without hope. If he could clamber aboard the fragment he had a chance of life; without it he was as dead as he had so nearly been a moment earlier.

  It was hard: impossibly, heart-breakingly hard. The decking must have weighed at least a ton and reared in the waves like a frightened stallion. Jason grabbed at it. It threw him off. Again. The same result. It slipped through his outstretched arms and within seconds had opened up a ten-foot gap between itself and him. He was going to lose it.

  It would have been so easy to give up, to sink down in the water and watch the splintered wreckage carry his chance of survival away with it. By now the gap had doubled in size. So easy … No more fighting, no more fear, no more pain.

  Jason refused to give in. From somewhere he summoned the will to set his limbs in motion, to plough furiously after the wooden raft until once again it came within reach of his arms. The effort had drained him of his remaining strength; if he could not clamber on to the wreckage now he would never do it. The planking came slamming down in the water and he hurled himself at it again, managing somehow to get arms and one shoulder over the edge of the timber, fortunately at a point where there were relatively few splinters. The wreckage reared again, almost throwing him off. Somehow he hung on, fingers scrabbling, shoulders straining, mouth set in fear and determination. The wreckage came down again. He inched himself higher and then higher still. A protruding fragment like a ragged blade snagged in his jacket; he ripped himself free at the cost of another gash, this time on his chest.

  Ripped clothes and flesh did not matter. What mattered was getting himself on board this piece of wood and staying there. Little by little he managed it. At last, oblivious to how long it had been since he was first swept overboard, Jason dragged his legs clear of the sucking waves.

 
Utterly exhausted, chest heaving, he lay in a heap on the rearing piece of decking. It sped through the turbulent water with a force and speed that astonished him.

  He had nothing to hang on to; at any moment a violent lurch might hurl him back into the sea. He would never climb aboard a second time. He lay flat, arms and legs spread, fingers scrabbling at the planking, trying to present the smallest possible target to the wind and waves.

  For hours he lay there; hours that seemed like days. It grew dark and then, after what seemed an eternity, light again. He opened his eyes. It was indeed light of a sort: a full moon cast its mantle over a mad confusion of black and white waves, black and white spray, extending everywhere and forever. Jason stretched out his hand and looked at it. Black and white like everything else. He wondered with what remained of coherent thought whether he had died and this black and white world was eternity. Eternity was not something he had thought much about in his life. He lowered his arm, his head drooped, he slept.

  When he awoke the moon had set and it was dark again. Now Jason was conscious of a raging, all-consuming thirst. He was cold, so cold, the wind penetrating the soaked clothing with such ease that he might have been wearing nothing at all, the gashes on his shoulder and chest stiffening and increasingly painful, but it was his thirst that dominated everything. He began to wonder whether he had succeeded in saving himself from the sea only to die on this piece of wreckage being swept at the mercy of the wind and tide. He closed his eyes and again, miraculously, slept.

  It was light and the wind had eased. Jason opened his eyes cautiously. The lids were stiff and the eyes themselves burnt like fire. His throat burnt, his skinned fingertips, the two major gashes he had sustained: all burnt. He was scarified by salt. Pain filled him like a tide.

  As he sat up, body groaning, what he saw put all thought of pain, of discomfort, even of the demon thirst itself, out of his mind.

  Twenty yards away a group of small islands, some of them little more than rocks, raised their heads above the surface. Beyond the islands was an expanse of calm water. Beyond the water, and filling the horizon as far as he could see, was a yellow and grey sweep of cliff, one hundred feet and more in height.

  After such relentless violence and turmoil, of screaming wind and near death, he had come, without noise or fuss, safe to land.

  The raft of broken timber moved through the tranquil water. Revolving slowly, ponderously, it drifted past the islands and began to inscribe a lazy circle across the waters of the bay.

  Jason studied the land. There was a headland at either end of the bay, pillars of rock jutting out into the water with a smear of green vegetation growing upon them. Between the headlands, the cliff drew a semi-circle against a sky which now was almost clear. Birds screamed and circled in noisy clouds above the cliffs and the breakers that fretted white along their base.

  He could see no beach, no sign anywhere of a landing place, no route up the rocky face of the cliffs. It looked as though he were no better off now he had reached shore than he had been in the howling wastes of the sea.

  The raft circled once more. Jason saw that it would pass close to the base of the cliffs that now loomed high overhead. If he stayed aboard it would eventually clear the further point and drift out to sea again. To go ashore might achieve nothing but to stay where he was meant death.

  He stood, closing his mind to the thousand aches and pains that wracked him, and threw himself into the sea.

  It was no distance at all: fifty yards, maybe less. He nearly didn’t make it. There was a current setting off shore that had not been apparent from the raft. It was not particularly powerful but in his present weakened condition any current at all could easily have been too much.

  He finally came ashore between two huge rocks where a jumble of boulders separated the base of the cliff from the sea. Somehow he managed to clamber over the smooth boulders, avoiding the slimy weed that clung to them, and hopping, jumping and slipping, came at last to the cliff wall.

  He looked up. For the first twenty feet the rock, dark and moist as though covered by spray at each high tide, was sheer and utterly devoid of handholds. Jason’s heart sank as he examined it. This first section ended in a rocky overhang. Beyond it the rest of the climb didn’t look too bad but he doubted he would ever be able to scale that first section. Used to the water he might have been but climbing slippery rock faces was something entirely outside his experience.

  However, that could wait. There was something he had to do before he could even think about climbing the cliff. Jason scrambled along the line of boulders, searching with increasing anxiety for a flat-topped or concave rock.

  The sun’s heat was increasing with every minute. He had to find water and a flat-topped rock above the tideline was the only place he could think of where some of the rain that had fallen in the storm might be trapped.

  Within a hundred yards he stopped and looked about him in despair. Every boulder he had examined had been dry, smoothly rounded and beginning to warm ominously in the strengthening rays of the sun.

  He found a crevice in the rock face, explored it desperately. It was dank and smelt of seaweed and the sea. After a few yards it ended at a wall of smooth rock. He retraced his footsteps and went on until he reached a second crevice, narrower than the first, running deeper into the cliff face. After a few yards it opened up into a cave wide enough for its sides to be invisible. There was the same dank smell and a bunch of weed lying on the cave floor in a scattering of wet sand showed that it was below high water mark. No sign of fresh water anywhere.

  He turned to go back but paused as he heard a faint, intermittent pattering. He listened, holding his breath. It was too dark to see but he groped further, hands outstretched. A splashing trickle was falling from the roof of the cave. He shuffled in the darkness until he thought he had reached the spot. He could hear it clearly yet still could see nothing. He groped again. Still he could not find it and the sound of falling water, so tantalisingly close, made his thirst more intolerable than ever.

  Something splashed on the back of his outstretched hand. Quickly he ducked his head and sucked it.

  Fresh.

  He moved until the thread-thin trickle of water was falling on his upturned face. With agonising slowness he positioned himself until it fell directly into his mouth.

  It had a harsh, metallic taste. He did not care. He developed a crick in his neck. He did not care about that, either. He felt giddy, swaying so that the water fell sometimes into his open mouth, sometimes on his face, sometimes in his eyes. He cared about none of it. He drank and drank.

  He stood there for a long time while the water filled his mouth, his stomach, his whole body with liquid. Dimly he remembered being told that it was dangerous to drink too much after a long time without water; he took no notice of the memory but stood there, swaying and ecstatic, until he was full. Saturated, delirious with relief, he returned to the light.

  Now for the cliff.

  He found a place where there was an angle in the cliff wall. There were no handholds but by pressing his back against the rock and his feet on the jumble of fallen boulders he might be able to lever himself up to a point above the tideline where he could grasp the overhang at the top of the first section of cliff. He tried, stretching as far above his head as he could. He failed, his fingertips a good two feet below the rim. He moved ten yards along the base of the cliff and tried again. The same result. He stood back from the cliff wall and looked as far as he could see towards the headland of rock. No change anywhere. The other direction was the same. There was no way up that first section of the cliff.

  Jason turned, checking on the state of the tide behind him. It had gone out a long way since he had landed. An expanse of rock, pebbles and reddish-brown sand extended thirty yards off shore but the tide would turn, the sea would come back and when it did there would be nowhere for him to go. He was trapped at the foot of the cliffs as surely as he had been on the floating wreckage.

  He
had to be away from here before the tide returned.

  He looked about him again and saw his chance. Just one: he must walk across the beach, while the state of the tide still permitted it. As to what lay beyond the headlands … It could hardly be worse than his present position.

  Moving as quickly as he could across the tide pools and bands of slippery rock, he made his way towards the nearer of the two headlands. As Jason came close he saw that it stuck so far out into the sea that there was still water swirling around its base. He reached the headland and plunged into the sea. He had been uncertain that he would be able to swim around the headland but the water was calm, making no more than a gentle swirl around the base of the cliff. Soon he had passed it and entered the bay that lay beyond.

  There was a beach of yellow sand, bisected by a grey-brown line of what he thought was bleached seaweed. There was a cliff, broken in places as though at some time in the past sections of it had fallen into the sea. There was a fire. Beside the fire, the shapes of two men.

  THREE

  Jason’s first reaction was to scream out to the strangers that he was here, he was alive, in a place where he had thought never to see another human being again; his second was to say nothing. Maybe they were survivors from the Kitty, maybe they weren’t. The figures moving about the fire were too far away for him to be sure even if they were men or women, white or black. He should get a good look at them before letting them know he was here.

  He swam cautiously ashore, landed behind a rampart of large boulders and clambered his way along the beach. He kept to the cover of the rocks until at last he reached a position where he could spy on the strangers without their seeing him.

  They had their backs to him but were clearly white. That was something. All the same, he waited until one of them turned and he saw a face that he recognised. Lew Bone, the man of all men whom he would have wished not to see. While he hesitated, unsure whether to reveal his presence or not, the second man also turned and Jason’s doubts fell away. It was Tom, his brother.