The Black Tide (29 page)

Suddenly I felt very sick.

I turned, ducking my head for the doorway and some fresh air, and at that moment a voice behind me murmured, ‘Is that you, Gwyn?’ I hesitated, looking back. The dhow lifted to the surge of a wave, rolled to starb’d and, as it rolled, his body rolled with it, his groan echoing the groan of the timbers. ‘Water!’ He suddenly sat up with a shrill gasp that was like a scream suppressed. One hand was pressed against the boards to support him, the other clutched at his stomach. He was groaning as he called for water again. ‘Where are you now? I can’t see you.’ His voice was a clotted whisper, his eyes staring. ‘Water please.’

‘I’ll get you some.’ It was the salt in the air. I was thirsty myself. The salt and the stench, and the movement of the boat.

There was a door I hadn’t noticed before on the port side. It opened on to a store cupboard, oil cans and paint side by side with sacks of millet, some dried meat that was probably goat, dates and dried banana in plastic bags, a swab and buckets, bags of charcoal and several large plastic containers. These last were the dhow’s water supply, but before I could do anything about it, my body broke out into a cold sweat and I had to make a dash for the starb’d bulwarks.

It was very seldom I was sick at sea. The wind carried the sickly smell of the injured man to my nostrils as I leaned out over the side retching dryly. It would have been better if I had had more to bring up. I dredged up some seawater in one of the buckets. We were on the edge of a slick and it smelt of oil, but I washed my face in it, then went back to that messy cubby-hole of a store. There were tin mugs, plates and big earthenware cooking pots on a shelf that sagged where the supports had come away from the ship’s side. I had a drink myself, then refilled the mug and took it in to Choffel.

He drank eagerly, water running down his dark-stubbled
chin, his eyes staring at me with a vacant look. It was only when he had drunk nearly the whole of a mugful that it occurred to me the water was probably contaminated and should have been boiled. In Karachi everybody boiled their water and I wondered where the containers had last been filled. ‘Where am I? What’s happened?’ He was suddenly conscious, his eyes searching my face. His voice was stronger, too. ‘It’s dark in here. Would you pull the curtains please.’

‘You’re on a dhow,’ I said.

The ship lurched and he nodded. ‘The shots – Sadeq.’ He nodded, again feeling at his stomach. ‘I remember now.’ He was quite lucid in this moment, his eyes, wide in the gloom, looking me straight in the face. ‘You were going to kill me, is that right?’

‘Do you want some more water?’ I asked him, taking the empty mug.

He shook his head. ‘You think Sadeq saved you the trouble.’ He smiled, but it was more a grimace. ‘I’ve shat my pants, haven’t I? Fouled myself up.’ And he added, ‘This place stinks. If I had something to eat now …’ The ship rolled and I had to steady him. ‘I’m hungry, but I can’t contain myself.’ He gripped hold of my arm. ‘It’s my guts, is it?’

My fingers where I had held him were a sticky mess. I reached for the blanket, wiping my hand on the coarse cloth. I could clean him up, but if I got water anywhere near the wound it would probably bleed again. I started to get to my feet, but the clutch of his hand on my arm tightened convulsively. ‘Don’t go. I want to talk to you. There are things … Now, while I have the strength … I was going to escape, you see. I was going to Iran, then maybe cross the Afghan frontier and get myself to Russia. But you can’t escape, can you – not from yourself, not from the past.’

His voice was low, the tone urgent. ‘No,’ he said, clutching hold of me tighter still as I made to rise. ‘The
Lavandou
. You mentioned the
Lavandou
. My third ship. A boy. I was just a boy and my mother dying, you see. Cancer and overwork and too much worry. She’d had a hard life and there was no
money. My father had just died, you know. His lungs. Working in the mines he was when just a boy. The anthracite mines down in the Valleys. He was underground. Years underground. A great chest he had, and muscles, huge muscles. But when we laid him to rest he was quite a puny little chap – not more than six or seven stone.’ His voice had thickened and he spat into the mug, dark gobs of blood.

‘Better not talk,’ I said.

He shook his head urgently, still clutching me. ‘I was saying – about the
Lavandou
. I was twenty-two years old … and desperate.’ His fingers tightened. ‘D’you know what it is to be desperate? I was an only child. And we’d no relatives, you see. We were alone in the world, nobody to care a bugger what happened to her. Just me. God! I can still see her lying there, the whiteness of her face, the thinness of it, and all drawn with pain.’ His voice faltered as though overcome. ‘They knew, of course. They knew all about how desperate I was. She needs to go into a clinic. Private, you see – not waiting for the National Health. And me at sea, unable to make sure she got proper attention. It’s your duty, they said. And it was, too – my duty. Also, I loved her. So I agreed.’

He stared up at me, his eyes wide, his fingers digging into my arm. ‘What would you have done?’ His breath was coming in quick gasps. ‘Tell me – just tell me. What would you have done, man?’

I shook my head, not wanting to listen, thinking of Karen as he said, ‘The ship was insured, wasn’t she? And nobody got hurt, did they?’ His eyes had dimmed, his strength fading. I loosened his fingers and they gripped my hand, the cold feel of them communicating some deep Celtic emotion. ‘Just that once, and it went wrong, didn’t it – the Lloyd’s people twigged what I’d done, and myself on the run, taking another man’s name. God knows, I’ve paid. I’ve paid and paid. And Mother … I never saw her again. Not after that. She died and I never heard, not for a year. Not for over a year.’ He spat blood again and I could see his eyes looking at me, seeking sympathy.

What do you do – what the hell do you do when a creature like that is dying and seeking sympathy? At any moment
he’d start talking about the
Petros Jupiter
, making excuses, asking my forgiveness, and I didn’t know what I could say to him. I thought he was dying, you see – his eyes grown dim and his voice very faint.

‘We’re wasting fuel,’ I said, unhooking his fingers from my hand. I think he understood that for he didn’t try and stop me, but as I got to my feet he said something – something about oil. I didn’t get what it was, his voice faint and myself anxious to get out into the open again, relieved at no longer being held by the clutch of his hand.

Clouds had come up and the wind had freshened. Back on the poop I put the engine in gear and headed east into the Straits. We were broadside to the waves, the dhow rolling and corkscrewing, spray wetting the parched timbers of her waist as the breaking seas thumped her high wooden side. I was hungry now, wondering how long the
shamal
would blow. No chance of a hot meal until I could get the dhow to steer herself and for that I’d need almost a flat calm. But at least there were dates in the store.

I secured the helm with the tiller ropes and made a dash for it, coming up with a handful just as the bows swung with a jarring explosion of spray into the breaking top of a wave. I got her back on course, chewing at a date. It was dry and fibrous, without much sweetness, and so impregnated with fine sand that it gritted my teeth. They were about the worst dates I had ever eaten, but being a hard chew they helped pass the time and keep me awake.

Towards noon the wind began to slacken. It was dead aft now, for all through the forenoon hours I had been gradually altering course, following the tankers as they turned south through the last part of the Straits. Soon our speed was almost the same as the breeze, so that it was hot and humid, almost airless, the smell of diesel very strong. The clouds were all gone now, eaten up by the sun, the sky a hard blue and the sea sparkling in every direction, very clear, with the horizon so sharp it might have been inked in with a ruler. There were a lot of ships about and I knew I had to keep awake, but at times I dozed, my mind wandering and only brought back to the job on hand by the changed movement as the dhow shifted course.

I could still see the Omani shore, the mountains a brown smudge to the south-west. The wind died and haze gradually reduced visibility, the sun blazing down and the dhow rolling wildly. The sea became an oily swell, the silken rainbow surface of it ripped periodically by the silver flash of panicked fish. The heat ripened the stench from the lazarette beneath my feet. Twice I forced myself to go down there, but each time he was unconscious. I wanted to know what it was he had said about oil, for the exhaust was black and diesel fumes hung over the poop in a cloud. I began listening to the engine, hearing strange knocking sounds, but its beat never faltered.

Water and dates, that was all I had, and standing there, hour after hour, changing my course slowly from south to sou’sou’east and staring through slitted eyes at the bows rising and falling in the glare, the mast swinging against the blue of the sky, everything in movement, ceaselessly and without pause, I seemed to have no substance, existing in a daze that quite transported me, so that nothing was real. In this state I might easily have thrown him overboard. God knows there were fish enough to pick him clean in a flash, and skeletons make featureless ghosts to haunt a man. I can’t think why I didn’t. I was in such a state of weary unreality that I could have had no qualms. I did go down there later, towards the end of the afternoon watch – I think with the conviction he was dead and I could rid myself of the source of the stench.

But he wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t unconscious either. He was sitting up, his back braced against the stern timbers and his eyes wide open. It just wasn’t possible then. I couldn’t pick him up and toss him overboard, not with his eyes staring at me like that. And as soon as he saw me he began to talk. But not sensibly. About things that had happened long, long ago – battles and the seeking after God, beautiful women and the terrible destruction of ancient castles.

He was delirious, of course, his mind in a trance. And yet he seemed to know me, to be talking to me. That’s what made it impossible. I got some sea water and began cleaning him up. He was trembling. I don’t know whether it was from cold or fever. Maybe it was fear. Maybe he’d known and
that’s why he was talking – you can’t throw a man to the fishes when he’s talking to you about things that are personal and take your mind back, for he was talking then about his home in Wales, how they had moved up into the old tin hills above a place called Farmers, a tumble-down longhouse where the livestock were bedded on the ground floor to keep the humans warm in the bedroom above. It was odd to hear him talking about Wales, here in the Straits with Arabia on one side of us, Persia on the other. ‘But you wouldn’t know about the
Mabinogion
now, would you?’ he breathed.

I told him I did, that I had read it, but either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t take it in. His mind was far away on the hills of his youth. ‘Carreg-y-Bwci,’ he murmured. ‘The Hobgoblin Stone. I’ve danced on it as a kid in the moonlight, a great cromlech on its side – and the Black Mountain visible thirty miles away. It never did me any harm,’ he added in a whisper. Then his hand reached out towards me. ‘Or am I wrong then? Was I cursed from that moment?’ The dhow rolled, rolling him with it, and he clutched at his guts, screaming.

I steadied him and he stopped screaming, gulping air and holding on to me very tightly. I got his trousers open at the fly and in the light of my torch could see the neat hole the bullet had punched in his white belly. He wasn’t bleeding now and it looked quite clean, only the skin round it bruised and bluish; but I didn’t dare turn him over to see what was the other side, in the back where it must have come out.

I cleaned his trousers as best I could and all the time I was doing it he was rambling on about the
Mabinogion
, and I thought how strange; the only other person ever to talk to me about it was Karen. She’d got it from the travelling library, asking for it specially. And when she had read it she had insisted that I read it, too, the four branches of it containing some of the oldest stories of the Welsh bards. A strange book full of fighting men who were always away from home and wives that gave themselves to any valiant passer-by, and everything, it seemed, happening three times over, all the trickery, the treachery, the blazing hopes that led to death. Some of its eleven stories had borne a strange resemblance to
the tribal life in the hills where my mother’s people had come from – the feuds, the hates, the courage and the cruelty. And this man talking of the country above Lampeter where Karen and I had stayed one night in a wretched little inn with hardly a word of English spoken to us.

It was just after we were married. I had been on leave from the Gulf and had borrowed her father’s car to drive up to the Snowdonia National Park. Just short of Llanwrtyd Wells I had turned north to look at the Rhandirmwyn dam and we had come out of the wild forested country beyond by way of an old Roman road called the Sarn Helen. I could even remember that huge cromlech lying on its side, the sun shining as we stopped the car and got out to stand on the top of the earth circle in which it lay, and the late spring snow was like a mantle across the rolling slopes of distant mountains to the south. And as I was zipping up his trousers, hoping he wouldn’t mess them up again, I saw him in my mind’s eye, a wild Welsh kid dancing on that stone in the full light of the moon. A demonstration of natural wickedness, or had he really been cursed? I was too tired to care, too tired to listen any longer to his ramblings. And the stench remained. I left him with some water and dates and got out, back into the hot sun and the brilliance of sea and sky.

By sundown the sea was oily calm, the dhow waddling over the shallow swells with only a slight roll. She would now hold her course for several minutes at a time, so that I was able to examine the rusty old diesel engine in its compartment below the lazarette. I found the fuel tank and a length of steel rod hung on a nail to act as a dipstick. The tank was barely a quarter full. It was quite a big tank, but I had no idea what the consumption was, so no means of calculating how far a quarter of a tank would take us.