The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

No one seemed to make any noise as he fell. It seemed to him strange that so consequential a thing should take place, so little remarked. He tried to shout, but his voice was too slow in coming. And so little thing as a voice would never make it out of him, anyway, with all that grey and silver water rushing around his face, filling his nose, stoppering his ears.

Navy’s reflexes must have been very fast, or perhaps time really had slowed in those few beats between turning, falling and entering the water; because as Fitz passed through the shocking membrane of current froth, then felt the cold, numb quietness close around his ears, he felt also a sharper, harder pain closing around his ankle – and knew at once that it was Navy’s hand, grasping and clutching him, retaining him, dragging him hard through the raking water as the boat still pitched forward on the swell, so that first one shin, then the other slammed against the wooden deck. A cracking spasm coursed through his body from his knee through to his throat. Every muscle in Fitz’s frame contracted against the pain, trying to pull through the flow of the water through which his body was dragging, and he realized that in his disorientation he had swerved, writhed and turned, and that his head was now curling up towards the hull of the boat. He reached for it, not sure whether he was trying to grapple it or to shield his head from knocking against it; but he never reached it. A hand had hooked into the tail of his heavy woollen coat, and in a single, heaving motion he found himself lifted clear of the water and dragged, not without scuffle and knocking, back into the boat.

By the time Fitz had recovered his bearings, Mr Ahmadi was already back at the tiller, steering the bow back out of the wind. He didn’t say a word, but was watching the sails and peering anxiously beyond them into the shifting depths of the storm as it blew through them. Navy sat above Fitz, more solicitous; she had taken his place, and with her free hand clutched the side stay with white knuckles. The skin of her hand was torn and bleeding. The blood was running pink down the shroud.

‘You’re supposed to stay in the boat,’ she said, and notwithstanding all the blood she smiled.

Fitz spluttered; too much water spurted from his nose as he laughed and coughed. Clearing his lungs and wiping down his face gave him relief, but the real cold was within, and he didn’t laugh long.

‘Have we lost them?’ he asked.

Navy didn’t answer; she turned her head out to starboard, and watched for a time, while in the boat’s bottom, his feet jammed against the hull, Fitz tried to wring brine from his cuffs and hems.

‘They’ll be along,’ she said, turning back to him so that she could be heard over the wind, and giving each word a lot of space. ‘There’s only one real bearing in this wind.’

Maybe it was the shock of going overboard, or the cold that now clung to him and seemed to pass through his skin to his joints and bones, but the next twenty or thirty minutes – it must have been that long – passed in a blink. Fitz didn’t dare lift himself out of the boat’s bottom, even when the wind quickened and they began to heel; without complaint, Navy tried to compensate for his injured courage by hiking out further, herself, so that at times only her legs remained within reach. Between holding himself against the shivering cold and hovering over Navy’s legs in case she should lose her balance and need rescuing, Fitz passed the rest of the storm as quickly as it passed over them.

No sooner did the cloud and murk begin to clear than it raced off, as if scrubbed away by some scouring hand. The change struck so suddenly and with such completeness, at a stroke wiping away not only the impenetrable and pelting rain, the thick, low cloud, and the battering squalls, but the heavy swells and its curdling caps, too. Behind the cloud as it cleared to the north before them, the pristine and glittering air scattered bright on the waves, and the boat seemed to respond by dipping and darting over the swells with a new lightness. Mr Ahmadi didn’t go so far as to unreef the sail, but he did let the sheet out and guided the boat into a wide reach. As the bow turned downwind, Fitz saw the island for the first time, a little hub of rock, gold in the afternoon sun over the green, green sea.

‘That’s it,’ said Mr Ahmadi. His mouth was set tight as a knife, but his eyes smiled.

The storm was still rolling over the little island’s high ground. It stood out of the sea like the arched back of a roused cat, its upper ridges spined with jagged striations of bare, weathered rock. Below, patches of grass and moss clung to steep slopes that ended in crumbling cliffs, and those cliffs in the sea. It was difficult to judge scale from their position and perspective, but Fitz thought the island fairly small – only a few hundred metres across at its longest. He supposed it was just visible, most days, from the coast, which lay twelve or fifteen miles away.

‘That?’ he asked. His voice carried easily in the muted air.

‘Look at the peak of the dome,’ answered Mr Ahmadi. He cleated the mainsheet against the block and pointed to the highest point on the island’s summit. ‘Do you see that jagged rock?’

Mr Ahmadi brought them into a dead run, so that the island would swerve more easily into view beyond the bow. Fitz and Navy studied it carefully. At the place where Mr Ahmadi had pointed, a huge menhir had been planted,