“I really don’t,” Lucas said.
“Fuck him,” Damian said. “I’m not going to let him spoil this fine day.”
“Our grand adventure.”
“The wind’s changing again.”
“I think the fret’s moving in, too.”
“Maybe it is, a little. But we can’t turn back, L. Not now.”
The bank of cloud across the horizon was about a klick away, reaching up so high that it blurred and dimmed the sun. The air was colder and the wind was shifting minute by minute. Damian put on his shirt, holding the jib sheet in his teeth as he punched his arms into the sleeves. They tacked to swing around a long reach of grass, and as they came about saw a white wall sitting across the water, dead ahead.
Lucas pushed the tiller to leeward. The boat slowed at once and swung around to face the wind.
“What’s the problem?” Damian said. “It’s just a bit of mist.”
Lucas caught the boom as it swung, held it steady. “We’ll sit tight for a spell. See if the fret burns off.”
“And meanwhile the tide’ll turn and lift off the fucking dragon.”
“Not for a while.”
“We’re almost there.”
“You don’t like it, you can swim.”
“I might.” Damian peered at the advancing fret. “Think the dragon has something to do with this?”
“I think it’s just fret.”
“Maybe it’s hiding from something looking for it. We’re drifting backward,” Damian said. “Is that part of your plan?”
“We’re over the river channel, in the main current. Too deep for my anchor. See those dead trees at the edge of the grass? That’s where I’m aiming. We can sit it out there.”
“I hear something,” Damian said.
Lucas heard it too. The ripping roar of a motor driven at full speed, coming closer. He looked over his shoulder, saw a shadow condense inside the mist and gain shape and solidity: a cabin cruiser shouldering through windblown tendrils at the base of the bank of mist, driving straight down the main channel at full speed, its wake spreading wide on either side.
In a moment of chill clarity Lucas saw what was going to happen. He shouted to Damian, telling him to duck, and let the boom go and shoved the tiller to starboard. The boom banged around as the sail bellied and the boat started to turn, but the cruiser was already on them, roaring past just ten meters away, and the broad smooth wave of its wake hit the boat broadside and lifted it and shoved it sideways toward a stand of dead trees. Lucas gave up any attempt to steer and unwound the main halyard from its cleat. Damian grabbed an oar and used it to push the boat away from the first of the trees, but their momentum swung them into two more. The wet black stump of a branch scraped along the side and the boat heeled and water poured in over the thwart. For a moment Lucas thought they would capsize; then something thumped into the mast and the boat sat up again. Shards of rotten wood dropped down with a dry clatter and they were suddenly still, caught among dead and half-drowned trees.
The damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been—a rip close to the top of the jib, long splintery scrapes in the blue paintwork on the port side—but it kindled a black spark of anger in Lucas’s heart. At the cruiser’s criminal indifference; at his failure to evade trouble.
“Unhook the halyard and let it down,” he told Damian. “We’ll have to do without the jib.”
“
“I wonder why he was going so damned fast.”
“Maybe he went to take a look at the dragon, and something scared him off.”
“Or maybe he just wanted to get out of the fret.” Lucas looked all around, judging angles and clearances. The trees stood close together in water scummed with every kind of debris, stark and white above the tide line, black and clad with mussels and barnacles below. He said, “Let’s try pushing backward. But be careful. I don’t want any more scrapes.”
By the time they had freed themselves from the dead trees the fret had advanced around them. A cold streaming whiteness that moved just above the water, deepening in every direction.
“Now we’re caught up in it, it’s as easy to go forward as to go back. So we might as well press on,” Lucas said.
“That’s the spirit. Just don’t hit any more trees.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Think we should put up the sail?”
“There’s hardly any wind, and the tide’s still going out. We’ll just go with the current.”
“Dragon weather,” Damian said.
“Listen,” Lucas said.
After a moment’s silence, Damian said, “Is it another boat?”
“Thought I heard wings.”
Lucas had taken out his catapult. He fitted a ball bearing in the center of its fat rubber band as he looked all around. There was a splash among the dead trees to starboard and he brought up the catapult and pulled back the rubber band as something dropped onto a dead branch. A heron, gray as a ghost, turning its head to look at him.
Lucas lowered the catapult, and Damian whispered, “You could take that easy.”
“I was hoping for a duck or two.”
“Let me try a shot.”
Lucas stuck the catapult in his belt. “You kill it, you eat it.”
The heron straightened its crooked neck and rose up and opened its wings and with a lazy flap launched itself across the water, sailing past the stern of the boat and vanishing into the mist.
“Ritchy cooked one once,” Damian said. “With about a ton of aniseed. Said it was how the Romans did them.”
“How was it?”
“Pretty fucking awful, you want to know the truth.”
“Pass me one of the oars,” Lucas said. “We can row a while.”
They rowed through mist into mist. The small noises they made seemed magnified, intimate. Now and again Lucas put his hand over the side and dipped up a palmful of water and tasted it. Telling Damian that fresh water was slow to mix with salt, so as long as it stayed sweet it meant they were in the old river channel and shouldn’t run into anything. Damian was skeptical, but shrugged when Lucas challenged him to come up with a better way of finding their way through the fret without stranding themselves on some mud bank.
They’d been rowing for ten minutes or so when a long, low mournful note boomed out far ahead of them. It shivered Lucas to the marrow of his bones. He and Damian stopped rowing and looked at each other.
“I’d say that was a foghorn, if I didn’t know what one sounded like,” Damian said.
“Maybe it’s a boat. A big one.”
“Or maybe you-know-what. Calling for its dragon-mummy.”
“Or warning people away.”
“I think it came from over there,” Damian said, pointing off to starboard.
“I think so too. But it’s hard to be sure of anything in this stuff.”
They rowed aslant the current. A dim and low palisade appeared, resolving into a bed of sea grass that spread along the edge of the old river channel. Lucas, believing that he knew where they were, felt a clear measure of relief. They sculled into a narrow cut that led through the grass. Tall stems bent and showered them with drops of condensed mist as they brushed past. Then they were out into open water on the far side. A beach loomed out of the mist and sand suddenly gripped and grated along the length of the little boat’s keel. Damian dropped his oar and vaulted over the side and splashed away, running up the beach and vanishing into granular whiteness. Lucas shipped his own oar and slid into knee-deep water and hauled the boat through purling ripples, then lifted from the bow the bucket filled with concrete he used as an anchor and dropped it onto hard wet sand, where it keeled sideways in a dint that immediately filled with water.
