Authors: Bernard Cornwell
I saw no hummingbird. I did not even look for a hummingbird. I could not have cared if a whole troupe of hummingbirds had joined wing tips and hummed hallelujahs around my head. I just wanted to find David’s cache, which consisted of ten cans of baked beans, ten cans of corned beef, six Kendal Mint bars, a small cooking canteen, a box of Earl Grey teabags, a waterproof container of matches, a can-opener, a groundsheet, and a sleeping bag, all crammed into a rucksack. It was a sensible cache, though I wished he had included one of the cheap, spare quartz watches that I had stored aboard
Stormchild
for the day when all my expensive chronometers gave up their ghosts. David was very sensible in restricting the times when he would keep a radio watch for me, but I no longer had a watch and did not know when the hour was on the hour.
But at least I had food. I opened a can of baked beans and, not bothering to make a fire to heat them, ate them greedily.
Above me a hint of thunder boiled in the low, dark clouds.
With the very last of the day’s light I took from my pocket the photographs of Nicole. I stared into her face, trying and failing to understand her. I tried to remember her as a child, but it was as if a veil had drawn itself between those memories and this moment. I did not know my daughter anymore. I did not understand what strange sea change had been wrought in her by her brother’s death, nor what she had become in the years since. My daughter was a stranger. I put the photographs away. Night fell in a rage of wind and rain. Lightning flickered briefly to the south.
Except for my brother, my whole family was gone to death or to evil, and I was alone. That knowledge made me feel as though I had passed through a dark gateway into a place where hatred ruled and where any life left to me was bleak and profitless. I crouched in the trees like an animal. I was dirty, soaked, tired, bleeding, and very dangerous.
And I had seventy-two hours, in which to teach the Genesis community that they were not above the law. I had seventy-two hours to destroy them, just as they had destroyed my family. I had been so reluctant to face that truth, but now I would ram it down their throats.
I slept with the Australian girl’s legacy of dynamite beside me. I woke long before dawn. I tried to reach
Stormchild
on the radio, but there was no answer, and I dared not drain the battery by leaving the small set switched on in hope of catching any possible transmissions that David might make. Instead I pulled his rucksack onto my back, picked up the rifle, and started walking.
I
t took me most of the daylight hours to cross the Isla Tormentos. I was unsure of my way for I was not returning to the limestone workings, but rather trying to reach the farm settlement. I had no map, no compass, and the sun was hidden all day, so I trudged through the unending rain guided only by guess.
Much of my journey was through marshland for I was using the low ground to avoid the eyes of any Genesis sentinel. I pushed through stands of woodland that were so thick with undergrowth they rivaled a tropical rain forest for impenetrability. I waded rain-swollen, peat-colored streams that were rich with trout, and staggered through deep sloughs under the protests of screaming birds. My blistered feet hurt like hell, so that I hobbled rather than walked. Twice, denied the cover of low ground by rising floodwaters, I was forced up onto the hills, and both times I found the fresh tracks of the cross-country motorbikes, evidence that von Rellsteb and his companion had returned this way, proof, if I needed further proof, that they had failed to capture
Stormchild.
That failure would be worrying von Rellsteb. He probably believed me to be dead, but that would be no consolation for his fear that
Stormchild
was sailing north to carry Berenice and her damning tales to the Chilean authorities. With my body left to be found, and the Australian girl still missing somewhere on the island, the last thing von Rellsteb needed was any official interest in the Isla Tormentos and he would be doing everything in his power to intercept
Stormchild
in the heavy seas off Cape Raper.
It was that supposition which led me to believe the farm settlement would be largely unguarded. If the community believed I was dead and knew
Stormchild
was at sea, then they would certainly not be guarding their house against an attack from the landward flank. On that assumption I made my plans to make their settlement uninhabitable. Without food and shelter the group would be shattered. I planned to destroy von Rellsteb’s legacy. I would murder his dream. I would finish him as he had tried to finish me, and I no longer cared what risks I ran in that destructive revenge because I had nothing left to live for.
I was not entirely bent on suicide. Before attacking, I planned to wait through the rest of David’s seventy-two hours, in hope of contacting him on the radio. If I succeeded in reaching
Stormchild
I would persuade David to rescue me when my harrowing of the settlement was finished. I had decided not to tell my brother what I planned, for fear that David would summon the authorities before I succeeded; instead I would merely tell David I was in safe hiding then arrange a rendezvous with him somewhere in the Desolate Straits.
But if I could not reach
Stormchild
on the radio, then damn the consequences.
Because I had nothing left to live for.
I had reached the protective escarpment that curled about the western flank of the settlement at nightfall. The last few miles were hard going for I had entered a nightmarish landscape of rocks, small gorges, sudden streams and cold black lakes above which the settlement’s crude radio mast acted as a landmark beckoning me on. I approached the crest of the escarpment very cautiously, skirting around a wind-fretted reservoir that was held back by the earthen dam which controlled the water supply. No one challenged my approach. Once, slipping off a wet rock, my right foot dislodged a crashing fall of scree, but there were no guards posted on the high ground to hear the shattering landslide splash into the lake.
By dusk I had found a hiding place. It was a deep crevice beneath the rocky peak on which the radio mast had been built. The crevice was a crack in the rock eighteen inches high and four feet deep. Six people could have hidden in its black shadows and from its eastern lip I could stare straight down the steep escarpment, across the vegetable plots, to Genesis community. I made myself at home in my refuge by spreading out the groundsheet, unrolling the sleeping bag, and stowing my precious food and explosives deep in the dry heart of the rock. I then crept down to the reservoir and had a skimpy wash in its icy water. I had no razor, so my incipient beard, bristly and uncomfortable, had to stay.
Back in my aerie I made a supper of cold baked beans and corned beef as I searched the bay with my half binocular. Neither the catamaran nor the sloop were there, only the decrepit fishing vessel, which suggested the faster yachts had indeed gone north to search for
Stormchild.
They would be having a lively time of it, for the wind was whipping over my rock and shrieking an eldritch sound in the guy ropes of the radio mast, while the landscape beneath me was being beaten by a cold, wind-blasted rain that kept the Genesis community indoors. Just before darkness I saw two of the gray-dressed women hurry with sacks to one of the outhouses, but I saw no one else.
Darkness came and I watched the dim candle lights flicker in the windows of the big house until, one by one, they disappeared and the settlement was swallowed into the wild Patagonian night. After the last light had disappeared I tried to reach
Stormchild
by radio. I counted the seconds, and once every minute for an hour and a quarter I switched on the small set and sent an identifying message, but I heard nothing in reply. It could have been that David and
Stormchild
were too far away, or perhaps the hills of the island were blocking my signal, or maybe the radio was not working. I finally abandoned my efforts and, sheltered from the relentless rain by the tons of rock above me, I tried to sleep, but the best I could manage was a shivering night of intermittent and hallucinatory dozes. I was filled with misery. My feet were in agony, but I dared not take off my boots in case I could not pull them on again over my blistered, bleeding feet.
An hour before dawn I finally abandoned any pretense of sleep and once again tried to radio David, and once again I failed to reach him. I went back to the eastern side of my rock, and, as the gray light seeped into the bowl of the mountains, I watched the settlement stir. A wisp of smoke showed at a chimney. The rain still fell and the wind gusted to make the damp landscape a place of cold misery. I shivered, yet in truth I was so damp and so cold that by now I had almost ceased to notice any further discomfort. During the night my socks had become soaked with blood that now seeped over the edge of my boots.
I contemplated making no hostile move that morning. I needed more rest, and I still had time to reach David. If it was necessary, I planned to spend all day trying to raise him on the radio, but instead, in the morning’s early gray light, and just as the first workers went into the fields, everything changed.
For, just after dawn, the most astonishing mournful and trembling sound echoed across the sky like a great shuddering lament. My first prosaic thought was that a lovesick bull sea lion had bellowed his frustration to the new day, but then I realized that this sound was too great for any animal. It was a foghorn.
Minutes later, like the arrival of some phantasmagorical spacecraft from another world, a ship appeared. She was a real, civilized, proper merchant ship. I took out my half binocular to see the name
San Rafael
painted on her bows. She looked huge, though in truth she was nothing more than a small coaster, perhaps two hundred feet long and five hundred tons in displacement, but in that bay, where I had thought to see nothing bigger than
Stormchild,
the
San Rafael
loomed like a Leviathan. She was a smart ship, beautifully painted in a dark blue and gray livery, with the colorful Chilean ensign painted on her funnel. I guessed from the derricks on her foredeck that she was a supply vessel for the oil and gas rigs that edged the Land of Fire, and she looked just the kind of sturdy efficient vessel that such a job would need. She had a high bluff bow, a cargo deck amidships, and a galleried layer of living quarters behind the bridge at her stern. A wisp of steam from her turbines drifted across the water as the radar aerial on her short mast whipped busily around. Bilge water spewed from a vent on her starboard side, above which men in blue donkey jackets leaned on her varnished rails to gaze at the isolated settlement.
The arrival of the
San Rafael
had thrown the Genesis community into turmoil. The few gray-dressed women who had already started work in the gardens fled in panic toward the house, while a man in green stared in apparent shock at the cargo boat that now seemed to fill the bay. I shared the man’s evident astonishment, for the ship was a stunning reminder that there was a real world somewhere out beyond the tide-scoured channels, a world where people lived by rules and read newspapers and watched television and drove cars and did their shopping. I stared at the wondrous ship, wondering whether I should try to contact her by radio and ask her to pass a message on to
Stormchild,
but even as I was trying to compose a suitable explanation for such an odd request, I saw that the
San Rafael’s
crew was lowering a ship’s boat.
I trained my makeshift glass on the coaster. The lens skidded across the group of men at the ship’s side, down the flank of the coaster, and at last steadied on the small ship’s tender that proved to be a motorized launch about seventeen feet long. The launch’s coxswain, a cigarette dangling from his lip, threw off the falls fore and aft, then accelerated the small boat away from the
San Rafael
’s hull toward the beach.
The launch was not bringing supplies to the settlement; she carried neither crates nor fuel drums, but instead she was evidently disembarking two passengers. Those passengers, swathed in yellow rain slickers, huddled nervously together on the boat’s central thwart. I could see nothing of the passenger sitting on the port side of the launch, but there was no mistaking the face of the person to starboard, and, upon seeing that face, my heart leapt from its suicidal self-pity into a sudden and very unexpected joy. The face was so very solemn, but it was also so very full of life and enthusiasm and happiness.
Jackie Potten had come to Chile to fetch her Pulitzer.
I switched on my small radio. If I was to talk to the
San Rafael
I would have to call her on channel 16, which was the only frequency I would expect them to monitor, but someone else had already sequestered that channel. I heard a man’s voice haranguing the
San Rafael
in quick, agitated Spanish. I could distinguish the ship’s name in the man’s excited torrent of words, but nothing else, though I hardly needed to know Spanish to understand what was being said; the man was attempting to persuade the
San Rafael
to take the visitors away, but even as his protests became frantic the small launch kept determinedly on toward the beach. As it neared the shore I saw Jackie stand precariously to take a photograph of the settlement.
Two green-dressed men had run to the bluff above the beach and now waved vigorously at the launch in an evident attempt to make it turn round. A third man, this one carrying an automatic rifle, appeared at the back door of the house and began running toward the hills where I lay sheltered, and I realized that the arrival of Jackie and her companion had prompted the same precautions that had attended my own arrival at the settlement. Most of the group stayed protected in the house while a cordon of men tried to make the unwelcome visitors leave. I presumed the gunman on the hill was the precaution of last resort, while the gunman in the house’s upper window was posted to dissuade any of the gray-dressed community members from trying to escape.