Soon that was the least of their worries. Fitz first realized that something was wrong when he heard thunder roll in the long recess of the sky behind them. Mr Ahmadi didn’t look back as Fitz had, but his face set at the sound – close, too close, and meaty, like a thick throat gargling blood. Behind them a rack of black clouds, chasing the sun, advanced over the rocky promontory of the coast, and Fitz could almost taste on the forward sweep of its violence the salt spittle of a ranting, gasping, torrenting storm.
He didn’t dare mention what Mr Ahmadi clearly didn’t want to see, but Navy did.
‘That doesn’t look good,’ she said. ‘Electrical storms on the water can be dangerous, and that one is bringing high windspeeds in a direction orthogonal to the prevailing oceanic swell.’
Fitz stole a glance back at Clare. She had turned to watch the big black thunder cresting the cliffs.
‘It will get dark and wet very fast,’ said Mr Ahmadi. His voice barked with authority against the rising drone of the wind. ‘I’m going to tack back into the wind, to see if we can’t get into the lee of the shore again. Watch your heads.’ For the first time since they had set off, Fitz and Navy had to duck as the boom swung across the boat and the mainsail filled on the port side. Phantastes followed suit, coming inside them as they tacked back towards the storm and the hope of lighter winds towards the cliffs. Fitz noticed he had set his teeth, and was grinding them at the back, working his lower jaw hard against his back molars. He wished that he had something to do besides grip the wales and try to help his stomach to rise and fall with the swells – swells that were now rolling straight into their stern and tipping them, repeatedly, into yawning troughs. The air thickened, stinging them with salt spray, and as the clouds rolled forward, unfurling their huge inky banners, the light began to constrict around them, to tighten and to pale, so that the sea itself seemed to shrink and all that they did within it. No longer did the mast yearn for the far distances of the horizon, or the jib pregnant with the wind’s pressure for the north that had lain before them like a gauntlet to be seized; now they saw only as far as from one surge to another, darkly, and when the rain began to lash down and the first of the squalls struck them like a flat palm, the salt in his eyes seemed to collapse Fitz’s world still further, until everything he knew and could understand lay in the two hands – still gripping the sides and stays – immediately before his own face.
‘I have to try to reef the sails!’ shouted Mr Ahmadi. Fitz could barely hear him over the slap of the swell and the roar of the wind, but he could see that Mr Ahmadi was right – if the gusts intensified any further, this sudden autumn storm might tear the sailcloth, or worse. At first Fitz tried to stay out of the way as Mr Ahmadi clawed a route forward, but then he took the tiller, and held it jammed to the left as the sails started to inch down and Mr Ahmadi went to work gathering them along the length of the boom. Crouching in the jerking boat, Navy helped Mr Ahmadi to gather and roll the cloth from luff to leech. It was all they could do to keep their feet against the spray and sudden, strong shifts in the wind, the unpredictable lurches of the foaming swells, and the constant threat of the heavy boom; Fitz had to wedge his feet hard under the deck, trying to maintain purchase through the tough soles of his stiff shoes by cramming his toes beneath a strut. From breath to breath and task to task, they were surviving the storm by inches.
When Mr Ahmadi took his seat again at the stern, and shifted them back into the wind, he pointed them higher, and closer to the coast. Fitz climbed forward and joined Navy again on the starboard side, where they used their weight to balance the boat against the lean of the ripping wind. With his hand firmly gripping the side stay, Fitz craned his head round to catch sight of the other boat.
It was gone.
His heart staggered, and as he tried to swivel and catch Mr Ahmadi’s eye, to shout, to point, he let his hand slip from the stay. If the boat at that moment hadn’t crashed off the crest of one of the larger rollers still sweeping into its transom, he might have caught himself. Instead, feet splaying in the air, he tipped backwards in the beginning of what seemed the longest, most perfect reverse somersault he had ever executed. To slip into the surging water, and knife down inside its parting and soundless deep, would have been the work of a second, a story told in a breath or a blink; but the process of it seemed to unfold into chapters, sections and subsections, each minute element of the experience a discrete compound of sensation and observation.
I am going to die.
His hand waved in the air, as if he were conducting a furious passage in some titanic overture. It looked to him very small against the grey sheets of flying rain that stacked one on another above the mast.
Mr Ahmadi rammed the tiller to port, sending the boat into a windward spin. As it came round beneath his tumbling back, Fitz saw the side stay dip back
