“Drink. Give me the tube afterwards. I need it to make a sling.”
While Pezzini drank down the tube, Lawrence swept his hands about looking for stones. All he could find were little bits of gravel and small pebbles; useless as ammunition for a sling-shot.
He gripped Pezzini by the collar and urged him to his feet.
“We’re going onto the mud now. Hold my hand and do not let go. If you hear or see anything, stop and crouch. Leave any action to me.”
“Suppose the ultras are watching with night vision?”
“Can we do anything about it?”
“No.”
“Then forget about it.”
Lawrence pulled him down the beach and out onto the bed of mud. The wind was the only direction they would have once out on the estuary bed, unless the overcast cleared to reveal the moon. Lawrence took a route to the south of the island and then generally towards the centre of the estuary, keeping the wind on his left cheek. The wind was probably not especially reliable because of the obstructions of islands, but it was all he had. Pezzini moved sluggishly, plodding and clumsy, his boots thumping the clay. Lawrence told him to shut up or he could go alone. Pezzini’s grace improved. They advanced into total darkness, eyes stretched wide, edgy from the faint orange echoes of light that were only in the mind and the unnerving suspicion of voices just barely audible under the rush of the wind across the islands and the reeds.
The mud got stickier, until balls of it clung to their soles. Veering left, with the wind now on his cheek, he led Pezzini towards what he hoped would be drier surface. They splashed into water. Wavelets slapped about them. He swore. Further left, it got deeper. He tugged Pezzini about and tried the other way. This time the clay hardened and they scraped the clods off their boots. The going felt good here, he took them into the wind—roughly south-west—and for a while they strode along. Without warning, they hit stalky things that crackled. Both men jumped in shock. They had hit a bank of reeds, which meant shore. After a brief think, Lawrence pulled his comrade along the margin of the reeds, sweeping his free hand along them to stay in contact. To push through them would have made too much noise. Anyway, he saw no advantage in getting up onto land just yet. This was probably an island.
For an interminable time, they blundered into the night, into the wind, across soft clay, having to seek a route around water when they came to it. Lawrence lost track of time entirely and grew uneasy, knowing they had at most five hours before the tide was back in across all this mud. The wind got colder, numbing his cheeks. Ahead of them, the sound of breakers grew louder. It was obvious they were approaching a big reach of water. Maybe it was the returning tide. Maybe it was a locked-in pool. He put the wind on his left cheek. After some minutes they heard breakers again. The rising tide could have trapped them on a shoal. The only way out was back, downwind. Bad luck if they heard breakers this way.
The sound of breakers grew again. Not believing it, Lawrence kept going until the muddy clay sloped down and he could vaguely see a kind of shifting grain flowing away from them. Whitecaps, driven by the wind at their backs. Had he been religious, at this point Lawrence would have prayed. He stood gazing into the black void of noise, wondering what on earth to do, while Pezzini waited at his side as trusting as a dog. Time passed. Maybe he dithered five minutes, maybe fifteen. The tide was rising all right. It reached their boots. They had to retreat back up the shelf.
“Keep close,” he said. “We’re going to have to move fast.”
Alone, he would have run. To run in the company of Pezzini would have been like a three-legged race. They hurried along the water line, following it around into the wind and on farther until the wind was on his right cheek. Finally, when the wind was blowing down his neck, the idea finally paid off. Stretching away to the right was a kind of fuzzy white bar where the waves were breaking over shallows. Lawrence did not waste time on whether the shallows led to land or the middle of the flooded estuary, he ploughed straight in. The water reached up to his knees, then deeper still, slowing him to a fighting wade. Jesus was it freezing cold. He ground his teeth when the cold seeped around his groin. Fuck and damn this place, it was getting deeper, the current was dragging him off sideways, waves broke over his shoulders. Then he lost the battle. The tide swept him off his feet, breaking his grip on Pezzini’s hand and pulling him away into the darkness.
He lay in the current, amazed at his own calm in this disaster, if anything uplifted to think that at least The Captain would not get a cadaver to sneer over. Pezzini splashed about nearby, wheezing and coughing. Lawrence rolled over and was swimming over to help him when the splashing abruptly stopped. It was as if Pezzini had got dragged under. That was a real hazard. His boots could have snagged a submerged tree. Lawrence trod water, listening, hearing just the gurgling of eddies and a soft rush of breakers from farther away. It would have been madness to call out.
He knew in his heart Pezzini was done for, just as he knew there was nothing he could do about it.
Which way to the shore? Being in the current, he had no idea which direction would take him across to a bank. He spun around a full rotation, looking all about for a clue. There was a clue all right, just not one that extracted from him any
