Between the beams the lower hull-plates were intact, and walled him into the hold. Beyond his feet was the prow of the ship, one of the old herring-trawlers in the breakers’ yards somewhere along the river towards Mount Royal. Metal ladders reached up the outer sides of the hull, and the floor was covered with piles of metal sheeting, port-holes and sections of bulkhead. In the turning afternoon light the mournful wreck was filled by a last fleeting glow.
Ransom sat up on one elbow, feeling the grazes on his cheeks and forehead. One of the lapels had been almost torn from his linen jacket, and he pulled this off and pressed the pad to his temple. He remembered the nets closing around him in the hot airless road, like the capes of bull-fighters called out to the streets behind their arena to play a huge fish found leaping in the dust. He had been carried half-conscious to the docks and tipped into the trawler’s hold. Through a gap in the port side of the hull he could see the roof of a warehouse, a collection of gantries leaning against it. The smells of paint and tar drifted across the air.
Behind him the stern bridge of the trawler reached into the sky. Two life-belts hung like punctured eyes from the rail on either side of the bridge-house. Below, a faint light came from one of the cabins. There were no sounds of the fishermen, but a single figure patrolled the deck, a metal gaff in one hand.
Ransom pulled himself on to his knees. He wiped his hands on the tags of cloth sticking from the mattress. The trawler had been beached in an undredged dock below the former river level, and the wet mud had seeped through the keel plates. The dark cakes lay around him like lumps of damp lava. He stood up, his head drumming from the mild concussion, and groped across the floor of the hold. He paused behind the mast-brace, listening to a vague noise from the streets ashore. Then he felt his way down the starboard side of the hull, searching for a loose plate. On the bridge, the look-out patrolled the stern, watching the smoke-fires burning in the city.
The noise drew nearer, the sounds of men running. Ransom went back to the mattress and lay down. The foot-steps raced past the warehouse, and the group of ten or so fishermen reached the wharf and crossed the wooden gang-way to the bridge deck. Between them they carried a large bundle in their nets. They leaned over the rail and lowered it down into the hold, steering it over the mattress. Then they released the nets and tipped a half-unconscious man on to the mattress beside Ransom.
The bos’un in charge of the hunting party came to the rail and peered down at this latest catch. A stocky, broad-shouldered man of about thirty, he was distinguished from the others by a mop of blond hair over his plump face. Ransom let his jaw hang slackly and fixed his eyes on one of the beams. Two feet from him the new arrival, a grey-haired tramp in an old overcoat, snuffled and coughed, moaning to himself.
The blond man nodded to his men. They hauled up their nets and slung them over their shoulders.
A door opened in the bridge-house, revealing the light of a lantern. A tall man with a dark wasted face stepped out on to the deck, looking around him with a strong gaze. His black suit was buttoned to the neck, emphasizing the length of his arms and chest.
‘Jonas—!’ The bo’sun strode across the deck and tried to close the door.
‘Don’t fear the light, Saul.’ The tall man pushed his arm away. After a pause he shut the door, then moved forward among his men. He nodded to each of them in turn, as if approving their presence on his quarter-deck. In turn they glanced up at him with deferential nods, fingering the nets on their shoulders as if aware that they should be about some useful task. Only the blond-haired Saul seemed to resent his authority. He hung about irritably behind Jonas, tapping the rail as if looking for something to complain about.
Jonas crossed the bridge and stood by the fore-rail. His slow movements along the deck had a kind of deliberate authority, as if this were the largest vessel he had ever commanded and he was carefully measuring himself against it, taking no chances that a sudden swell might topple him from his bridge. His face had the hardness of beaten leather, drained of all moisture by sun and wind. As he looked into the hold, his long arms reaching to the rail, Ransom recognized the marked slope of his forehead and the sharp arrow-like cheekbones. His eyes had the over-intense but alert look of a half-educated migrant preacher constantly distracted by the need to find food and shelter.
He nodded at the supine figures of Ransom and the drunken tramp. ‘Good. Two more to join us in the search. Now back to your nets and sweep the streets. There’ll be good catches for the next two nights.’
The men clambered to their feet, but the bo’sun shouted: ‘Jonas! We don’t need the old men now!’ He waved contemptuously at the hold. ‘They be dead bait, they’ll weigh us down? He launched into a half-coherent tirade, to which Jonas listened with head bowed, as if trying to control some inner compulsive nervousness. The men sat down again, grumbling to each other, some agreeing with Saul’s complaints with forceful nods, others shifting about uncertainly. The loyalties of the group swerved from one man to the other, held together only by the unstated elements which they all sensed in Jonas’s isolated figure.
‘Saul!’ The tall captain silenced him. He had long hands which he used like an actor. Watching him, Ransom noticed the calculation in all his movements as he stepped about on the high stage of the bridge. ‘Saul, we reject no one. They need our help now. Remember, there is nothing here.’
‘But, Jonas—!’
‘Saul!’
The blond bos’sun gave up, nodding to himself with a tic-like jerk. As the men shuffled along the deck to the gangway he gave Jonas a bitter backward glance.
Left alone, Jonas gazed across the darkening streets. As the men went off, nets over their shoulders, he watched them with the narrow compassion of a man born into a hard and restricted world. He paced the bridge of his skeleton ship, looking up at the smoke billows rising from the city, as if debating whether to trim his sails before a storm.
The old tramp moaned on the mattress beside Ransom, blood running from one ear. His overcoat was stained by a pink fluid that Ransom guessed to be anti-freeze. Now and then he woke for a lucid interval, and then sank off again, gazing at the sky with wild sad eyes.
Ransom stood up and groped across the hold. Above him Jonas came to the rail and beckoned him forward, smiling at Ransom as if he had been waiting for him to wake. He called to the look-out, and a ladder was lowered into the hold.
Painfully, Ransom managed to climb halfway to the rail, and Jonas’s strong hands reached down and seized his arms. He lifted Ransom on to the deck, then pressed him to sit down.
Ransom pointed to the tramp. ‘He’s injured. Can you bring him up here? I’m a doctor, I’ll do what I can.’
‘Of course.’ Jonas waved a long arm at the look-out. ‘Go down and we’ll lift him out.’ As he held the ladder he said to Ransom: ‘A doctor, good. You’ll come with us, we need everyone we can find for the search.’
Ransom leaned on the rail, feeling his head clear. ‘Search for where? What are you looking for?’
‘For a new river.’ Jonas gestured with a sweep of his long arms, encompassing the fading skyline and half the land. ‘Somewhere there. My bos’un tells them to laugh at me, but I have seen it!’ He seemed to half-believe his own boast.
The sounds of running feet came from the distant streets. Ransom listened to them approach. He waited as the look-out climbed down into the hold, a net over one shoulder. Within a minute any chance of escape would have gone. Ten feet away was the gangway. Beside the warehouse a small alley led away into the near-by streets.
Jonas leaned over the rail, his body bent at the waist like a gallows. The tramp lay slackly in the cradle of the net, and Jonas’s powerful arms lifted him into the air, like a fisherman hauling in an immense catch.
Ransom stood up, as if offering to help, then turned and ran for the gangway. When the boards sprang below his feet Jonas turned and cr
ied out, as if trying to warn him of his error, but Ransom was across the wharf and racing up the alley.
Behind the warehouse he saw the fishermen coming down the street, a man struggling in the outstretched nets. At their head was the blond-haired bo’un. He saw Ransom and broke into a run, his short arms hooking in front of him.
Ransom ran past the houses, but within thirty yards Saul was at his shoulder, his feet kicking at Ransom’s as they swerved in and out of the cars.
Suddenly two whirling forms leapt from behind a wall, and with a flash of teeth hurled themselves on the bo’sun. Out of breath, Ransom ran forward for another fifty yards, then stopped behind a car as the two Alsatians snarled and jumped at Saul’s head, tearing at his swinging fists.
‘Doctor! This way!’
Ransom turned to see the bright-shirted figure of Quilter, the peacock hanging from his waist, waving at him farther along the road. Leaving the dogs, Ransom limped forward after the youth as he ran on, the tail speckling at his heels.
LOST IN A MAZE of dusty streets, he followed Quilter across the fences and gardens, sometimes losing sight of him as he leapt through the smoke of the refuse fires. Once, searching about in a walled garden into which he had blundered, Ransom found the youth gazing down at the half-burned carcass of a large dog lying across a heap of embers, his face staring at it with child-like seriousness.
Finally they stepped over a low parapet on to the bank of the river. A mile away to their left was the span of the motor-bridge. Below them, across the white bed of the channel, Philip Jordan stood in the stern of his skiff, leaning on his pole. Quilter strode down the bank, sinking to his knees through the dry crust, the peacock’s tail brushing the dust up into Ransom’s face.
Ransom followed him down the slope, pausing by a stranded lighter. The sun was half-hidden by the western horizon. The smoke plumes overhead were darker and more numerous, but the basin of the river gleamed with an almost spectral whiteness.
‘Come on, doctor! You can rest later.’
Surprised by this brusque call, Ransom looked round at Philip Jordan, uneasy at this association between Quilter, the grotesque Caliban of all his nightmares, and the calm-eyed Ariel of the river. He walked down to the skiff, his feet sinking in the damper mud by the water’s edge. As the evening light began to fade the burnt yellow of the old lion’s skin shone in Philip Jordan’s arrow-like face. Impatient to leave, he watched Ransom with remote eyes.
Quilter sat alone in the stern, a water-borne Buddha, the shadows of the oily surface mottling his face. As Ransom stepped aboard he let out two piercing whistles. They echoed away across the bank, reflected off the concrete parapet. One of the dogs appeared. Tail high, it sprang down on to the bank, in a flurry of dust raced to the skiff, and leapt aboard over Ransom’s shoulder. Settling itself between Quilter’s feet, it whined at the dusk. Quilter waited, watching the parapet. A frown crossed his face. The Alsatian whined again. Quilter nodded to Philip Jordan, and the craft surged away across the darkening mirror of the surface, the peacock’s tail sweeping above the water like a jewelled sail.
Four miles away, the intervals in its skyline closed by the dusk, the dark bulk of Mount Royal rose below the smoke plumes like a sombre volcano.
15
THE BURNING ALTAR
THE NEXT MORNING, after a night of uproar and violence, Ransom began his preparations for departure.
Shortly before dawn, when the sounds of gunfire at last subsided, he fell asleep, on the settee in the sitting-room, the embers of the burnt-out house across the avenue lifting into the air like clouds of fireflies. He had reached home at seven o’clock, exhausted after his escape from Jonas and the fishermen. The lakeside town was quiet, a few torches glowing as the Reverend Johnstone’s militia patrolled the darkened street, methodically closing the doors of the abandoned cars and putting out the refuse fires in the gardens. Only Lomax’s house showed any lights from its windows.
After taking off his suit, Ransom had filled the bath, then knelt over the edge and drank slowly from his hands, massaging his face and neck with the tepid water. He thought of Philip Jordan, swinging the long prow of the skiff between the stranded hulks, the reflection of his narrow face carried away in the dark water like the ghosts of all the other illusions that had sustained Ransom during the previous weeks. The unspoken link between Philip Jordan and the ambiguous figure of Quilter, brooding over his lost dog as he fingered the luminous fan of the peacock’s tail, seemed to exclude him from Hamilton even more than the approaching fishermen with their quest for a lost river. All this made him wonder what his own role might become, and the real nature of the return of the desert to the land. As Ransom stepped from the boat he had tried to speak to Philip, but the youth avoided his eyes. With a guttural noise in his throat he had leaned on his pole and pivoted the boat away into the darkness, leaving Ransom with the last image of Quilter smiling at him like a white idol, his ironic farewell drifting across the oily water.
For an hour Ransom lay in the bath, resolving to leave as soon as he had recovered. Somehow he would persuade Catherine Austen to join him—the landscape around them was no longer a place for the sane. Soothed by the warm water, he was almost asleep when there was a muffled explosion in the distance, and an immense geyser of flame shot up into the night sky. The shaft of glowing air illuminated the tiles in the darkened bathroom as he climbed from the water. For five minutes he watched the fire burning strongly like a discharging furnace. As it subsided the softer light reflected the outbuildings of a small paint factory half a mile from the zoo.
An unsettled silence followed. Dressing himself in a clean suit, Ransom watched from the window. The Reverend Johnstones’s house remained quiet, but Lomax’s mansion was a hive of activity. Lights flared in the windows and moved up and down the verandas. Someone carried a huge multiple-armed candlestick on to the roof and lifted it high into the air as if inspecting the stars. Torches flickered across the lawn. More and more oil-lamps were lit, until the white rotunda of the house seemed to be bathed by rows of spotlights.
Ransom was preparing a small meal for himself in the kitchen when a brilliant firework display began in Lomax’s garden. A score of rockets rose over the house and exploded into coloured umbrellas, catherine wheels span, bursting into cascades of sparks. Roman candles tied to the trees around the garden poured a pink mushy light into the darkness, setting fire to part of the hedge. In the swerving light Ransom could see the white figures of Lomax and his sister moving about on the roof.
After the initial crescendo, the display continued for ten minutes, the rockets falling away into the darkness towards the city. Whatever Lomax’s motives, the timing and extravagance of the show convinced Ransom that he was trying to draw attention to himself, that the display was a challenge to those still hiding in the deserted outskirts of the city.
Listening to the rockets explode and fall, their harsh sighs carried away over the roof-tops, Ransom noticed that the reports were louder, mingled with hard cracking detonations that rocked the windows with the impact of real explosives. Immediately the firework display ended, and the lights in Lomax’s house were smothered. A few canisters burned themselves out on the lawn.
The whine and crack of the gunfire continued. The shots approached Hamilton, coming at ten-second intervals, as if a single weapon were being used. Ransom went out into the drive. A bullet whipped fifty feet overhead with a thin whoop, lost across the river. The Reverend Johnstone’s jeep sped past down the avenue, its lights out, then stopped at the first corner. Three men jumped down and ran between the trees towards the church.
Five minutes later, as he followed them down the road, Ransom could hear the organ above the gunfire. The faint chorale droned and echoed, the ragged, uneven sounds suggesting that someone other than the Reverend Johnstone was at the keyboard. Ransom crouched behind the trees, watching two of Johnstone’s men firing at the
porch of the church from behind an overturned car. As they were driven back, Ransom crossed the road and hid himself in one of the empty houses. The organ continued to play above the sporadic gunfire, and Ransom saw the blond-haired Saul, rifle in hand, hanging back as he beckoned his men between the cars. Apart from Saul, none of the fishermen was armed, and they carried staves torn from the fences along the pavement.
Ransom waited until they had moved past, and then worked his way between the houses. He slipped through the narrow alleys behind the garages, climbing in and out of open windows until he reached the house facing the church. From the edge of the road he could see through the open doors. The music had stopped and the tall figure of Jonas swayed from the pulpit, his long arms gesturing to the three men hunched together in the front pew. In the light of the single oil-lamp his face flickered as if in high fever, his hoarse voice trying to shout down the gunfire in the streets.
One of the men stood up and left him, and Ransom saw the spire of the church illuminated against the night sky. Smoke raced along the eaves, and then the flames furled themselves round the tower. Jonas looked up, halted in the middle of his sermon. His hands clutched at the flames racing among the vaulting. The two men turned and ran out, ducking their heads below the smoke.
Ransom left the house and crossed the road. The fire burned along the length of the nave, and already the smaller roofing timbers were falling on to the pews. As he ran down the path to the vestry door the blond-haired bo’sun darted from the aisle. His face and chest were lit by the flames as he stopped in the centre of the road to look back at the church. In his hand he carried the broken shaft of a wooden gaff.
The Drought Page 7