Hawk Quest

Each time the deck lifted, his stomach dropped away into his feet; each time it sank, his stomach climbed into his throat. Richard hunched over beside him, strings of yellow bile dangling from his chin. With the coming of night, Hero couldn’t see the waves before they struck and had to anticipate when to brace. His hands seized into claws. A wave catching them broadside staggered the ship and convulsed him with water so cold that he couldn’t breathe. Richard clutched him.

‘We’re going to die!’

‘I don’t care!’

A hand groped at his shoulder. ‘Richard?’ cried Vallon.

‘It’s Hero. Richard’s beside me.’

‘Good lads. How are you bearing up?’

‘Awful.’

‘That’s the spirit.’

With a clap on the back, Vallon was gone. Hero couldn’t imagine how he’d get through the night. Nothing but din and blackness, the screaming wind and swooping waves. Eventually the sheer brutality of the elements battered him into a stunned trance, dulling terror and shutting down his mind.

He raised his stinging eyes for the thousandth time to see the first grey signs of day. Grinning crests leered out of the dark and Richard’s face showed as something more definite than a blur.

Black cloud patches still raced past, but the pall was thinning. The sun rose and shot livid rays through the wrack. Hero worked his neck from side to side, trying to loosen sinews stretched as taut as hawsers. He fumbled at his safety line with fingers as useless as sticks. He stood, fell back again, and then propped himself shivering against the gunwale and looked out across the white-maned rollers. Raul was still at the helm, working the tiller to keep Shearwater at right angles to the swell. Every so often he looked behind him to read the oncoming sea. Hero was about to struggle forward when Raul made another inspection and gaped.

Hero turned. What he saw was so unexpected that at first he thought exhaustion had warped his sense of perception. The horizon loomed above him like a green-black wall, only the wall was moving and his heart stopped as he realised that it was a rogue wave sweeping soundlessly up on them, foam beginning to cream along its crest and slide down its face. The wind dropped to nothing and there was an ear-popping silence. Shearwater was in the lee of the wave, shut off from the storm. Hero flung himself down and gripped the thwart just before the wave struck. It caught Shearwater by the stern and swung her up and up until Hero, staring terror-stricken down the ship’s length, was certain it would pitch stern over stem. For a moment that seemed to last for ever the ship hung weightless on the peak, then the crest surged past and Hero toppled backwards as Shearwater slid into the following trough. Raul was screaming something and Hero grabbed the thwart, aware that another roller was about to hit. It smashed over the stern and boiled across the deck, scraping him off the thwart and tumbling him over the side. His lifeline brought him up with a shock and he took water into his lungs.

He was underwater, rolling through a green chaos of bubbles, unable to tell up from down. He popped to the surface and for a moment saw Wayland and Garrick leaning out to grab his lifeline. Another wave swept him back under and dragged him deep. The sea roared in his ears and then he felt the rope yank tight around his waist and he came flailing into the light. Wayland dragged him to the side and Garrick hauled him gasping and choking on to the deck.

Wayland’s anxious face stared at him. ‘Are you hurt?’

Hero couldn’t speak. His lungs felt like they’d been scoured with sand.

Wayland took him under his armpits and hoisted him into a sitting position. The stern thwart was empty. He saw the frayed end of a safety line trailing on the deck.

‘Richard!’

‘He’s alive,’ said Wayland. ‘The wave tossed him into the hold. Everyone’s safe, but we’ve been swamped. We have to bail out before another wave hits.’

Hero managed to nod through another fit of coughing. Wayland lifted him to his feet. He saw Richard standing dumbfounded in the hold, water sloshing up to his thighs. Garrick was supporting him, fending off barrels of salt that had broken loose and were surging up and down the hold. Shearwater had lost a foot of buoyancy and rode as ponderously as a log. Vallon threw a bucket at Hero.

‘You and Richard stay on deck.’

Hero stared at the flooded hold. Bailing would be as effective as taking a spoon to a lake.

‘We ain’t going to sink,’ Raul shouted. ‘The timber will keep us afloat even if we fill to the gunwales. Now get bailing before we ship another wave.’

Wayland had already thrown himself into the task, scooping water as fast as he could and swinging the bucket up to Syth. Garrick and Vallon joined him. Up on deck Hero laboured away mechanically. The wind was falling and the clouds were breaking.

All morning they toiled and the water level was only a couple of inches lower than when they’d started. There came a time when Hero tried to raise his bucket and couldn’t.

‘That’s enough for now,’ said Vallon.

They ate cold rations in their soaking clothes and then resumed their toil. The wind had slackened to a light southerly, and though the swell still ran high, the danger of swamping was receding. Raul even raised a scrap of sail to give better steerage.

It was late evening before they’d emptied the hold. Hero crawled out weeping from the pain in his hands. The air had fallen still. A fiery reef stretched along the horizon. Slowly the whole sky turned red, staining the sea crimson and flooding the faces of the company. Then the light died and the clouds cooled down through green to black. Venus glowed in the west, Mars twinkled red and green. The Pole Star appeared. They were alone on the ocean.

Hero’s teeth chattered. ‘Where do you think we are?’ he asked Raul.

Raul’s beard was grey with salt. ‘Must have cleared the Shetlands by now. The Faroes should be about two days to the north-west.’

Hero looked at the rollers sweeping past. ‘We might already be too far north. I think we should set a course due west.’

Raul seemed to juggle directions in his hands. ‘You sure about that?’

‘No.’

‘West it is,’ said Raul. He leaned against the tiller and Shearwater turned, trailing a phosphorescent wake.

Hero slept right through the next day in his exhaustion. He woke to a lulling motion, the sail rippling above him. The sun had gone down, its resting place marked by a golden plume of cloud fading to pink. Far out on the still waters, the glossy black flukes of a whale arched out of the sea and slapped down in a soundless fountain of spray.

Hero looked to the helm. ‘Any sign of land?’

Raul shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

The night was so calm and clear that the celestial sphere was mirrored on the sea’s surface. The day following was equally brilliant, yet under an empty blue sky that would have revealed land fifty miles off, they saw nothing but herds of grampuses and a solitary fulmar that Raul said was a wanderer of the deep ocean and no harbinger of land.

Two more days slid by and they knew that they must have missed the Faroes. They sailed on, at first keeping west and then, losing confidence, heading north. Raul organised the company into watches, dividing his time at the helm with Garrick and Wayland. In the late afternoon on the sixth day, Hero was standing watch alone in the bow. Shearwater lay becalmed, the waves flopping round-shouldered against her hull. Everyone else was asleep. Garrick hung over the tiller, steering through a dream. Vallon rested on his back with one hand over his eyes. Raul slumped against the bulwark with his legs straight out and his mouth open. Wayland and Syth lay back to back with the dog couched beside them.

Staring into the immensity of sea and sky, Hero had the sensation of floating in a dimension between time and eternity. The sea looked strange, the horizon having retreated to an immense distance and taken on a dished