Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

They had drifted in the darkness then, the tanker lost, and some time in that next long day Mulder had ripped his blade across Bannister’s throat and thus fulfilled his contract. Then he had waited for Kassouli, but the swamped hull would not have shown on the tanker’s radar and Mulder had waited in vain. He had slept for a time, waking to the darkness into which, at long intervals, he had sent his few flares. I had seen the last three fired.

Now, huddled and cold, battered and shivering, I listened to Mulder’s tale. I massaged my leg, feeling the slow return of life to the cold flesh. At times, struggling up in the streaming cockpit, I would see Angela’s painfully slow progress towards us. I waved once, and saw her wave back. All I could do now was pray that Wildtrack did not sink before Sycorax reached us. I wondered if I should go into the after cabin and strip the lifejacket from the dead man, but I could not face those empty eyes and flayed throat.

“What happened,” I shouted at Mulder, “to Nadeznha?” He had thought my interrogation was over, and I had to raise my left foot to encourage him. “I don’t know!” he shouted.

“You do bloody know!” I put my heel against his broken leg.

“I wasn’t on deck.” Mulder seemed hypnotized by my threat.

“Bannister relieved me.”

“You didn’t say that at the inquest.”

“Bannister didn’t want me to! He paid me to say that I was on watch!”

“Why?” I shouted. The wind was shrieking at us, snatching our voices, and tumbling cold water about our two hunched figures.

“Why?” I shouted again.

“He didn’t want anyone to know he wasn’t a watch captain. Me and Nadeznha, we sailed the boat, not him! But if anyone had known his wife was skippering and he was just crewing, he’d have lost face.”

I stared at the shivering man. Good God, I thought, but it made such sense. Bannister had not been half the sailor his wife had been, nor that Mulder was, yet his vanity would have insisted that he was seen as the expert.

Mulder mistook my silence for disbelief. “As God is my witness”—he was shaking with fright and cold—“that’s all I lied about.

I swear it! I don’t know what happened. I wouldn’t have killed her, I loved her!” I still said nothing, and Mulder still construed my silence as a threat. “I loved her, man! We were lovers! She and I!”

“Lovers?” I was incredulous; gaping at him. It made sense, if I had bothered to think about it, yet the conjunction of Nadeznha Bannister’s beauty and Mulder’s bestiality seemed so very astonishing. “Did Bannister ever find out?”

“He never found out.” There was a curious sort of pride in Mulder’s voice; the boast of a man who had made a notable sexual conquest. Poor Bannister, I thought, cuckolded by so many sailors.

But if Bannister had known about Mulder and Nadeznha, I thought, then his pride might have made him kill both. “Did Bannister kill his wife?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Mulder’s voice was a whimper that barely carried over the hiss of sea and air. “In God’s name, Mr Sandman, I don’t know.”

“But you told Kassouli that he killed her.”

“I told him I’d lied for Bannister at the inquest.” Mulder was desperate to be believed. “It was Mr Kassouli’s idea that Bannister killed Nadeznha, not mine!”

“But you encouraged the idea?”

“I told him the truth. I told him Bannister hated Nadeznha. Behind her back he called her a spoilt wog bitch.” Mulder babbled at me.

“He was terrified of her!”

“But you don’t know that he murdered her, do you?”

“Who else?”

“You bastard,” I said. This whole God-damned, star-crossed, bloody mess was because Kassouli had misinterpreted Mulder’s lie at the inquest. And all along the bloody Boer had known nothing, but his venality had led to this killing place. He had taken money for one lie, then seen that he could make more money by betraying Bannister to Kassouli. Now he lay shivering and broken in a sinking boat and, if I could save him, it would only be for a courtroom and a prison.

That fate suddenly seemed closer as Sycorax thrust her bows through the crest of the neighbouring swell. I hurled the knife overboard and struggled to the lee rail. Sycorax surged down the wave slope, then a rolling crest came between us and all I could see was her topmast above the frantic water. I held on to the guardrail for grim life as another crest slammed over Wildtrack , and when the water seethed away I saw that Sycorax was foully close, too close.

She was rearing above us, her chain bobstay dripping weed and water that was whipped horizontally by the wind. Wildtrack ’s hulk was falling down the wave, but Sycorax was coming faster and higher on the churning slope. I could see the copper sheathing at her stem. “Sheer off! Sheer off!” I shouted it vainly as I felt Wildtrack rising beneath me, heaving slowly up, then Sycorax seemed to dip towards me as Angela saw the danger. She was too late. I flinched away from Wildtrack ’s gunwale as Sycorax ’s bows crashed into the hulk. I seemed to be drowning in the savage churn of water and I heard, rather than saw, the slamming of the two boats. I forced myself upright to see Sycorax ’s timber scraping and gouging away from me. I’d put the fenders too far aft.

“Nick!” I heard Angela scream and I knew she would never manage to make the run a second time. I took a breath, willed my legs to push me up, then lunged to seize Sycorax ’s pulpit rails. My left leg thrust me upwards as the two boats banged and thumped each other. If I fell between the hulls now my legs would be crushed to mincemeat. I hooked an arm over the rail, swung my left leg up to the toerail, and suddenly I was clinging to the outside of Sycorax ’s bows. I was choking with water, and being deafened by the bellow of wind and the grating of wood and the seething anger of the sea.

Angela thrust the tiller over to sheer off as I’d told her, and suddenly I knew she would accelerate the boat and she would not know that I was tied to Mulder. When the braidline jerked taut it would be me who was plucked into the sea, not Mulder. He was a great weight in a waterlogged cockpit, while I was just clinging by weakened arms to Sycorax ’s gunwales. I screamed for Angela to slow down, but the wind snatched my voice into nothing. I had thrown the knife away, and all I could do was grab the trailing braidline with my right hand and reach under Sycorax ’s guardrails to loop it round a berthing cleat. I looped it once, twice, then it snatched taut and I heard the shout of pain as Mulder was plucked out of Wildtrack ’s cockpit. The loops on the cleat had held, but were slipping now and I let them slip so that the rope’s tension helped to pull me inboard.

I dragged myself to safety. I was sobbing with pain and cold, dripping with blood, but there was no time to catch breath. Sycorax dipped in a trough and water smashed me back towards the mainmast where I was stopped short by the braidline’s tension. I kept that tension hard as I undid the bowline about my waist, then knelt up to lash the braidline to a belaying pin on the fiferail. Angela was staring at me, her eyes wide in terror, but she had done all I had asked her to do, and done it well. The pain was all over me. Blood was dripping from my left hand from which the crude rope bandage had washed free.

I crawled down the scuppers. “Hard to starboard! Engine out of gear!”

Angela had turned to stare at the figure who was being towed in the water behind us. “Is that Tony?”

“Starboard the tiller now! Out of gear!” The foam was breaking and boiling around Mulder.