J. Ballard - The Drought

Only toward the sea, far across the dunes and creeks, was there any activity.

Shortly after dawn, as the tide extended slowly 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 toward 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 center. 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 saltflats, 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 quietly away along the banks.

Overhead the gulls dived, picking at the hundreds of fish swimming below the surface. In equilibrium, the water ceased to move, and for a moment the great lagoon, and the long arms of brine seeping away northwards through the gray 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 gray slush, they worked furiOusly as the wet crystals drained backwards toward the sea. Their arms and chests were strung with strips of rag and rubbber. 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, thinfaced 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 be made up of a series of flintlike 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 toward the shore. 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 breach, half the lagoon had drained, rushing out in a deep channel. Like a demented canal, it poured onwards toward the shore, washing away the smaller dunes in its path. It swerved to the northeast, 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 into the main channel. His men floundered after him, repairing the breach and driving the water back 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 along by its own momentum, the channel had widened into a gliding oval lake, the hundreds of fish tumbling over one another in the spinning currents. Every twenty yards, as the lake poured along, a dozen fish would be left 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 tilled along, still almost 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 toward 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 across the bank and began to paddle the pool away among the shallows to the west.

Feet splashed after them through the brine, and the air was filled with whirling paddIes and the spray of flying salt. Trying to recover the water they had lured with such effort from the sea, the trappers drove it back toward the lake. Some of them attacked the pirates, splintering their short paddles with their own heavier blades. The dark-faced leader 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 melee, 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 gray morning light gleamed in the wet slopes, their footfalls were lost in the streaming salt.

Nursing his cheek against the rubber pad on his shoulder, Ransom made his way carefully 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 the sternfaced captain would send a party over to the beaches, where the outcasts lived, on a punitive expedition. 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.