As it felt the cold steel in its belly, the killer wrenched all the muscles from chin to tail. The great flukes slammed into something with jarring force. It twisted again and tried to dive.
As though in a dream, Kate, sitting up, saw the tiny canoe turn in and vanish behind the black bulk of its side as Colin drove his arm down. Then suddenly, incredibly, the canoe reappeared, broken, turning, flying. Colin seemed to take off and tumble like an acrobat through the air. Of Simon there was no sign. “Colin!” screamed Kate, dragging herself to her knees. “Colin!” The whale floundered and heaved, tangled in the rope now, as well as the net, trying to dive. The ocean closed its grey jaws, and suddenly there was nothing there.
Colin hit the water with stunning force. He knew he had at most two and a half minutes before his heart gave up the unequal struggle against the cold. The floe was fifty feet away. He struck out for it. His face seemed to be burning, his hand swelling with the cold. Every joint ached with it, every muscle throbbed and became numb. He kicked his legs with panic force, gasping air and water in equal amounts. Hair in his eyes. The ocean fought him every inch of the way. It flooded his boots, made his clothes like lead, it tore at every part of him with icy claws.
“It’s all right,” whispered the Queen of Bitches in his mind. “Just go to sleep. It’s all right. Go to sleep. Go to sleep.”
He was, in fact, almost asleep when he hit the floe, and it required every ounce of his strength, coupled with Kate’s, to get him out of the water and on to the ice. He began to shiver uncontrollably.
Kate looked down at the blue pinched face. My God, she thought, what do I do now?
Suddenly his eyes were open and he was struggling to sit up. “Must keep moving,” he said.
“Where’s Simon?”
“Gone. They’ve both . . .”
And then the whale exploded out of the water again and began to run towards them, humping itself out of the ocean, fin high, head still wrapped in the net. The killer, badly wounded, surged towards them with powerful inevitability. Kate’s hand dived into the pocket of her anorak. Then she was holding the Very pistol, pointing at the black mountain of the whale’s head, waiting for it to raise its face a little so that the shot would do more than just bounce off.
The whale’s head was perhaps twenty feet away. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
“No!” Colin’s hand crashed up under her arms. The gun wrenched into the air, exploding into life, sending a red flare curving up to blaze into life above the fogbank gathering to the south.
“Look!” He pointed. Incredibly, unimaginably, something was moving on the killer’s back.
Simon was dead and he knew it. Unlike Colin, he had not been thrown clear by the blow of the killer’s tail. Instead he had become entangled in the net, dragged down when the killer dived, for two and a half minutes of pure agony crushed against its side as it struggled under the water, trying to tear the spear from its belly, and then returned to the surface to breathe. Simon, too, had breathed, and was breathing still. But he had been in the water for more than three minutes. He couldn’t feel his legs. His hands burned with unbearable agony. The only thing keeping him alive was the faint warmth of the killer’s flesh against his body.
Something solid struck him across the forehead, and when he automatically reached up to ward off another blow, it slapped snugly into his hand – the handle of the axe. He looked at it stupidly for a second, then he began to laugh.
“Right, you bastard,” he said, and he began to heave himself up the killer’s shoulder, twisting the axe-head free as he did so.
The killer felt something moving on its back. It panicked. Terrified, it began to run, hurling itself through the ocean at top speed until the solid drag of the floe sixty feet behind it slowed it down again.
With massive, dogged, insane concentration, Simon pulled himself on to the killer’s back until he half knelt, half sat astride the monster’s shoulders, his back against the firm base of the huge black sail of the fin. Every joint screaming with the movement, he closed his fists on the axe handle and raised the long wooden shaft as high as he could and held it there for a moment.
Then, “DIE!” he screamed, and he brought the steel blade down in a glittering arc into the side of the killer’s head. The red and grey metal disappeared into the killer’s flesh. Simon felt it grate against the shattered bone. He pulled it free again. Moving like a clockwork toy, he jerked it up again, and down. Up and down. Up and down.
The killer, goaded to new heights of strength by the terrible pain, hurled itself with incredible power against the restraint of the shrieking rope.
On the floe, Colin, his trembling forgotten, was pushing his left hand with all his strength down on the peg holding the rope, right hand round Kate’s shoulders. But the killer’s last, terrible lunge was too much. Colin felt the ice crumble under his false hand, and the sharp steel peg jerked free. The rope howled as it whipped through the air, its steel-weighted end cracking like a pistol-shot.
Simon, his sanity completely gone, had the axe raised for another massive blow, when the whale lurched free. His body, twisting to keep its balance, swung away from the fin, and suddenly, incredibly, something was whirling round it. Simon looked down. An orange snake closed on his chest, covering the yellow of his lifejacket with magic coils. It was as well he could not feel his body then, for his back was broken and his ribs crushed. He tried to breathe but something slammed into him. He stared down dazedly. One moment there were only the magical orange circles climbing up from his waist, and then next there were two inches of steel peg sticking out in front of his lifejacket.
“S-I-M-O-N . . .” The echoes of Colin’s cry echoed over the ocean, curiously deadened by the looming bulk of the fog. But Simon wouldn’t hear. Colin straightened, and watched the tall black thorn of the killer’s sail disappearing like the conning-tower of a sinking submarine.
Kate stood up beside him and narrowed her eyes, but there was nothing to see except the thickening billows of the fog; the flat grey sea; the sky, light grey cumulus-clouds beginning to break, revealing a thin spread of cirrus; the restless floes . . . Their own floe, the size of a small room now – fifteen feet by twenty – shifted restlessly, water slopping over it. She spun round, eyes searching in panic. But there was nothing to see. She went to Colin who was standing, also silent, looking around. They slid their arms around each other and looked out as though there was something to look at in the billowing fog, but there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
iv
Colin Ross was dying. He lay, still wrapped in his freezing clothes, with his dark head cradled in Kate’s lap. He could not feel his legs. It required all his strength of will to stop his massive body convulsing with the cold as both heat and life drained out of him. Otherwise the energy used by the muscles as they tightened and relaxed would set up a strain on his heart that it would not be able to bear for very long. He gave himself an hour at the outside. Kate knew as well as he did what was happening, but neither of them mentioned it. They spoke quietly, contentedly of small, unimportant things, like husband and wife at the fireside during a long winter evening.
But then, gradually, as the fog thickened around them in warm clouds, out of the heart of it, quiet at first – unnoticed by either of them – but growing louder, there came a faint, almost subliminal throbbing.
Suddenly Colin’s eyes sprang open. “Listen,” he said.
The throbbing had grown almost solid. The fog seemed to shake with it, the ice to tremble.
“What is it?” whispered Kate, awed by the power of the sound.
“It’s an engine. A ship!” He heaved himself up on to his knees. The fog swirled around them, shaking with the sound.