The Coming of the Whirlpool Read online

  Tears threatened behind Dow’s eyes. He had chosen to leave home and to seek a new life it was true, but oh, was he really expected to find that life in this dismal village? How could he start anew where everything seemed so glum and broken down? Was there even anyone in Stromner his own age, with whom he might become friends? Or were there only old people here?

  There came a thump from the other side of the door, the sound of something being knocked over, and a string of curses. Dow huddled deeper against the cold. No doubt the old man was returning to his drinking. Worst of all was that this Nathaniel – with his drunkenness and foul breath and squalid house – was supposed to be a new father to him. It was unthinkable.

  Dow shivered. The room was freezing, and there was no prospect of anything to warm it, nor to fill his belly. He turned to the pile of old canvas and did his best to fashion the stiff material into a blanket. Then, removing his shoes but otherwise still wrapped in his jacket and the rest of his clothes, he curled up on the cot and blew out the candle, burned almost to the end in any case.

  For a long while he lay there, staring into a dark that was relieved only by a dim line of light beneath the door. From time to time a hoarse shout sounded from the drinker in the other room, and once there came a crash of pottery smashing, and once also, Dow was sure, the sound of desolate weeping. But then the wind rose outside and the rain rattled down again, loud on the wooden tiles of the roof. A storm was rising, and lulled by the rain’s ebb and roar, Dow fell asleep at last.

  He woke to bewilderment and pain. A hand was gripped on his shoulder, shaking him cruelly. He strove to break free, not knowing where he was, but then he saw the room, cold in a hint of daylight, and remembered.

  The fingers bit more deeply, and a breath of old whisky hissed into his face. Nathaniel Shear was leaning low over the bed.

  ‘Gettup!’

  Dow guessed at once that the old man had not slept, had perhaps not even paused in his drinking, right through the night.

  ‘Up damn you,’ the fisherman insisted. Dow wrenched his shoulder free and Nathaniel swayed back, staring down with an unreasoning hostility. ‘I’ll teach you, if that’s what they want. Up!’

  Dow rose, glancing to the window. Rain lashed against the salt-crusted glass. Outside, the storm was still blowing. In fact, it sounded worse.

  ‘What?’ mocked Nathaniel, watching. ‘Afraid of a little weather? That won’t do. You’re not in your cosy forest anymore. Time to learn what real work is, if that’s the way you want it. Move, boy. Now!’

  Dow barely had time to pull on his shoes, and no time at all for breakfast (not that any was offered) before the old man dragged him out into the storm. A gust blasted them as they came through the front door, and rain pelted in their faces, cold and hard. It was barely dawn. The wind was whistling out of the west and low clouds were racing overhead, the peak of East Head lost in their dark bellies. Stromner looked as miserable by day as it had by night. Every shack and shed, indeed the very dunes, seemed to hunker down, beaten and drenched.

  Dow squinted blearily through the rain. Was there a more cheerless and inhospitable place in all the world? But he followed after Nathaniel.

  They encountered no one else and came at last to the pier. To one side of it was the beach, stony and steep and backed by the dunes. There upon the shingle were drawn up the village’s fishing boats, perhaps ten small craft in all, leaning this way and that on their keels, sails furled about their booms. Dow had known all along that he would not be going to sea in anything like the grand ships he had glimpsed from the headland, but even so, this motley collection of boats made for a sorry sight on the wet beach. The scene wasn’t helped by the skeletons of other craft that littered the shoreline for some distance beyond; old vessels that had been abandoned to rot on the beach, or to be swallowed by the dunes.

  To the north stretched the open waters of the Claw. The great bay was seething in the wild dawn, a chaos of sharp black-faced waves streaked with lines of white foam, the horizon lost to darkness and mist. Savage chop beat upon the pebbles of the shore, and a stinging spray was driven by the wind into Dow’s face as he gazed out, as chill as any sleet in the highlands.

  ‘Look lively now,’ Nathaniel snapped. The old man had laid a hand upon the prow of one of the boats. ‘Get behind there and push!’

  Dow did as he was told, leaning his shoulder into the boat’s stern. The craft was squat and low, no more than sixteen feet long but wide in the beam, made of overlapping wooden planks that were black and oddly slick to the touch. It bore a single mast set well forward of centre, almost in the bow, with a long boom that reached back nearly to the stern. There was a narrow seat by the tiller and another by the mast, but otherwise the interior held only a tangle of ropes and nets and buoys, all sloshing about in a pool of foul smelling water.

  On the bow someone had daubed a swirling pattern in lines of white paint. It reminded Dow of whorls in a tree trunk. He had a vague notion that boats were given names, just like people, but if the swirling pattern was such a thing, or had some other meaning, he could not begin to guess.

  Dow shoved and Nathaniel pulled and the boat slid gratingly across the stones. The bow hit the water and lifted. Nathaniel, for all his drunkenness, hoisted himself in one swift motion over the side. In moments he was at work lowering the centreboard from its trunk. ‘Push!’ he spat over his shoulder.

  The boat slipped further out and Dow was suddenly floundering chest deep in the waves, the shore dropping away alarmingly beneath his feet. Nathaniel had loosed the sail and was yanking on ropes to raise it up the mast, canvas flapping in the wind. He glanced back. ‘What are you waiting for? Get in, you fool!’

  Soaked through, Dow hauled himself over the stern and collapsed into the boat – face down in the bilge water. He swallowed a mouthful of the foul stuff and reared up on his knees, spluttering. Nathaniel shoved him rudely down again as the wind filled the sail and the boom whipped sideways. Dow clambered out from under the old man’s feet, ducked below the threatening boom, scrambled to the forward bench and then crouched there, blinking water from his eyes.

  Already, the boat was cutting away from the beach and out into the Claw. It was Dow’s first true experience of sailing – the ride on the barge did not count, he knew – and there was none of the fluid grace he had expected. Instead the sail cracked brutally by his ear, and the bow was slamming into the waves, hammer blow after hammer blow, as if the water was hard as stone. The violence of it all was confounding. Dow could scarcely cling to his seat.

  And yet Nathaniel rode easily in the stern, one hand grasping a rope to adjust the sail, the other on the tiller. Their eyes met and the old man’s scorn burned like glee. ‘Stand on your feet, idiot,’ he called. ‘If you can!’

  Shamed and furious, Dow took hold of a line of fixed rigging – it hummed wickedly in the gale – and rose slowly. The planking beneath his feet kicked and leapt, but somehow he stayed upright; it was a matter of watching how the boat met the waves and loosening his stance to prepare for each jolt. Derisive laughter from the stern told him how ludicrous he must look, but balanced thus, he turned deliberately away from Nathaniel to face forward over the bow.

  Rain peppered his face like tiny stones. It seemed at first that they were sailing west, directly into the wind, which was surely impossible. But no – looking more attentively, Dow saw that in fact they were angling across the gale, somewhat to the north of west. Even as Dow pondered this, Nathaniel hauled on the tiller and the little craft swung across the face of wind, the boom shifting with a crack, forcing Dow to duck below it. The canvas filled again and they went slanting away across the waves once more, pursuing a south-west angle this time.

  Yes . . . Dow thought he could see it now, how the tiller and the keel must work in unison with the sail, allowing the boat to skew its way forward, in stages, against the wind. It was almost simple, really.

  He stood straighter and looked about. Behind them Stromner was already h
idden by the low point which sheltered the beach; they were now well out into the channel that lay between East Head and West. On their left the heights of East Head remained lost in cloud, and on their right Stone Port was little more than a shadow through the rain. But directly to the south the channel narrowed steadily until, between the surf-lined extremities of either promontory, it terminated in the gap – approaching all too rapidly now – of the Rip.

  Dow would never have guessed that a stretch of water could look so evil. And it wasn’t because the waves there appeared any wilder than within the channel. If anything, the Rip seemed to swallow the waves, as if a dark oil lay upon the water there, suffocating the chop and producing only sinister undulations and swirls. But it was a deceptive calm – even Dow, in all his ignorance of the sea, could recognise that. It spoke of immense currents at work beneath the surface, forces so powerful that they stilled even the fury of the wind.

  Dow went chill suddenly in his wet clothes. A strange nausea was growing in his stomach, and his legs felt weak. This wasn’t right. He wasn’t ready for this. What were they even doing there? Staring about he could see no other boats; no one else had dared venture out in this storm – so why had they? Not to fish, surely. Indeed, when Dow looked back to the old man, he could see no sane or natural purpose in the fisherman’s stare.

  Nathaniel grinned at him. ‘You wanted to go to sea, boy! You’ve an admiral’s blood in your veins, I’m told. So why are you quaking and quivering? What danger could there be in chancing the Rip in a gale?’

  Such was the hatred in the old man’s voice it came to Dow that perhaps Nathaniel actually meant him harm out here. But it was too late for anything to be done. Dow could only watch on, frozen and helpless, as they scudded through the last chop of the channel and into the queasy swell of the Rip.

  ‘Look, admiral’s child!’ The old man’s words were hurled through the wind. ‘Look over the side and see the ocean’s teeth.’

  The boat was moving at a terrific pace now. Dow stared over the side. To his horror he saw that although the surface appeared black, the water was in fact perfectly clear, and visible just a few feet below the hull were rocks – great jagged fangs of stone that rose up from the depths. The water raced across these teeth with terrible speed, and the boat was swept along too, powerless, under threat any instant of having its keel ripped out. Dow became aware of the sail flapping loose, and of the wind veering madly from one quarter to the next. He tore his gaze from the water and looked back to Nathaniel.

  More horror. The old man had let go of the tiller and released the ropes that bound the sail. He had surrendered them to the Rip. Now he stood upright in the stern, hands raised as if to offer proof that he had abandoned all control of the boat. He was grinning still, but tears streamed on his cheeks.

  ‘Do you see them down there, boy? All the dead souls the Rip has dragged to the bottom? All the ships the teeth have gnashed to splintered hulks? Do you hear the lost sailors crying to you from the deep?’

  Dow stared in terror and disbelief. They had entered the Rip close to East Head, but already they had been swept halfway across the gap. It seemed that they must be dashed upon the West Head rocks, or worse, be carried out to sea, to where the truly immense ocean waves reared, ponderous and white capped and crashing continuously along a line of boiling water.

  But Nathaniel was heedless. He had fallen to his knees and was hunched over the side, staring down. There were no rocks visible now, only dark water, bottomless.

  ‘Where are you?’ he cried, sobbing amid the rain and spray. ‘Where did you go?’ He seemed utterly mad, uncaring that death was close – or perhaps even craving it. He reached his hand down to the water, imploring as he wept. ‘I beg you, give them back to me!’

  Dow looked up again. Now the cliffs of West Head were starkly clear through the rain. But in fact the current had changed – it was sweeping the boat not onto the rocks, nor out to sea, but rather in an arc that led back across the channel. Hope rose in Dow and he gazed into the centre of the Rip. Yes, he perceived it now – the water was moving in conflicting directions, surging back and forth against itself. Almost there was a coherence to it, as if at any moment all the surges would resolve into one vast pattern, an immense circular motion . . .

  But suddenly stone grated and rapped against the keel, and water spurted from the floor as the planks of the hull briefly buckled and bent. The boat heaved almost to a standstill upon the unseen reef, then the wind and the current tore it free and they rushed on again, back towards East Head and more rocks yet. Dow’s fear roared up in him, devouring. He spun to Nathaniel.

  ‘You have to save us!’

  But the fisherman was beyond any appeal, beyond knowing even that Dow was with him in the boat. The old man was raging blindly at the sea. ‘Open, damn you. Open again and show me the way down!’

  Dow had no idea what it meant, and no time for wondering. He clambered under the wildly swinging boom and clasped Nathaniel by the shoulders. He yelled into the old man’s face, not knowing what his own words were, aware only of terror and anger. The fisherman gave no sign that he heard anyway, but then his red gaze focussed upon Dow, and lit with crazed inspiration.

  ‘This one,’ Nathaniel cried, clutching Dow in return. ‘Take this one! Take this useless boy and give back those you stole from me!’

  And suddenly Dow was wrestling for his life. A hand was around his neck, and another was dug into his back, bending him over the side of the hull so that he was face down to the water, spray slapping against his cheek. A stunned instant passed before he understood – Nathaniel was trying to throw him overboard! The boat dipped and for a horrifying moment Dow’s head was submerged and he gazed with stinging eyes directly down into blackness.

  Mortal terror galvanised him. He reared up and sent the old man staggering back beneath the mast. At the same moment a gust hit the flapping sail, filled it, and the boom swung viciously across the boat. The spar caught Nathaniel full upon the brow with an awful clap, and he was thrown off his feet to land sprawling in the bow, where he lay empty-eyed and insensible.

  For a moment Dow could only stare in shock at the fallen figure. Then stone grated again under the hull and he came back to himself. Nathaniel no longer mattered. The true dangers were the sea and the shrieking wind. He lurched to his feet and set a hand on the tiller. Where was he? Which way did safety lie? And how was he to get there? The world seemed to consist only of hurrying foam and lurking reefs and blotting rain. He pushed at the tiller, but the rudder merely swung slack in the water, ineffectual. He was doing something wrong. It was hopeless. He was alone, lost in a boat he did not know how to sail.

  Dow’s fear energised him no longer, it had become instead a cold and shrinking thing, an urge to curl up and close his eyes and pretend that none of this was happening. Almost he gave in to it. But then he saw the shadow of East Head rising over the bow, and realised that the boat had come almost full circle about the great gyre of the Rip. If he could only escape that gyre – this very moment – then he would be close to Stromner and the safety of its beach.

  If he could just turn the boat!

  Heart thumping, Dow studied the tiller in his hand and the rudder in the water. He studied the sail and the boom and the rigging.

  And he saw. If he took hold of that rope, then he could steady the sail. If he swung the boom that way, then the wind would fill the canvas, shoving the boat forward and giving the rudder purchase. And if he pushed the tiller right, then the boat would steer left, out of the Rip.

  Dreamlike, balanced unthinkingly, one hand on the rope and the other on the tiller, Dow gathered the boat beneath him, a living thing with a will of its own, but which could be tamed and bent to command. The wind caught the sail with a thud and they were away, slicing across the black water, almost effortlessly in the end. Exultation filled Dow. The water and wind might fight against him with more strength than he could ever muster, but with cleverness the water could be cheated, and
with skill the wind could be made to work against itself.

  Laughing, he guided the boat clear of the Rip and slammed it headlong back into the chop of the channel.

  It was harder there, in the sharp swell – harder to balance on his feet, harder to control the sail and hold the rudder to his course. His elation faded and fear took him again, and the cold. His hand on the rope began to cramp. But he fought on, tacking the boat back and forth clumsily as the channel widened northwards.

  At last he was clear of the inner point of East Head. He came about one last time and set a course directly for Stromner and the shore.

  The boat felt leaden now, sluggish. In the bow, Nathaniel moaned and spat blood, but Dow was barely aware of him. He was too focussed on the strip of sand ahead, and on forcing his hands to retain their grip and his quaking legs to remain unbent. He was barely aware, either, of the men that had gathered on the beach, or the others that were hurrying down from the village.

  He knew nothing about how the craft might be stopped. He merely sailed on, paralysed at the helm, until sand rasped against the keel and the boat jammed hard in the shallows and the sail tore the rope from his hand. Everything heeled over, but Dow clung to the tiller, upright still.

  Men came splashing through the waist-deep water. They climbed aboard, their expressions oddly shamefaced as they pried his fingers loose, telling him, ‘It’s okay, boy, it’s okay. You’re safe home.’

  He wasn’t home. This place would never be home. But he was alive. Released from fear at last, Dow sank to his knees and wept.