Pirates of the Archipelago

Part Twelve

I couldn't believe my eyes. I leaned over Albatross's side and nearly fell out for laughing. There was no sign of his boat, but Roy was lying in the middle of a six-foot ring of orange and blue fabric, inflated like a doughnut. There was a dinky little pop-up shelter over his head and he was wearing a pair of dark glasses against the sunlight. He stared up at me.

'What's so funny? Haven't you ever seen a survival suit before?'

'N… No. No, I haven't.' I tried, not very well, to stifle my giggles. 'Would you like to come on board? If you can, that is.' It was hard to see how I was going to haul this great big wheel onto Albatross. 'Or shall I join you down there? Where's your boat, anyway?'

'Sunk,' he said shortly.

'Well, come on, then.' I grabbed hold of the edge of the blue fabric circle.

'Wait a mo.' Roy did something with a toggle and with a huge underwater fart his suit deflated itself and shrank into pleats. Soon it was back to its original size and Roy was able to climb over Albatross's stern and join me.

'What's that made of? Mono?'

'Yes, of course. What did you think it was?' I thought. There must have been whole miles of monofibre in that suit. It must have cost… oh, what the heck. First things first.

'Are you hungry?'

'A bit.' I gave him some of the bread. Then I did what I had to do. I apologised.

'Roy.'

'Yes?'

'I'm sorry. I should have known better. We never should have come here.'

'Sorry? Why? It's not your fault the barrage broke.'

'It didn't break.'

'What?'

'It didn't break. It was lowered. It was a flushing tide.'

'A flushing tide? What's that?'

'It's what I should have known about. Look, it's all to do with the way we manage the Inner Sea. When the first landers came to the Archipelago the tide still rose and fell inside the Rings of the lands that had them, like Finf, Dix, Leaven and Woolf. Not as much as in the outside ocean, but still quite a lot - fifty feet or so. It meant that the Inner Sea varied in size as the tide came in and out. That was OK, and it was better than the other lands where the tide goes up and down all the way, but they saw the opportunity to make a place on Glory that was much more like Earth than the other lands could ever be. I think they had the islands of the South Seas and the Caribbean in mind. So they built the barrages, with quite a bit of help from the 'Down, and now the Inner Seas of the major lands of the Archipelago hardly rise and fall at all.'

'OK.'

I carried on. 'But that raised a problem of its own.' I was starting to parrot Miss Jayne's teaching style, but that was all right. I mean, she's a good teacher. 'The Inner Seas became sealed off from the ocean outside. That was good in lots of ways, but bad in others. We get a lot more sun here than we do rain, so the Inner Sea slowly evaporated and went down. As it went down it got saltier, so its life started to die off. Also, the waste from the land - sewage and stuff - had nowhere to go but the Inner Sea, especially on Leaven Peak. The Rings could throw their waste into the ocean, like they do on Edge or Falls or wherever, but we had nowhere to put it. That's why the 'Down lets us have a fusor, by the way. One of the reasons, anyway.'

'What are the others? We don't have fusors on Edge. We're not allowed them. Dad says it's a disgrace and the Board should do something about it.'

'Have some more water to drink. What are you complaining about? You've got hydro power from the dam that makes your sailing lake, and wind power from the arrays in the north and, like any other land, you've got tide turbines on the coast. You don't need a fusor. But us; we don't get strong winds, we can't use tide turbines - obviously - and we don't have any rivers to build dams across. So instead we have a fusor, and it makes enough power to run all the fancy hotels and dry all the waste, so we can use it for fertiliser without it making such a stench it drives all you posh Wedgies away.'

Roy looked upset. 'Yes, yes, you don't have to lecture me. You still haven't told me about the barrages and why they don't work.'

Was there any point in carrying on? Would he listen to me anyway? Weren't there more important things to do, like trying to get back to the Ring? I looked at the sails and the burgee and the Blessèd sun. The wind had dropped while I was rescuing Roy - the sails were flat and the burgee had flopped down against the top of the mast - and the Blessèd sun was dipping towards the horizon. It would be hours before the tide turned. We could make no further progress homewards until tomorrow. I couldn't risk paddling; the splashing would draw attention to us. The Ring was clearly visible only five miles or so to the north, but it was out of reach. There wasn't much we could do now except sit tight.

Unless….

'Roy!' Providence, but I was slow! 'Roy, have you called?'

'What?'

'Your phone, stupid! Call your Dad! He'll send an airship out to fetch us!'

Roy stared at me. 'Do you think I haven't thought of that? Do you really think that wasn't the first thing I thought of after your wretched broken dam dumped me in this mess?'

'So?'

'I can't call him.'

'Why not? Are you afraid he'll tell you off? Do you think he'll take away your boat?'

Roy looked around. 'What boat?'

'Oh.'

'No, it's simpler than that. My phone got wet. It wasn't designed to be submerged, especially not in salt water. It's not working. Look.' Roy held his phone up. The letters on the display panel were all jumbled up, like secret code writing. 'There's no signal. See?' He pointed to a little image of the 'Down in the top right-hand corner of the display. It was blinking once every second. 'That shouldn't be flashing. The receiver's shorted out.'

'Oh, I'm sorry. I should have realised.' Roy said nothing. I had another idea. What about my locator? I hadn't bothered with it so far; I could see the sun and the coast perfectly well, and that was all I usually needed to know when I went out sailing. I looked in its binnacle, blowing away the moisture that had collected inside it. Yes, the locator was working perfectly, showing our position to the south of the Ring. Its receiver was OK, then, but a receiver was no good to us by itself. We needed to be able to send a call for help. It was good that we wouldn't lose our position if the weather came down again, but that was as far as it went.

I hunkered down in the port side of Albatross's hull. Roy joined m on the starboard side, with the centreboard case separating us. I pulled on the sheets so the sails shielded us from the heat and glare of the Blessèd sun.

'That's it,' I said. 'That's all we can do for now, until the tide turns. I'm going to get some sleep.'

And, amazingly, first Roy and then I drifted off, while the Blessèd sun made its daily sky-voyage to the edge of the world and the ocean's swell rocked us in its gentle, treacherous arms.



Glory's swift equatorial twilight was just ending when I woke. Roy was standing by Albatross's stern and his movements had disturbed me. I realised with a quickly-suppressed laugh that he was relieving himself over the side. 'Don't look,' he said nervously.

I said nothing, and I didn't look, until he had returned to his side of the boat. 'Are you all right?' I asked.

''Yes, fine.'

'Your suit working well?'

'Yes, fine. It's very insulating.'

Above us the sails still hung slack. I glanced at the locator; we had moved slightly onshore and approximately a mile to the west. The next high tide would be shortly after daybreak - about five o'clock in the morning. If we were to reach the safety of the Ring we would have to set off not long after three-thirty. I lowered the sails - they weren't needed for shade any more - and rescued my trousers from the foredeck. They hadn't dried very well, but they would have to do. I pulled them back on.

'Would you like some more to eat?' I turned round and reached into the locker.

'Have some of mine. It's vitamin-reinforced. Very sustaining.' Roy unzipped one of the pockets of his suit, took out a foil-wrapped bar and handed it to me. I tore off the outside and took a bite. It tasted of sugar and oats and some kind of fruit and it wasn't really very nice, but it filled me up and quieted the cramps that were beginning to gnaw at my stomach.

'Thank you,' I said. We lay side by side and chewed. Roy told me his suit had a filter that made seawater drinkable and I wasn't to worry about him, but keep all the bottled water for myself. He sucked on a straw that came out of his collar to show me. So I took a careful swig from my bottle and replaced it in the locker. We were silent for a while and then, spontaneously, Roy began to talk about his life on Edge. Some of it I'd heard before in the week before Landing Day, but that had been different. It had been all about his big house and his big school and his big cars and his family's big estate and if I hadn't begun to like him - just a bit - I'd have had enough of his big head after no more than an hour or two.

'What's it like,' I asked him, 'living so far from the sea? Don't you miss it?'

'No. See,' and he turned over, 'it's funny. We're both Earthies really. You've got your sea and your palm trees and your sailing and your diving and, like you say, they're very much like it might have been on a tropical island back on Earth. But I've got that too. I've got hills and fields and forests, and sheep and cows and pigs, and houses with tiled roofs and chimneys, and they look just like pictures of Earth, like it was in England or France or America thousands of years ago, before the Plague came. People actually want to live inland on Edge, did you know that? So they can get away from the sea and the tides? It's as if we can't forget the old world, even though none of us ever lived there.'

'Glory is our home.'

'It's our home now. But it's not our real home. Don't you feel it? Don't you ever find yourself wishing you were back on Earth?'

'No!' But then I remembered the film of The Black Hawk and the broad Pacific Ocean and the great ships that had criss-crossed it with impunity. And I remembered the other films the 'Down had shown us, of a busy world filled with millions and millions of people all running their busy lives, working, talking busily to each other across the comms nets, always making things; new things, big things, exciting things. I thought of Emmy and the poem he had read at Dad's grave. There were no writers on Glory who could match the man who had written those lines, even though he had lived in a tiny long-ago England and we had a whole world to ourselves.

'I don't know. I'd like to visit it, I suppose. In a time machine or something like that.'

'Yes. It'd have to be a time machine.'

Over our heads the stars were coming out. I looked, as everyone instinctively looks, for the spark of light at the tail of the constellation of the Cat that was Sol, the star of Earth. There it was - slightly yellow, its brightness toned down by its passage across the light years and through the air of Glory. The Earth itself was invisible, of course. Perhaps the 'Down, with its powerful telescopes could see our home world, perhaps not. The 'Down wouldn't say; not to someone ordinary like me.



'Tell me more about yourself.'

'What?' It was an hour or two later and I'd dozed off again.

'Go on. I've told you all about me.' That was certainly true. I now knew all anyone would ever need to know about the Awdrys, and their business, and their relatives, and their connections with the Board.

'There's not much to say.'

Roy chuckled. 'Say it, then.'

I was slightly taken aback. Nobody had asked me to tell them about myself before. I was Annie McLuskie, pirate bold. I was the Captain and I was to be treated with the respect and fear due to my ebony ringlets, gold hoop earrings and jewel-studded cutlass. You called me Cap'n or Skipper, or you walked the plank; and that was all you needed to know. Anything else - you just had to ask the people who live around Parrolindon or Porth Leaven. They'd tell you.

'All right. My name's Annalisa McLuskie and I live in the village of Parrolindon with my Mum and my little brother Emmanuel. Parrolindon is four miles round the coast from Porth Leaven, which is the principal town of Leaven Peak and, indeed, the whole of the Archipelago of Grain on the world of Glory.'

I could hear Roy's smile in the darkness. 'Keep going.'

'My mum works in the packing shed, where she prepares the fish we farm in the Inner Sea of Leaven for shipment to the rest of the world. Emmy and I go to school. My father was killed by a Beast nearly four years ago.' I paused to catch my breath.

'What did he do?'

'He was a cockler. A shellfish-gatherer. He led a team of men who collected the mussels and cockles and whelks and crabs and lobsters and prawns and all the other shellfish that live on the outside of the Ring.'

I could tell there was a question that Roy wanted to ask, so I kept talking to stop him asking it.

'We live, Mum and Emmy and me, in a little house up a bit from the shore in Parrolindon. Houses next to the sea are very expensive. You wouldn't call it a house. You'd say it was a shack. It's made of wood and there are four rooms, one behind the other. At the front there's where we cook and eat and talk. Behind it is Mum's bedroom, then Emmy's, then mine. The bathroom is in a hut out at the back. The rooms don't have proper ceilings and you can climb along the rafters and look down into each one. If you stand in front of the house and the doors are open you can see all the way through to the yard.

'You might say we're poor, but we're not. We have everything we need and we're happy. If my Dad was alive and we lived on Edge he'd be working for someone like your Dad, or for one of the men your Dad employs. Instead he had his own crew and he worked for them and for us. He provided for us. His men provided for their families. So don't come over all Wedgie-superior on me!'

Roy said nothing. Then: 'You've still got your boat. I haven't even got that. It folded up the moment it hit the water. I'd have drowned if my suit hadn't saved me.'

'I always knew it was a crap boat. First moment I saw it. Tinny rubbish crap boat, I said to myself.'

I heard Roy's grin again. 'Yes. A tinny rubbish crap boat. Did Albatross belong to your Dad once?'

'Yes. And to his Dad and his Granddad too. She was called Mustard when my father had her. I only renamed her a month or two ago. My Granddad named her Banjax and to his father she was Susan Louise. She's always been the same boat, though, whatever her name and whoever she belonged to. They were all fishermen of some kind, or had something to do with the sea. We've never worked on the plantations or opened a hotel or a bar or a hire business or anything like that. 'All Dad… all they… all I ever wanted to do was sail.'

'I know,' said Roy, his voice near, yet far-off in the darkness. 'Same here. Always the same here. It's only when I'm sailing that I feel like I'm doing what I was meant to do. What I was made to do.' I guessed that his family were expecting him to take over the running of their farms and estates some day. Then there'd be precious little time for sailing and, not for the first time, I felt a twinge of sympathy for Master Roy Awdry of Tanly, on Edge. He changed the subject:

'You never finished telling me about the barrages.'

'Oh yes. Sorry. There's not much left to tell. Because we need to keep the Inner Sea topped up, every time there's an especially high and low tide, like now - I pointed up to the sky where Sally hung rust-red overhead - and the worlds are lined up, we let the barrages down a few feet so that some of the used water can drain out. Then, at high tide, the ocean floods in over the top of the barrages and fills the Inner Sea up with clean water. When the level is back to normal we raise the barrages to their usual height. We do this about four times a year, according to the way the timing of the worlds works out. It's called a flushing tide because that's what it does - it flushes old water out and new water in. It was our rotten luck, and my carelessness, that led to us setting out on our race just when our moon was new, Hally was in transit and we were in the middle of a Sally-season. There used to be nets stretched across the tops of the dams, but they broke and weren't replaced. It's because we're so careful about keeping the water clean that the shellfish that live and grow on the outside of the Ring are the best on Glory. But…'

'Yes?'

'It's because of the clean water that the Beasts come so close. The water doesn't smell bad to them, the way it does around the other lands.'

'I see.'

'Do you? Then you see the price we have to pay for our shellfish.'

A hand crept round the side of the centreboard case, found mine, and squeezed it. 'I do see that. And I'm sorry. I didn't know. I won't eat Leaven lobster ever again.'

'Don't be daft! Where will we get our Tokens from if you bloated capitalist Wedgies don't buy our fish? And what will you eat instead? Foys?'

Roy laughed. 'No. I don't think so.'

I leaned over to the locator and set its alarm. 'We need to get some sleep. This thing'll go off early tomorrow morning to let us know when we have to start trying to get to the barrage in time for high water. Goodnight Roy. I'm glad you're here.'

'I'm glad you're here too, Annie. See you tomorrow.' A last squeeze and he withdrew his hand.

'See you tomorrow.' Yes, tomorrow. And then what?