Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

Then the sea heaved the hulls together and I heard the crashing grind of wood on fibreglass. I jumped.

I pushed off with my left leg, which meant I landed on my right, and, for the first time in weeks, my knee buckled. I must have cried aloud, though I could hear nothing but the turmoil of water and wind. The leg was numb, it crumpled, and I sprawled heavily on Wildtrack ’s slippery foredeck. Pain speared out from my back. I heard Sycorax ’s engine falter as Angela rammed the lever into neutral and I had a terrifying glimpse of Sycorax ’s bowsprit arcing above my head, then a new terror swamped me as a sea broke over Wildtrack ’s foredeck and swept me towards the side. I grabbed a guardrail stanchion with my right hand and held on as the water shattered about me. The rush of cold sea slewed me around, but my left boot found a purchase on Wildtrack ’s forehatch and somehow I held fast in the bubbling and seething thunder of the sea. I couldn’t think, except, over and over again, to repeat a refrain in my head: “You must be fucking mad, you must be fucking mad”, and I suddenly remembered those were the very words I’d screamed aloud as I’d charged uphill with an SLR in my hands. I’d been scared witless then, and I was scared now. The sea began to stream off Wildtrack ’s deck and I lifted my head to see blood spewing into the flooded scuppers. It seemed to come from my left hand, but I could not see how bad the cut was. I tried to move my right leg, but there was no feeling there. I watched Sycorax sheering off, plunging her bowsprit into the wavecrests.

Wildtrack ’s hulk lurched up, freeing me from the water and letting me pull myself down the scuppers. I saw that I had slashed my left hand on a stub of metal shroud that had been sheared clean and astonishingly bright with bolt-cutters. The cut was across the fleshy base of my thumb and, though it was pulsing blood, there was nothing I could do about it now. I was cursing my leg as I pulled myself forward. My oilskins snagged on an empty jib-sheet track and, in my fear and rage, I ripped the jacket savagely to free myself before the next wave hammered over the rolling hulk.

I slithered over the coaming into the flooded central cockpit. I was soaked through, but adrenalin was warming me. The wind was lashing spray across the boat, but there was some small shelter in the cockpit, though it was frightening to be so low and unprotected in the water. The great swells loomed steep above me, their sides like crinkling slopes of bottle glass up which the swamped boat rose sluggishly but never quite made the tops so that the waves would break over her and, for an instant, she would be awash. The truth was that Wildtrack was sinking, and I was suddenly gripped with a terrible fear that she would go down before Angela could bring Sycorax back. I looked around for a lifebelt or raft, but when the crew had abandoned Wildtrack they had taken all such equipment. Yet, even if she did succeed in coming back, I did not know how I would transfer myself, let alone Bannister. My leg was useless. I sat half underwater and clawed fingers into my thigh and knee in an attempt to feel something.

I tried to stand, fell again, and pulled myself to the cockpit’s edge.

The leg would have to look after itself while I dragged trailing ropes from the water and jammed them into cave lockers. As I pulled the last line aboard, a swell rolled the boat’s stern up and the water in the cockpit surged forward. I saw the horror then.

I wasn’t ready for it, and I puked.

The door to the rear cabin was open and the body floated forward with the ship’s sluggish motion. It floated out of the door until its shoulders stuck. When I first saw the corpse I was stowing the last treacherous rope and summoning the courage to cross the rear coachroof to where Bannister sheltered, but suddenly I knew it was not Bannister who waited for me in Wildtrack ’s stern.

It was not Bannister, because I was looking at Bannister now, and he at me. Or rather his dead eyes were gaping at me from the companionway that spilt yet more water into the cockpit. He was wearing a lifejacket that should have kept his head above water, but his throat had been cut almost to the spine so that his head lolled back and his fish-white eyes were alternately above and under the rush of seawater. There was no blood. All the blood had been pumped and washed out of him. He must have been dead for hours for he was nothing but a bleached and bloodless thing that floated in the mass of cabin flotsam. The throat had been cut clean by a blade, then washed cleaner by the salt water. The sight of that wound made me vomit.

Wildtrack ’s bows rose and the body mercifully washed back out of sight. I scrambled aft and, using my arms, dragged myself onto the coachroof and hung on to the handrails as another sea bubbled and spilt around me. It was then that the man in the stern cockpit turned his hooded gaze on me.

It was Mulder.

Wildtrack shuddered under me as the sea poured off her topsides.

I scrabbled towards Mulder and fell into the small after cockpit.

“Can you stand?”

He shook his head, then pointed to his left leg that was bent unnaturally. He shouted something, and I had to cup my hand to my ear to show him I could not hear his words. He pulled open the flap that had covered his mouth. “Fucking fell.” He shouted it bitterly, as though fate had been peculiarly unkind to him. “My leg’s broken!” That made two one-legged men in a doomed boat. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” I was trying to stand, holding on to the rail beside the aft cabin door. I was searching for Sycorax and saw her, hull down, two hundred yards off, and still going away from me. I saw the storm jib’s sheet had come loose and the sail was flogging itself into shreds, then a heave of green water hid her from me. I tried to put my weight on my right leg and felt it shivering with the strain.

“Where’s your crew?” I shouted.

“Taken off!” Mulder shouted back. “They’re safe.” So another boat had stood by and rescued the crew? Mulder had clearly stayed on board to try and salvage the damaged ship and had then been marooned when the gale blew up. I wondered where the rescuing boat was, and why it had not steered for the flares. “Is that who you were signalling?” I asked. “The rescue ship?”

“Get me the fuck off here, Sandman! She’s sinking!”

“I should bloody leave you, Fanny.” I ducked as we reared up the side of a green cliff and as the tons of water smashed across us. “Why did you cut his throat?” I shouted the question again as we heaved up from the cold waves.

“Accident.” He shouted the word vehemently.

He looked so damned smug in his expensive foul-weather gear and lifejacket. I hated him then, and tried to kick him, but my damned leg folded so that I fell awkwardly in the cockpit. I fell over his broken leg and I heard Mulder’s odd falsetto scream. I rolled off him and pulled myself into a sitting position. “Why did you cut his throat?” I shouted again.

He just stared his hatred at me, so I lifted my left leg to kick his broken bone and the threat made him babble in a desperate attempt to avoid the pain. “Because I couldn’t push him overboard!”

“Did you kill his wife?”

He stared at me as if I was mad. “Get me off here! The boat’s sinking!”

“Did you kill his wife?”

“No!”

“You are a bastard, Fanny.” I managed to kneel upright and un-shackle his lifeline from a D-ring. He watched me, not sure whether I intended to push him overboard or save his life. I grabbed a braidline rope out of the tangle of wreckage in the cockpit and pulled forty or fifty feet free before the line jammed. “Knife!” I shouted over the sound of wind and sea. “Give me your knife!” He handed me a sheath knife which I supposed had been the murder weapon. I used the heavy blade to slash off the length of braidline, then clung to the handrail as another sea hissed about us.