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.
Angela pushed the tiller over, kicked the throttle lever into neutral, and the strain vanished from Mulder’s taut rope. I had to go forward again, this time taking a coil of rope from a locker in Sycorax’s cockpit. My right leg was shaking, but holding me. I harnessed myself, then leaned over the guardrails and tied my new rope to Mulder’s with a rolling hitch. The knot was stained with blood by the time it was fast. I released the braidline from the fiferail and berthing cleat, then went back to the cockpit. The wind was screaming, or perhaps I screamed, for the pain was making me sob.
I was moving like a horror-film monster and muttering instructions to myself. Sycorax was broaching, rolling and pitching, snatching like a tethered wild colt.
I pulled the braidline inboard, undid the rolling hitch, and fed Mulder’s line through a block that hung from the boom gallows.
Then I began to haul him alongside.
“Is that Tony?” Angela helped me pull.
“It’s Mulder!”
“Where’s Tony?”
“He’s dead.” I could not soften the blow. I spoke too curtly, but I was at the end of my strength and I did not know how, in this welter of sea and wind, to break the news gently.
Mulder was too heavy for us. We brought him to the gunwale, and there he stuck. I thought at first it was the clumsiness of his inflated lifejacket that was blocking our efforts and I told Angela to fetch a knife and slash the jacket. Mulder, who must have recognized Angela with astonishment, then fear, flinched from the blade, then subsided as he saw that she posed no threat. She stabbed and stabbed through the tough material until the jacket went limp.
“Pull!” I said to her, and we pulled, but Mulder’s weight and the weight of his soaked clothing was too great and we still could not hoist him over the guardrails. Sycorax rolled her gunwale under and Mulder tried to pull himself up, but he was as weak as we were.
“Hold on!” I shouted at him. He nodded and gripped a guardrail stanchion. I cleated the braidline, then fetched my bolt-cutters from a locker. If I cut the guardrails away then a surge of sea would probably roll the South African on to our scuppers.
I cut the wires and was just loosening the braidline from the cleat when Angela screamed.
I thought it was because Mulder had died, but it was for quite another reason.
“Nick! Nick!” Her voice held pure terror. I turned and saw, coming out of the grey-white murk, the bows of a giant ship.
It was a supertanker. A great black, dripping, slab-sided, bulbous-bowed monster of the sea, and I saw she had the yellow kestrel-painted funnel of the Kassouli Line. The tanker slammed through the ocean like a great sea-beast; like a Leviathan come for its revenge.
It was the Kerak. She was in ballast, showing her red paint, while the great bulb at her stem seemed like a ramming prow that was heading straight for Sycorax. I remembered Mulder’s threat—that Kassouli would sink us—and it seemed only too real as the vast bows splintered the seas aside.
“Nick!” Angela screamed again.
“Hold fast!” I shouted at Mulder, then I banged the tiller across and throttled up. It was all a sudden panic in cold horror. The great ship was closing at what seemed her full speed and I could do nothing but shout in impotent rage at her streaked bows.
Kerak must have seen us as I shouted, for she seemed to turn, or else Sycorax found a twist of speed I’d never known in her. Whatever, we would not be rammed, but we still risked being swamped and I instinctively wrenched my tiller to port so that our bows would meet the great tanker’s wash head on.
I turned and, by doing it, I killed Mulder.
I had not meant to, I did not know I was doing it, but I killed him.
Or perhaps, mercifully, he was already dead before I pulled the tiller across.
I had released the two locking turns on the cleated braidline after I’d cut the guardrails away. I’d done it so I could pull Mulder inboard, but my alarm at the Kerak’s threat had made me abandon the cleat. It still had three turns on it, but the braidline was made of a slick synthetic fibre that, without the locking turns, slipped on the cleat’s horns. The surge of our acceleration must have loosened Mulder’s grip on the stanchion, he had let go, and his weight had dragged the braidline’s loops inch by deadly inch, and with each lurch he had fallen further from safety. As I turned to port a wave had lifted our stern and he must have been thrust under the boat.
The first I knew of it was a chopping judder in Sycorax’s timbers, a quivering in the hull, and then I snatched the engine out of gear, but the blood was already spreading in our wake. Blood and horror surfaced, churned up by the spinning blades, and then Mulder’s tethered body bobbed up on the surface, a mess of red, and I jerked the rest of the braidline loose and throttled hard forward so we would leave him astern and Angela would not see the butcher’s mess on the sea behind. Mulder’s skull had taken the propellor’s blows. He was dead.
Then the Kerak’s streaked and cliff-like hull smashed past to block out the eastern sky. Faces, made tiny by height and distance, stared from behind the bridge windows. A single figure, standing on the jutting wing of the bridge, hurled what I thought was a lifebuoy towards Sycorax. The thing twisted in the air, was snatched by the wind, and red flowers shredded from the wreath as it dropped to the sea. Flowers for a dead girl.
The wake of the tanker was like a storm wave, breaking and running white. I pushed Sycorax hard round, under full throttle again, then snatched the lever back to slow as we met the first wave head on. We pounded into the sea, rearing and plunging, and water exploded from our hull as we crashed down from its peak. The second wave tossed us up again and the boom shook and I thought the topping lift would snap. I hurled useless curses at the receding tanker.
“What happened?” Angela was staring at the cut guardrails where Mulder had been.
“He died,” I said. “My fault.” Our bows pitched into what seemed like a black hole in the sea. We crashed into the next wave, Angela staggered, then Sycorax clawed her way back up.
“Who died?” Angela asked, and I realized that she was in shock.
“Mulder died!”
Her eyes were vacant. “And Tony?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, except that I was sorry. I was sorry for her, for her husband, even for the man who had died because I had undone the locking turns of his safety line. I would dream about those turns. A life had gone because I’d pulled a rope free. It was a foul dream to add to the one about the man who’d cried “Mama! ” as my bayonet twisted in his gut.