The Homeward Bounders (5 page)

The cattle country was bad enough. I never met the same people twice in it, of course. The earlier ones had moved off or died by the time I came round again. The ones I met were always agreeable, but they never
did
anything. It was the most boring place. I used to wonder if the
Them
playing it had gone to sleep on the job. Or maybe they were busy in a part of that world I never got to, and kept this bit just marking time. However it was, I was in for another session of dairy-farming, and I was almost glad it would only be a little one. Glad, that is, but for the mining horror that came next.

It was only three days before I felt the Bounds call. I was surprised. I hadn't known it would be
that
short. By that time I had gone quite a long way down south with a moving tribe I fell in with. They were going down to the sea, and I wanted to go too. I had still never seen the sea then, believe it or not. I was really annoyed to feel the tugging, and the yearning in my throat, start so soon.

But I was an old hand by then. I thought I would bear it, stick it out for as long as possible, and put off the mining world for as long as I could. So I ground my teeth together and kept sitting on the horse they'd lent me and jogging away south.

And suddenly the dragging and the yearning took hold of me from a different direction, almost from the way we were going. I was so confused I fell off the horse. While I was sitting on the grass with my hands over my head, waiting for the rest of the tribe to get by before I dared get up—you get kicked in the head if you try crawling about under a crowd of horses—the next part of the call started: the “Hurry, hurry, you'll be late!” It's always sooner and stronger if you get it from a new direction. It's always stronger from a RANDOM Boundary too. I don't know why. This was so strong that I found I couldn't wait any longer. I got up and started running.

They shouted after me of course. They're scared of people going off on their own, even though nothing ever happens to them. But I took no notice and kept running, and they didn't have a Mrs. Chief with them—theirs was a sleepy girl who never bothered about anything—so they didn't follow me. I stopped running when I was over the nearest hill and walked. I knew by then that the “Hurry, hurry!” was only meant to get me going. It didn't mean much.

It was just as well it didn't mean much. It took me the rest of that day and all night to get there, and the funny colored sun was two hours up before I saw the Boundary. This was a new one. It was marked by a ring of stones.

I stared at it a little as I went down into the valley where it was. They were such big stones. I couldn't imagine any hairy cattle herders having the energy to make it. Unless
They
had done it, of course. I stared again when I saw the new sign scrawled on the nearest huge stone, some way above my head.

“I wonder what that means,” I said. But I had been a long time on the way and the call was getting almost too strong to bear. I stopped wondering and went into the circle.

And—twitch—I was drowning in an ocean.

Yes, I saw the sea after all—from inside. At least, I was inside for what seemed about five minutes, until I came screaming and drowning and kicking up to the surface, and coughing out streams of fierce salt water—only to have all my coughing undone the next moment by a huge great wave, which came and hit me
slap
in the face, and sent me under again. I came up again pretty fast. I didn't care that nothing could stop a Homeward Bounder. I didn't believe it. I was drowning.

It isn't true what they say about your life passing before you. You're too busy. You're at it full time, bashing at the water with your arms and screaming “Help!” to nothing and nobody. And too busy keeping afloat. I hadn't the least idea how to swim. What I did was a sort of crazy jumping up and down, standing in the water, with miles more water down underneath me, bending and stretching like a mad frog, and it kept me up. It also turned me round in a circle. Every way was water, with sky at the end of it. Nothing in sight at all, except flaring sunlit water on one side and heaving gray water on the other.

That had me really panicked. I jumped and screamed like a madman. And here was a funny thing—somebody seemed to be answering. Next moment, a sort of black cliff came sliding past me, and someone definitely shouted. Something that looked like a frayed rope splashed down in the sea in front of me. I dived on it with both hands, which sent me under again, even though I caught the rope. I was hauled up like that, yelling and sousing and shivering, and went bumping up the side of that sudden black cliff.

It was like going up the side of a cheese-grater—all barnacles. I left quite a lot of skin on there, and a bit more being dragged over the top. I remember realizing it was a boat and then looking at who'd rescued me. And I think I passed out. Certainly I remember nothing else until I was lying on a mildewy bed, under a damp blanket, and thinking, This can't be true! I can't have been pulled out of the sea by a bunch of monkeys! But that was what I seemed to have seen. I knew that, even with my eyes closed. I had seen skinny thin hairy arms and shaggy faces with bright monkey eyes, all jabbering at me. It must be true, I thought. I must be in a world run by monkeys now.

At that point, someone seized my head and tried to suffocate me by pouring hellfire into my mouth. I did a lot more coughing. Then I gently opened one watery eye and took a look at the monkey who was doing it to me.

This one was a man. That was some comfort, even though he was such a queer-looking fellow. He had the remains of quite a large square face. I could see that, though a lot of it was covered by an immense black beard. Above the beard, his cheeks were so hollow that it looked as if he were sucking them in, and his eyes had gone right back into his head somehow, so that his eyebrows turned corners on top of them. His hair was as bad as his beard, like a rook's nest. The rest of him looked more normal, because he was covered up to the chin in a huge navy-blue coat with patches of mold on it. But it probably only looked normal. The hand he stretched out—with a bottle in it to choke me with hellfire again—was like a skeleton's.

I jumped back from that bottle. “No thanks. I'm fine now.”

He bared his teeth at me. He was smiling. “Ah, ve can onderstand von anodder!” That is a rough idea of the way he spoke. Now, I've been all over the place, and changed my accent a good twenty times, but I always speak English like a native. He didn't. But at least I seemed to be in a world where someone spoke it.

“Who are you?” I said.

He looked reproachful at that. I shouldn't have asked straight out. “Ve ollways,” he said—I can't do the way he spoke—“we always keep one sharp lookout coming through the Boundaries, in case any other Homeward Bounder in the water lies. Lucky for you, eh!”

I stared at his huge hollow face. “Are
you
one? Do you call us Homeward Bounders too?”

“That is the name to all of us is given,” he said to me sadly.

“Oh,” I said. “I thought I'd made it up. How long have you been one?” A long time, by the look of him, I thought.

He sighed. “You have not heard of me in your world maybe? In many places I am known, always by my ship, always sailing on. The name most often given is that of Flying Dutchman.”

As it happens, I had heard of him. At school—good old boring chapel-shaped Churt House—one rainy afternoon, when all the other Dominies were down with flu. The one Dominie left had told us about the Flying Dutchman, among other stories. But all I could remember about him was that long, long ago he had been doomed to sail on forever, until, unless—It didn't matter. It was probably the same as me.

“What happened? What did you do to annoy
Them
?” I asked.

He shivered, and sort of put me aside with that skeleton hand of his. “It is not permitted to speak of these things,” he said. Then he seemed sorry. “But you are only young. You will learn.”

“What world do you come from, then?” I asked. “Is it permitted to speak of that? Is it the same world as me?” I sat up then, in great excitement, thinking that if we were both from the same place, then we were Bound to the same Home, and I could do worse than sail with him until we got there. Sitting up gave me a view of the cabin. I was not so sure after that. Cobwebs hung in swags from all the corners and beams. On the walls, black mold and green slime were fighting it out to see which could climb highest, and every piece of metal I could see was rusty, including the candlestick on the wormy table. The cabin floor had dirty water washing about on it, this way and that as the boat swung, and swilling round the Dutchman's great seaboots. “Is yours the same world?” I said doubtfully.

“I do not know,” he said sadly. “But I shall know if I am back there. There will be some rest then.”

“Well, I'll tell you about my Home,” I said. “You may recognize something. First, my name's Jamie H—”

But he raised his skeleton hand again. “Please. We do not give names. We think it is not permitted.”

Here, one of his crew came to the door and did a jabber-jabber. He was a man too, but I saw why I had taken him for a monkey. He was so stick-thin. He was more or less naked too, and the parts of him that weren't burnt dark brown were covered with hair. Men are very like monkeys really.

The Dutchman listened for a little. Then he said, “Ja, ja,” and got up and went out.

It was not very interesting in the cabin and it smelled of mold, so after a bit I got up and went on deck too. The sea was there, all round. It gave me the pip at first, just like the wide-open cattle country. But you get used to it quite soon. The sailors were all scrambling about the rakish masts above me. They were struggling with the great black torn sails, and they seemed to be trying to hoist a few more. Every so often, a rotten rope would snap. There would be some resigned jabber, and they would mend it and carry on. This made it quite a long business, getting any extra sails up.

The Dutchman was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the reason for all this pother. It was another ship, a beauty, about midway between us and the horizon. It was like an arrow or a bird, that ship—like everything quick and beautiful. I had to gasp when I saw it. It had a bank of white sails, white as a swan. But, as I watched, I could see frenzied activity among those white sails. Shortly, a whole lot more white sails came up, some above, some overlapping the others, until there were so many sails up that you thought the thing was going to topple over and sink from sheer top-heaviness. Like that, the white ship turned and, with a bit of a waggle, like a hasty lady, made her way over the horizon. Our sails were still not set.

The Dutchman sighed heavily. “Always they go. They think we are unlucky.”

“Are you?” I asked, rather worried on my own account.

“Only to ourselves,” he sighed. He gave out some jabbering. The monkeys up aloft gave up struggling with the sails and came down to the deck again.

After that, I was sure they would be thinking of breakfast. I hadn't eaten since lunch the day before, and I was starving. Well, I suppose a Homeward Bounder can never exactly starve, but put it this way: it never feels that way, and my stomach was rolling. But time went on, and nobody said a word about food. The monkeys lay about, or carved blocks of wood, or mended ropes. The Dutchman strode up and down. In the end, I got so desperate that I asked him right out.

He stopped striding and looked at me sadly. “Eating? That we gave up long ago. There is no need to eat. A Homeward Bounder does not die.”

“I know,” I said. “But it makes you feel a whole lot more comfortable. Look at you. You all look like walking skeletons.”

“That is true,” he admitted. “But it is hard to take on board provisions when you sail on, and ever on.”

I saw the force of that. “Don't you ever fetch up on land then?” And I was suddenly terrified. Suppose I was stuck on this ship, too, forever, without any food.

“Sometimes we go to land, ja,” the Dutchman admitted. “When we come through a Boundary and we can tell we have time, we find an island where is privacy, and we land. We eat then sometimes. We may eat maybe when we come to land to put you ashore.”

That relieved my mind considerably. “You should eat,” I said earnestly. “Do, to please me. Can't you catch fish, or something?”

He changed the subject. Perhaps he thought catching fish was not permitted. He thought no end of things were not permitted. I had opportunity to know how many things, because I was on that ship for days. And a more uncomfortable time I hope never to spend. Everything about that ship was rotten. It was half waterlogged. Water squeezed out of the boards when you trod on them and mold grew on everything. And nobody cared. That was what got me so annoyed. True, I could see they'd been at this game for ages, a hundred times longer than I had, and they had a right to be miserable. But they took it to such lengths!

“Can't you wear a few more clothes?” I said to a monkey every so often. “Where's your self-respect?”

He would just look at me and jabber. None of them spoke much English. After a bit, I began to ask it in another sort of way, because it got colder. Fog hung in the air and made the damp ship even wetter. I shivered. But the monkeys just shrugged. They were past caring.