“But I can’t swim. I’m not a witch. I’ve never touched an engine since the Changes came. I only drew pictures.”
Blast. Geoffrey thought he might possibly be able to swim round to the harbor undetected. It’s surprising how little you can see from the shore of something that’s barely moving and barely projecting from the water. But he couldn’t do it if he had to lifesave Sally all the way.
“Fat chance of our getting it this weather,” he said, “but what we want is a good old sea fog.”
A breathing out of the water. No wind that you could feel, and nothing you could see, if you looked at any particular patch of sea. But all along the coast, from Bournemouth to Exeter, the water breathing up and being condensed into a million million million droplets in the cold layers of air above the oily surface. Cold out of the lower deeps. An unnumber-able army of drops, which even the almighty sun could not feel through, breeding more layers of cold in which more armies of drops could be breathed out. And now the wind you could not feel, pushing the fog from the South, piling it up in heavy swathes against the seaward hills, thick, gray, cold. Thicker. Grayer. Colder. Thicker. Grayer. Thicker . . .
Sally was shaking him by the shoulder. He was sitting in six inches of water and could see about a yard through the grayness. There were shoutings from the shore, a noise of contradictory orders being given in many voices.
“I think they’re getting boats and coming to throw us in,” said Sally. “You could swim now. It didn’t matter their taking it away after all. D'you think you can take me with you?”
Geoffrey stood up and took off his sopping robe. He folded the expensive cloth carefully and tied it in a roll with the belt, with a loop which he put round his neck so that the roll lay on his chest, where the whatever-it-was should have been. He stepped down into the deep water, on the far side of the island. It came up to his neck.
“I don't know if we’ll be able to find our way in this,” he whispered, “but it’s better than being drowned a-purpose, like a kitten. You lie on your back and I’ll hold you under your arms and pull you round. Take off your dress, though, and do it like my robe. Fine. Good girl. Off we go. Try to breathe so you’ve got as much air as possible in your lungs all the time. It helps you float. And pinch my leg if you hear anything that sounds like a boat.”
There was no trouble finding the way in the fog. It was his fog, after all—he’d made it and knew, if he cared to think about it, how its tentacles reached up into the chalk valleys behind the town and its heart drifted in slow swirls above the obliterated beach. But he thought about it as little as he could, for fear of getting lost in it, mind-lost, again. He lay on his back and gave slow, rhythmic frog kicks out to sea. He hoped it wouldn’t be too smelly when they went through the patch by the outflow from the town sewer, where the best mackerel always were. Sally lay very still, like a girl already drowned.
He was beginning to worry about her, to think of risking a few words, when he felt her hand moving over his shin. She pinched him hard and he stopped kicking, slowing to a barely moving paddle. She was right. There was a squeaking of wood on wood in the grayness, between them and the beach, and it was coming nearer. A voice said “What’s that, over there?” Pause. More squeaking. Another voice said “Lump o’ timber. This is right useless. Let’s be goin' in. Who’d have thought the young wickeder would have had another talisman?” Another voice said “We’ll be lucky if Dorset sees a morsel of dry hay this summer. Never cross a weathermonger, I always say. And he was a good un, for a young un.” “He was an evil witch,” said a more educated voice, fiercely. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The voices wrangled away into silence.
Geoffrey kicked on. He seemed to have been doing it for hours, and his legs were flabby after their rest. He began to count kicks, in order to keep going. Seven, eight, nine, eighty, one, two, three, four . . . the water was greasy with electricity under the grayness. They disturbed a gull which rose effortlessly from the surface and vanished. There didn’t seem to be any smell where the sewer came out — perhaps they weren’t using it any more . . . eight, nine, six hundred, one, two . . . , nine, a thousand, one, two . . . round the corner and into the straight. Not all that far now. There was the heeling black side of the old Jersey ferry. Lord, she was rusty. Ouch!
He’d banged his head against something — a dinghy. The varnished planks seemed like a welcome home to a world he knew, after all that wet and grayness.
“Hang on here,” he whispered, showing Sally where to clutch the gunwale. “Don’t try to climb in.”
He worked his way round to the stern, gave a final kick and heaved himself over, barking his belly a little. His legs felt empty and boneless, like one of those toy animals with zippers that women keep nighties in. Or used to, anyway. Heavens knows what they did now. He had a struggle getting Sally in — she was near the end of her strength — but managed it with a lot more noisy splashing than he cared for. There weren’t any oars in the dinghy, of course, but at least he could paddle with the footboard. He moved to the bows and hauled on the painter until a blue stern solidified in the fog. Sche-hallion IV it said — Major Arkville’s boat. Well, he wouldn’t mind lending his dinghy.
“Where’s Quern? he whispered.
“Further down on the other quay, but it’s no use going there. You want a boat with sails, Jeff. This one would do. You could always make a wind.”
“I’d rather have an engine.”
“But you haven’t got the stuff. They burnt it all, every drop they could find. I saw it. There was a great big poof noise, and fire everywhere. The poor old Mayor got roasted, because he stood too near.”
Geoffrey felt obstinate. She was probably right, providing he could make a wind (but in that case who’d steer, supposing he “went under” like when he made the fog, if he had made it? And anyway, if he could sail so could they — faster, probably, and the wind would blow the fog away.). But he wanted to see Quern again, if only for Uncle Jacob’s sake. He didn’t want to ask Sally about Uncle Jacob, because he knew something must have happened to him. There’d have been no question of drowning kids if Uncle Jacob had been about. He paddled clumsily away from the blue stern.
Quern was tucked right in under the quay, with a line of sailing boats lashed outside her. He tied the dinghy to the outermost and crept across the decks. The ones nearer the quay were in a very lubberly condition, but Quern herself seemed OK. Somebody (himself, Sally said) had been looking after her. Let’s hope he’d been looking after the engine too. He lifted the hatch.
The engine was speckless, but the tank was quite empty. Geoffrey ducked into the cabin and crawled through the hatch in the forward bulkhead to where Uncle Jacob kept the spare cans (“As far from the engine as possible, laddie. Fire at sea is a terrible thing. I’ve seen it.”). There were three big jerricans, all full, which had evidently been missed at the time of the Mayor-roasting. He lugged one back and rummaged for dry clothes in the port locker. Two oily jerseys, two pairs of jeans — terrific.
Sally was peering down into the engine hatch, shivering.
“It’s like one of my pictures,” she said.
“You’d better get into these.”
“But they’ll beat me if they find me wearing trousers. It isn’t womanly!’