A quarter of a mile from the shore, the hulks of two or three ships were buried to their upper decks in the salt, their grey superstructures reflected in the brine-pools. Small shacks of waste metal sheltered against their sides and beneath the overhang of the sterns. Outside the lean-to doors smoke drifted from the chimneys of crude stills.
Beside each of these dwellings, sometimes protected by a palisade of stakes, was a small pond of brine. The banks had been laboriously beaten into a hard margin, but the water seeping everywhere continually dissolved them. Despite the to and fro movements of the inhabitants of the salt wastes, no traces of their footsteps marked the surface, blurred within a few minutes by the leaking water.
Only towards the sea, far across the dunes and creeks, was there any activity.
26
THE LAGOON
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, as the tide extended across the margins of the coastal flats, the narrow creeks and channels began to fill with water. The long salt-dunes darkened with the moisture seeping through them, and sheets of open water spread outwards among the channels, carrying with them a few fish and nautiloids. Reaching towards the firmer shore, the cold water infiltrated among the saddles and culverts like the advance front of an invading army, its approach almost unnoticed. A cold wind blew overhead and dissolved in the dawn mists, lifting a few uneager gulls across the banks.
Almost a mile from the shore, the tide began to spill through a large breach in one of the salt-bars. The water sluiced outwards into a lagoon some three hundred yards in diameter, inundating the shallow dunes in the centre. As it filled this artificial basin, it smoothed itself into a mirror of the cloudless sky.
The margins of the lagoon had been raised a few feet above the level of the surrounding salt flats, and the wet crystals formed a continuous bank almost half a mile in length. As the water poured into the breach it carried away the nearer sections of the mouth, and then, as the tide began to slacken, swilled away along the banks.
Overhead the gulls dived, picking at the hundreds of fish swimming below the surface. In the equilibrium, the water ceased to move, and for a moment the great lagoon, and the long arms of brine seeping away northwards through the grey light, were like immense sheets of polished ice.
At this moment, a shout crossed the air. A dozen men rose from behind the bank surrounding the lagoon and with long paddles of whalebone began to shovel the wet salt into the breach. Sliding up to their waists in the grey slush, they worked furiously as the crystals drained backwards towards the sea. Their arms and chests were strung with strips of rag and rubber. They drove each other on with sharp cries and shouts, their backs bent as they ladled the salt up into the breach, trying to contain the water in the lagoon before the tide turned.
Watching them from the edge of the bank was a tall, thin-faced man wearing a sealskin cape over his left shoulder, his right hand on the shaft of his double-bladed paddle. His dark face, from which all flesh had been drained away, seemed to consist of a series of flint-like points, the sharp cheekbones and jaw almost piercing the hard skin. He gazed across the captured water, his eyes counting the fish that gleamed and darted. Over his shoulder he watched the tide recede, dissolving the banks as it moved along them. The men in the breach began to shout to him as the wet salt poured across them, sliding and falling as they struggled to hold back the bank. The man in the cape ignored them, jerking the sealskin with his shoulder, his eyes on the falling table of water beyond the banks and the shining deck of the trapped sea within the lagoon.
At the last moment, when the water seemed about to burst from the lagoon at a dozen points, he raised his paddle and swung it vigorously at the opposite bank. A cry like a gull’s scream tore from his throat. As he raced off along the bank, leaving the exhausted men in the breach to drag themselves from the salt, a dozen men emerged from behind .the northern bank. Their paddles whirling, they cut an opening in the wall twenty yards wide, then waded out to their chests in the water and drove it through the breach.
Carried by its own weight, the water poured in a torrent into the surrounding creeks, drawing the rest of the lagoon behind it. By the time the man in the cape had reached this new opening, half the lagoon had drained away, rushing out in a deep channel. Like a demented canal, it poured on towards the shore, ‘washing away the smaller dunes in its path. It swerved to the north-east, the foam boiling around the bend, then entered a narrow channel cut between two dunes. Veering to the left, it set off again for the shore, the man in the cape racing along beside it. Now and then he stopped to scan the course ahead, where the artificial channel had been strengthened with banks of drier salt, then turned and shouted to his men. They followed along the banks, their paddles driving the water on as it raced past.
Abruptly, a section of the channel collapsed and water spilled away into the adjacent creeks. Shouting as he ran, the leader raced through the shallows, his two-bladed paddle hurling the water back. His men floundered after him, repairing the breach and driving the water up the slope.
Leaving them, the leader ran on ahead, where the others were paddling the main body of water across the damp dunes. Although still carried by its own momentum, the channel had widened into a gliding oval lake, the hundreds of fish tumbling about in the spinning currents. Every twenty yards, as the lake poured along, a dozen fish would be stranded behind, and two older men bringing up the rear tossed them back into the receding wake.
Guiding it with their blades, the men took up their positions around the bows of the lake. At their prow, only a few feet from the front wave, the man in the cape piloted them across the varying contours. The lake coursed smoothly in and out of the channels, cruising over the shallow pools in its path. Half a mile from the shore it rilled along, still intact.
‘Captain!’ There was a shout from the two look-outs in the tail. ‘Captain Jordan!’
Whirling in the damp salt, the leader raised his paddle and drove the oarsmen back along the shores of the lake. Two hundred yards away, a group of five or six men, heads lowered as they worked their short paddles, had broken down the bank on the western side of the lake and were driving the water outwards across the dunes.
Converging around both banks, the trappers raced towards them, their paddles flashing at the water. The pirates ignored them and worked away at the water, propelling it through the breach. Already a large pool some fifty yards wide had formed among the dunes. As the main body of the lake moved away, they ran down the bank and began to paddle the pool away across the shallows to the west.
Feet splashed after them through the brine, and the air was filled with whirling paddles and salt spray. Trying to recover the water they had lured with such effort from the sea, the trappers drove it back towards the lake. Some of them attacked the pirates, splintering the short paddles with their heavier blades. The dark-faced man in the sealskin cape beat one man to his knees, snapping the bony shaft of his paddle with his foot, then clubbed another across the face, knocking him into the shallows. Warding off the flying blades, the pirates stumbled to their feet, pushing the water between their attackers’ legs. Their leader, an older man with a red weal on his bearded face, shouted to them and they darted off in all directions, dividing the water into half a dozen pools which they drove away with their paddles and bare hands.
In the mêlée the main body of the lake had continued its gliding progress to the shore. The defenders broke off the attempt to recapture the water and ran after the lake, their rubber suits streaming with the cold salt. One or two of them stopped to shout over their shoulders, but the pirates had disappeared among the dunes. As the grey morning light gleamed in the wet slopes, their foot-falls were lost in the streaming salt.
27
THE TIDAL WAVES
NURSING HIS CHEEK against the rubber pad on his shoulder, Ransom made his way among the watery dunes, steering the small pool through the hollows. Now and then, as the pool raced
along under its own momentum, he stopped to peer over the surrounding crests, listening to the distant cries of Jordan and his men. Sooner or later a punitive expedition would be sent over to the beaches where the outcasts lived. At the prospect of smashed cabins and wrecked stills Ransom rallied himself and pressed on, guiding the pool through the dips. Little more than twenty feet wide, it contained half a dozen small fish. One of them was stranded at his feet and Ransom bent down and picked it up. Before he tossed it back into the water his frozen fingers felt its plump belly.
Three hundred yards to his right he caught a glimpse of Jonathan Grady propelling his pool towards his shack below a ruined salt-conveyor. Barely seventeen years old, he had been strong enough to take almost half the stolen water for himself, and drove it along untiringly through the winding channels.
The other four members of the band had disappeared among the salt flats. Ransom pushed himself ahead, the salty air stinging the weal on his face. By luck Jordan’s paddle had caught him with the flat of its blade, or he would have been knocked unconscious and carried off to the summary justice of the Johnstone settlement. There his former friendship with the Reverend Johnstone, long-forgotten after ten years, would have been of little help. It was now necessary to go out a full mile from the shore to trap the sea—the salt abandoned during the previous years had begun to slide off the inner beach areas, raising the level of the off-shore flats and the theft of water had become the greatest crime for the communities along the coast.
Ransom shivered in the cold light, and tried to squeeze the moisture from the damp rags beneath his suit of rubber strips. Sewn together with pieces of fish-gut, the covering leaked at a dozen places. He and the other members of the band had set out three hours before dawn, following Jordan and his team over the grey dunes. They hid themselves in the darkness by the empty channel, waiting for the tide to turn, knowing they had only a few minutes to steal a small section of the lake. But for the need to steer the main body of water to the reservoir at the settlement, Jordan and his men would have caught them. One night soon, no doubt, they would deliberately sacrifice their catch to rid themselves for ever of Ransom and his band.
Ransom moved along beside the pool, steering it towards the distant tower of the wrecked lightship whose stern jutted from the sand a quarter of a mile away. Automatically he counted and recounted the fish swimming in front of him, wondering how long he could continue to prey on Jordan and his men. By now the sea was so far away, the shore so choked with salt, that only the larger and more skilful teams could trap the water and carry it back to the reservoirs. Three years earlier Ransom and the young Grady had been able to cut permanent channels through the salt, and at high tide enough water flowed down them to carry small catches of fish and crabs. Now, as the whole area had softened, the wet sliding salt made it impossible to keep any channel open for more than twenty yards, unless a huge team of men was used, digging the channel afresh as they moved ahead of the stream.
The remains of one of the metal conveyors jutted from the dunes ahead. Small pools of water gathered around the rusting legs, and Ransom began to run faster, paddle whirling in his hands as he tried to gain enough momentum to sweep some of this along with him. Exhausted by the need to keep up a brisk trot, he tripped on to his knees, then stood up and raced after the pool as it approached the conveyor.
A fish flopped at his feet, twisting on the salt slope. Leaving it, Ransom rushed on after the pool, and caught up with it as it swirled through the metal legs. Lowering his head, he whipped the water with the paddle, and carried the pool over the slope into the next hollow.
Despite this slight gain, less than two-thirds of the original pool remained when he reached the lightship. To his left the sunlight was falling on the slopes of the salt-tips, lighting up the faces of the hills behind them, but Ransom ignored these intimations of warmth and colour. He steered the pool towards the small basin near the starboard bridge of the ship. This narrow tank, twenty yards long and ten wide, he had managed to preserve over the years by carrying stones and pieces of scrap metal down from the shore. Each day he beat the salt around them to a firm crust. The water was barely three inches deep, and a few edible kelp and water anemones, Ransom’s sole source of vegetable food, floated limply at one end. Often Ransom had tried to breed fish in the pool, but the water was too saline and the fish invariably died within a few hours. In the reservoirs at the settlement, with their more dilute solutions, the fish lived for months. Unless he chose to live on dried kelp five days out of six, Ransom was obliged to go out almost every morning to trap and steal the sea.
He watched the pool as it slid into the tank like a tired snake, and then worked the wet bank with his paddle, squeezing the last water from the salt. The few fish swam up and down the steadying current, nibbling at the kelp. Counting them again, Ransom followed the line of old boiler tubes that ran from the tank to the fresh-water still next to his shack. He had roofed it in with pieces of metal plate from the cabins of the lightship, and with squares of old sacking. Opening the door, he listened for the familiar bubbling sounds, and then saw with annoyance that the flame under the boiler was set too low. The wastage of fuel, every ounce of which had to be scavenged with increasing difficulty from the vehicles buried beneath the shore, made him feel sick with frustration. A can of petrol sat on the floor. He poured some into the tank, then turned up the flame and adjusted it, careful, despite his annoyance, not to overheat the unit. Using this dangerous and unpredictable fuel, scores of stills had exploded over the years, killing or maiming their owners.
He examined the condenser for any leaks, and then raised the lid of the water receptacle. An inch of clear water lay in the pan. He decanted it carefully into an old whisky bottle, raising the funnel to his lips to catch the last intoxicating drops.
He walked over to the shack, touching his cheek, conscious that the bruised skin would show through his coarse stubble. Overhead the sunlight shone on the curving stern-plates of the wrecked lightship, giving the port-holes a glassy opaque look like the eyes of a dead fish. In fact, this stranded leviathan, submerged beyond sight of the sea in this concentration of its most destructive element, had rotted as much as any whale would have done in ten years. Often Ransom entered the hulk, searching for pieces of piping or valve gear, but the engine room and gangways had rusted into grotesque hanging gardens of corroded metal.
Below the stern, partly sheltered from the prevailing easterly winds by the flat blade of the rudder, was Ransom’s shack. He had built it from the rusty motor-car bodies he had hauled down from the shore and piled on top of one another. Its bulging shell, puffed out here and there by a car’s bulbous nose or trunk, resembled the carapace of a cancerous turtle.
The central chamber, floored with wooden deck planks, was lit by a single fish-oil lamp when Ransom entered. Suspended from a chassis above, it swung slowly in the draughts moving through the cracks between the cars.
A small petrol stove, fitted with a crude flue, burned in the centre of the room. Two metal beds were drawn up against a table beside it. Lying on one of them, a patched blanket across her knees, was Judith Ransom. She looked up at Ransom, her dented temple casting an oblique shadow across the lace-like burn on her cheek. Since the accident she had made no further attempt to disguise the asymmetry of her face, and her greying hair was tied behind her neck in a simple knot.
‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Did you catch anything?’
Ransom sat down and began to peel off the rubber suit. ‘Five,’ he told her. He rubbed his cheek painfully, aware that he and Judith now shared the same facial stigma. ‘Three of them are quite big—there must be a lot to feed on out at sea. I had to leave one behind.’
‘For heaven’s sake, why?’ Judith sat up, her face sharpening. ‘We’ve got to give three to Grady, and you know he won’t take small ones! That leaves us with only two for today!’ She glanced about the shack with wavering desperati
on, as if hoping that in some magical way a small herring might materialize for her in each of the dingy corners. ‘I can’t understand you, Charles. You’ll have to go out again tonight.’
Giving up the attempt to pull off his thigh-boots—made, like his suit, from the inner tubes of car tyres—Ransom leaned back across the bed. ‘Judith, I can’t. I’m exhausted as it is.’ Adopting the wheedling tone she herself had used, he went on: ‘We don’t want me to be ill again, do we?’ He smiled at her encouragingly, turning his face from the lantern so that she would not see the weal. ‘Anyway, they won’t be going out again tonight. They brought in a huge lake of water.’
‘They always do.’ Judith gestured with a febrile hand. She had not yet recovered from Ransom’s illness. The task of nursing him and begging for food had been bad enough, but faded into a trifle compared with the insecurity of being without the breadwinner for two weeks. ‘Can’t you go out to the sea and fish there? Why do you have to steal water all the time?’
Ransom let this reproof pass. He pressed his frozen hands to the stove. ‘You can never reach the sea, can’t you understand? There’s nothing but salt all the way. Anyway, I haven’t a net.’
‘Charles, what’s the matter with your face? Who did that?’
For a moment her indignant tone rallied Ransom’s spirits, a display of that self-willed temper of old that had driven her from the Johnstone settlement five years earlier. It was this thin thread of independence that Ransom clung to, and he was almost glad of the injury for revealing it.
‘We had a brief set-to with them. One of the paddle blades caught me.’
‘My God! Whose, I’d like to know? Was it Jordan’s?’ When Ransom nodded she said with cold bitterness: ‘One of these days someone will have his blood.’
The Drought Page 12