true. I swear it on the grave of my own father. Every word is true.'
'One day I will go back.' Jim made the promise to himself, rather than to the others. 'I will go back and cross the blue horizon, to the very limit of this land.'
'And I will go with you, Somoya!' Zama looked at him with complete trust and affection.
Zama remembered what his own father had said of Jim when at last he lay dying on his sleeping kaross, burnt out with age, a ruined giant whose strength had seemed once to hold the very sky suspended. 'Jim Courtney is the true son of his father,' Aboli had whispered. 'Cleave to him as I have to Tom. You will never regret it, my son.'
'I will go with you,' Zama repeated, and Jim winked at him,
'Of course you will, you rogue. Nobody else would have you.' He clapped Zama on the back so hard he almost knocked him off the thwart.
He would have said more but at that moment the coil of cod line jerked under his foot and he let out a triumphant shout. 'Julie knocks at the door. Come in, Big Julie!' He dropped the oar and snatched up the
line. He held it strung between both his hands with a slack bight ready to feed out over the side. Without being ordered to do so the other two retrieved their own rigs, stripping the line in over the gunwale, hand over hand, working with feverish speed. They knew how vital it was to give Jim open water in which to work with a truly big fish.
'Come, my pretty ling Jim whispered to the fish, as he held the line delicately between thumb and finger. He could feel nothing, just the soft press of the current. 'Come, my darling! Papa loves you,' he pleaded.
Then he felt a new pressure on the line, a gentle almost furtive movement. Every nerve in his body jerked bowstring taut. 'She's there. She's still there.'
The line went slack again, 'Don't leave me, sweetest heart. Please don't leave me.' Jim leaned out over the side of the skiff, holding the line high so that it ran straight from his fingers into the green swirl of the waters. The others watched without daring to draw breath. Then, suddenly, they saw his raised right hand drawn down irresistibly by some massive weight. They watched the muscles in his arms and back coil and bunch, like an adder preparing to strike, and neither spoke or moved as the hand holding the line almost touched the surface of the sea.
'Yes!' said Jim quietly. 'Now!' He reared back with the weight of his body behind the strike. 'Yes! And yes and yes!' Each time he said it he heaved back on the line, swinging with alternate arms, right, left and right again. There was no give even to Jim's strength.
That can't be a fish,' said Mansur. 'No fish is that strong. You must have hooked the bottom.' Jim did not answer him. Now he was leaning back with all his weight, his knees jammed against the wooden gunwale to give himself full purchase. His teeth were gritted, his face turned puce and his eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets.
'Tail on to the line!' he gasped, and the other two scrambled down the deck to help him, but before they reached the stern Jim was jerked off his feet, and sprawled against the side of the boat. The line raced through his fingers, and they could smell the skin, burning like mutton ribs grilling on the coals, as it tore from his palm.
Jim yelled with pain but held on grimly. With a mighty effort he managed to get the line across the edge of the gunwale and tried to jam it there. But he lost more skin as his knuckles slammed into the wood, with one hand he snatched off his cap to use as a glove while he held the line against the wood. All three were yelling like demons in hellfire.
'Give me a hand! Grab the end!'
'Let him run. You'll straighten the hook.'
'Get the bucket. Throw water on it! The line will burst into flames!'
Zama managed to get both hands on the line, but even with their combined strength they could not stop the run of the great fish. The line hissed with the strain as it raced over the side, and they could feel the sweep of the great tail pulsing through it.
'Water, for the love of Christ, wet it down!' Jim howled, and Mansur scooped a bucketful from alongside and dashed it over their hands and the sizzling line. There was a puff of steam as the water boiled off.
'By God! We've almost lost all of this coil,' Jim shouted, as he saw the end of the line in the bottom of the wooden tub that held it. 'Quick as you can, Mansur! Tie on another coil.' Mansur worked quickly, with the dexterity for which he was renowned, but he was only just in time; as he tightened the knot the rope was jerked from his grasp and pulled through the fingers of the other two, ripping off more skin, before it went over the side and down into the green depths.
'Stop!' Jim pleaded with the fish. 'Are you trying to kill us, Julie? Will you not stop, my beauty?'
'That's half the second coil gone already,' Mansur warned them. 'Let me take over from you, Jim. There's blood all over the deck.'
'No, no.' Jim shook his head vehemently. 'She's slowing down. Heart's almost broken.'
'Yours or hers?' Mansur asked.
'Go on the stage, coz,' Jim advised him grimly. 'Your wit is wasted here.'
The running line began to slow as it passed through their torn fingers. Then it stopped. 'Leave the water bucket,' Jim ordered. 'Get a grip on the line.' Mansur hung on behind Zama and, with the extra weight, Jim could let go with one hand and suck his fingers. 'Do we do this for fun?' he asked, wonderingly. Then his voice became businesslike. 'Now it's our turn, Julie.'
Keeping pressure on the line while they moved, they rearranged themselves down the length of the deck, standing nose to tail, bent double with the line passed back between their legs.
'One, two and a tiger!' Jim gave them the timing, and they heaved the line in, swinging their weight on it together. The knotted joint came back in over the side, and Mansur, as third man, coiled the line back into the tub. Four times more the great fish gathered its strength and streaked away and they were forced to let it take out line, but each time the run was shorter. Then they turned its head and brought it back, struggling and jolting, its strength slowly waning.
Suddenly Jim at the head of the line gave a shout of joy. 'There she is! I can see her down there.' The fish turned in a wide circle deep
below the hull. As she came round her bronze-red side caught the sunlight and flashed like a mirror.
'Sweet Jesus, she's beautiful!' Jim could see the fish's huge golden eye staring up at him through the emerald-coloured water. The steenbras's mouth opened and closed spasmodically, the gill plates flaring as they pumped water through, starving for oxygen. Those jaws were cavernous enough to take in a grown man's head and shoulders, and they were lined with serried ranks of fangs as long and thick as his forefinger.
'Now I believe Uncle Dorry's tale.' Jim gasped with the exertion. 'Those teeth could easily bite off a man's leg.'
At last, almost two hours after Jim had first set the hook in the hinge of the fish's jaw, they had it alongside the skiff. Between them they lifted the gigantic head clear of the water. As soon as they did so the fish went into its last frenzy. Its body was half as long again as a tall man, and as thick around the middle as a Shetland pony. It pulsed and flexed until its nose touched the wide flukes of its tail, first on the one side, then on the other. It threw up sheets of seawater that came aboard in solid gouts, drenching the three lads as though they stood under a waterfall. They held on grimly, until the violent paroxysms weakened. Then Jim called out, 'Hang on to her! She's ready for the priest.'
He snatched up the billy from its sling under the transom. The end of the club was weighted with lead, balanced and heavy in his big right hand. He lifted the fish's head high and swung his weight behind the blow. It caught the fish across the bony ridge above those glaring yellow eyes. The massive body stiffened in death and violent tremors ran down its shimmering sun-red flanks. Then the life went out of it and, white belly uppermost, it floated alongside the skiff with its gill plates open wide as a lady's parasol.
Drenched with sweat and seawater, panting wildly, nursing their torn hands, they leaned on the transom and gazed in awe upon the marvelous creature they had killed. There were no words to express adequately the overpowering emotions of triumph and remorse, of jubilation and melancholy that gripped them now that the ultimate passion of the hunter had come to its climax.
'In the Name of the Prophet, this is Leviathan indeed,' Mansur said softly. 'He makes me feel so small.'
The sharks will be here any minute.' Jim broke the spell. 'Help me get her on board.' They threaded the rope through the fish's gills, then all three hauled on it, the skiff listing dangerously close to the point of capsizing as they brought it over the side. The boat was barely large enough to contain its bulk and there was no room for them to sit on
the thwarts so they perched on the gunwale. A scale had been torn off as the fish slid over the side: it was the size of a gold doubloon and as bright.
Mansur picked it up, and turned it to catch the sunlight, staring at it with fascination. 'We must take this fish home to High Weald,' he said.
'Why?' Jim asked brusquely.
'To show the family, my father and yours.'
'By nightfall he'll have lost his colour, his scales will be dry and dull, and his flesh will start to rot and stink.' Jim shook his head. 'I want to remember him like this, in all
