Pirates Of The Archipelago, Part Thirteen
Will Annie and Roy make it to the safety of the Ring?



Pirates of the Archipelago

Part Thirteen

I never saw the Leaven Peak beacon lit, but when the locator's alarm woke me and I sat up there it was, a pillar of light pointing straight up to the heavens. There was no doubt which was the most direct route to the Peak, but I'd still need the locator's help to find the barrage and the sea-lock. Either the alarm or the rocking of the boat caused by my sitting up woke Roy.

'Oh... Oh, good grief, I feel stiff. I can hear my joints creak. Listen.' Roy put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. 'See?'

'Stop it, you. That's disgusting.' My limbs were feeling stiff too, not to mention that my clothes were still damp and clammy. I looked up. Sally was well past the zenith now and falling into the east, her ruddy light casting a sinister gleam across the water. The wind had got up a bit and Albatross's burgee was fluttering bravely at her masthead, while the tops of the waves were brushed with a speckle of foam. I looked at the locator. Albatross had drifted westwards while we slept and was now about six miles from the barrage. With the wind being mild, that meant about two hours' sailing. We would get to the Ring just as the tide was about to turn from flood to ebb. There was no time to waste, then.

I stood up to raise the mainsail, but my vision swam and I had to grab hold of the mast to steady myself. The boat swayed wildly. 'Are you all right?' Roy asked. He sounded worried. I shook my head to clear it and sat down again.

'Just a little woozy. I've not had much sleep. Could you get those sails up for us?'

'Sure.' Roy pulled on the halliards and the mainsail and jib rose up the mast and filled with air. The boom swung over and I caught the sheets to steady it.

'Hang on to these.' Roy held the ropes while I leaned over the locator's binnacle and punched in our destination - Porth Leaven via Lock Three. It chuckled to itself for a few seconds and then, in its ethereal 'Down-voice, told us to steer eighty-five degrees to port. I took my place at the helm, pulled the tiller over, and with a five-knot wind filling the sails to my left set our heading a few points east of north. Roy sat next to me, to forrard. Every couple of minutes the locator told me to steer a degree or two to port or starboard. We were on our way and it was time to talk seriously.

'Listen, now,' I said to Roy. 'The chances of our making it as far as the Ring are not very promising. I'd say they were less than fifty-fifty.'

'That good, eh?' Roy grinned that irritating grin of his.

'No, really. What's on our side is that the weather is not too calm and not too blowy. If it were quiet we'd never reach the Ring without paddling and that would make so much noise it'd attract every Beast from miles around. If it were blowing up a storm we'd probably founder. Albatross is a good boat, but she's not built for heavy seas.'

'Right.' Roy passed me another of his fruit bars. I chewed on it for a few minutes and drank the rest of my water.

'So our situation is about as good as it could be, seeing that we're stuck five or six miles out at sea. All the same, it's still pretty bad. We're making the kind of sounds that say boat to every hungry foy in a ten-mile radius. They'll be interested and they'll come and see what's going on. If we're close enough to the Ring that they can't reach us, we'll survive. If we're not, we won't.'

'Oh.'

'And even if we do get very close to the barrage by the time they find us, we still may not be saved. The higher the tide rises, the steeper the slope of the outer Ring and the more the depth of the water. You can be only a few yards from safety and… and still not make it.'

My head was buzzing and a headache was definitely coming on. 'Have you got any aspirin or profen in that fancy suit of yours?'

'Sorry. Only plasters and sunscreen.'

'Wedgie rubbish!'

I held up a wet finger. The wind was getting up. Good, yes, that was good. The more wind the faster we could sail and the more the sound of the waves would disguise the swish of Albatross's hull as it passed through the water.

'This survival suit wasn't designed for the open sea.'

'Do you make suits that are?'

'We used to, but they never worked. I mean, they worked, but there wasn't any point. If you were washed away into the sea, or your airship came down, say, you'd be killed long before anyone could rescue you. Someone made one with a built-in balloon once, but it was too heavy and bulky, not to say expensive. Annie… If we're not going to make it...'

'We are!'

'But if we're not…'

'Well?'

'I just want to say… I really like you.'

I leaned over and brushed my lips against his cheek. 'I quite like you too.'

'Gosh. Gosh, your face is hot!'

'Yours is cold. You want to turn up that suit of yours.'

'I can't. But look - Mum and Dad, they tell me that one day I'll meet a girl I like a lot and maybe we'll get married and settle down together. But they say I've got to work hard at my studies and get good results and not mess about and get into trouble… It's hard, you know?'

I'm not sure I did, though. School was school, and I went there every day, and it was all right but not amazingly interesting. And anyway, I wanted to be a sailor. So I just nodded, and even that made my forehead throb with pain. Roy went on. The poor boy was unloading himself on me:

'And I do like you a lot, even though you're not much like a girl-'

'What?'

'I don't mean that… I mean you're more like a boy. I can talk to you like I'd talk to a boy.'

'You seemed to get along all right with my friend Cynthia Towers from Frandoe, on Gold.'

'She was cute.'

'Thanks!'

'But she wasn't real. You're real.'

'Because I'm all straight up and down? Because I look like a boy?'

'That's not fair! I think you're very pretty. But look… what I mean is… is it all right if I put my arm around you? To steady you, I mean?'

I considered. 'No wandering hands?'

'Promise.'

'You'll leave my tiller arm free?'

'Yes, of course.'

'All right, then.'



It was an hour later and we were miraculously still alive, though by now I was feeling hot and sweaty and sick. At some stage Roy had withdrawn his hand and gently taken the tiller from me. Then he'd lifted my right arm and wrapped it around his waist and I'd let my head rest on his shoulder. The wind continued to blow from the east, driving us to safety but also, I knew, turning us into a beacon, attracting every Beast in the area. Beasts, yes…

'This is probably not a very good idea, seeing as how we're only half-way home, but I want to tell you how my father died.'

'You don't have to.'

'I want you to know. I might die and you might live. I'd want you to remember him for me.'

The day after that awful evening when Mum and Emmy and me had waited and waited and waited for news of Dad and his crew, the harbourmaster had come to the house and Mum had sent me and my brother to the shore with three Tokens each for fizzy pop, crisps and ice-cream. I'd given my tokens to Emmy, gone around the back of the house, and climbed up into the rafters where I'd wriggled my way along their dusty upper surfaces until my head was just above the top of the wall that separated Mum's bedroom from the front room. Mum was speaking:

'So there's no hope, then.'

'No hope at all, Mrs McLuskie.'

'Not even a body? Nothing?'

'I'm afraid not.'

There was a long pause. Then Mum spoke again, in a funny choked-up voice. 'I want to know what happened. Everything.'

'That'll come out in the inquest, Mrs McLuskie.'

'Damn the inquest! I want to know what happened to Alistair now.'

'I can only tell you what I've heard. It was about four o'clock yesterday afternoon. Your husband and his crew were stationed about a mile anticlockwise from the lock. Their boat…'

'Cressida.'

'Yes. Their boat Cressida was moored offshore on about a hundred yards of mono. The tide had passed full ebb and your husband's - Alistair's - crew were gathering. They had a good haul, mussels mostly, with a few whelks and crabs. Anyway, Charlie Wyatt was looking for cockles twenty yards or so off from the rest of the crew, when he slipped and fell. Alistair went after him.'

That happened all the time. The rocks were slippery and wet. It didn't explain why my Dad wasn't coming home.

'But what about Charlie's line?'

Yes, what about it? All he'd had to do was haul himself back up, surely?

'It broke.'

'What? That's impossible. Mono doesn't break.'

'Perhaps it wasn't the line. Perhaps it was the shackle or his belt. We don't know yet. That's up to the Coroner's Court to determine. Anyway… He fell and banged his head against a rock and knocked himself out. He was lying face-down in the water; that's what Brian and Wesley say. So Alistair went in to save him.'

That I'd understood. Dad's crew was his responsibility.

'And-'

'A Beast came. A foy. A big one. Alistair had got his arms round Charlie and the others were winching them in on his line when it broached. They didn't stand a chance.'

'Is Charlie dead too?'

'No. He's lost his right leg but he'll live. Your husband was very courageous. He shackled Charlie to his line and he turned in the water and faced the Beast. He shouted to it to go away. He threw his helmet at its eyes, Wesley says, but it did no good.' The harbourmaster had fallen silent. Mum'd looked up.

'Come down, Annie. I know you're there.' I'd climbed down and hugged her as tightly as I could.

'Was he awfully brave?'

'Yes he was. He was a true McLuskie.'

That was all I had needed to know.

'So you see,' I said to Roy, 'my Dad was killed when he was less than fifty yards offshore. We won't be safe until we're through the lock or over the barrage.'

'How far to go now?'

I checked the locator. 'About three-quarters of a mile. Less than an hour.'

'Thirty-nine minutes at our present rate of progress,' said the locator in its fluting voice.

Thirty-nine minutes, all of them deadly, the last minute no safer than the first. We were still in deep trouble.

'Keep going,' I said to Roy, to Albatross, to the locator. 'That's what we've got to do. If we stop, we're dead. If we keep going, we're only probably dead.'

'There's not much choice there.'

'No. No choice at all. But look… we're still alive. We're still breathing. We're not going to give up. I'm going to save us both, or my name isn't Annie McLuskie!'