The Spellcoats (13 page)

Duck picked Sweetheart up. “Don't make such a fuss, Hern,” he said. “When the floods go down, it'll be quite obvious.”

“But we don't have a bank to measure by!” Hern snarled.

“Then we'll find out some other way,” said Duck.

“Stop maddening me,” said Hern. “Take that cat away.”

Robin was very quiet as we sailed that morning. I should have noticed she was not well, I know, but I was thinking of other things. The gulls followed us. They made a noise like sharp misery, and I was afraid of them. They watched us with hungry eyes like beads. When they floated on the River, they seemed lighter than was natural. I was not sure they were really birds. There was a new light in the air, bleached and chalky, like bones, or Hern's eyes when he is angry, and the gulls wheeled about in it. The hills on either side of us were low and rocky, with no trees to speak of, and they seemed to come together in front of us into a bank of mist. The wind hissed over them. The River filled the wide space in between, gray now, and covered with angry shivers in all directions. Where the water met the land, it rose into high waves with white tops. These waves went riding landward, growing taller as they rode, until they were too tall for themselves, whereupon the white top fell over and smashed on the land. Everywhere was
crash, crash
of falling waves, and the seagulls crying out. I kept looking at Gull to make sure he was safe. I was frightened.

Hern and Duck became frightened, too, when we found we were not masters of the boat any longer. None of us understands the mass of contradictory currents in which the water flowed to the sea. Sometimes we were racing forward, sometimes we seemed hardly to move, and then, around midday, we were taken by the tide and borne back toward Sweetheart's island. We kept the sail up and tried to beat on, but we found we were taken more and more toward the left. After a whole morning we had gone barely two miles.

“I think we'd better keep leftward,” Hern said at last, “and try to land somewhere over there.”

“Oh, yes, do let's land!” Robin said. She said it so desperately that we all looked at her and saw that she was ill. She was shivering, and her face was an odd color—almost like the lilac flowers in Aunt Zara's garden. I think we did wrong to bring Robin to the sea.

Hern said, “I'll land in the first possible place.”

Duck picked up a blanket and wrapped it round Robin. “Would you like the Lady, Robin?” he said. I confess now that I felt jealous at how kind they both were to Robin. I found it hard to be kind to her, and I still do. She looked so ugly, and she kept shivering for no reason. I hope I did not show my feelings. I put the Lady in Robin's hands, but Robin seemed to forget her, and she dropped to the boards.

“Have the Young One,” said Duck.

“No,” Robin said, with great firmness.

After endless sailing in heaving gray water, we came near land. It would be midafternoon by then. Everything was bleached, brownish, and sandy-looking and smelling a new smell, like a fresh-caught fish. That is the smell of the sea. And the land was not in a solid line as we had thought, but in islands of heaped-up sand, with the true land just as sandy, some way beyond. In between the land and the islands the sand-colored water raced and sucked, while on the outer side of them it was all waves, crashing continually. How Hern got us ashore on the last island, I shall never know. He must be a better boatman than me.

Here was our final island. It was made of crusty sand. Sharp-edged grass grew on it and bent prickly bushes, all twisted in the wind. The wind had dug out holes and hollows in the sand. We found the largest hollow, facing back to the land we had come from—from there it looked like blue mountains—and we made a camp, dragging the boat up to give Robin some shelter. Down below was a place where all the things in that part of the flood were hurled on the island and pinned there by the racing water.

“Ugh!” said Duck when he saw it.

There were dead hens, drowned rats, cabbage stalks—many horrid remains—but there was wood and waterweed, too. We made a good fire from it. We wrapped Robin in rugcoats and blankets, and she still shivered. We offered her food.

“I couldn't!” she said. “Just water.”

“Water!” I said. Hern and I looked at one another. There was a drop in the jar, but there was no water on the island. I went down to the gray flood and tasted it. The River here mingles with the sea, and the sea is salt. I do not know where the salt comes from, but the sea is not fit to drink.

“What do we do now?” I whispered.

“We can't take the boat,” Hern whispered back. “She'd be cold without it, and the current's terrible. I can't see any sign of a stream either.”

We gazed at the low sandy land helplessly. Naturally Duck chose that moment to say in a loud voice, “I'm dreadfully thirsty!”

“Shut up!” we both said.

But there was Robin heaving herself up on one arm, with rugs dropping from her and her teeth chattering in her blue-gray mouth. “Is the water gone? I'll go and get—”

“You lie down,” I said, glaring at Duck. “I'm just going to get some.” I took the water jar and stumped off up the sandy hill, with no idea what I was going to do. I was really depressed. When I come to think of it, I find wide-open spaces always make me unhappy. It was the same with the lake. I have been brought up where the land is hilly and close. Here it was as if the land had not been properly made. Everything was flat and sand gray or River gray and hung with peculiar purple-gray mist. You could not see very far, even if there was anything to see. The only thing my eye could cling to was the wide channel of rushing gray water between me and the shore, and I did not see myself getting across that.

All the same, I stumped down toward the channel. I had some notion that the water would not be salty there. And as I went, I thought I heard Duck screaming from the rushing channel. It was the way he screams when he is really frightened. “Help!” he screamed.

I remember I dropped the jar and came down to the water like a plow in a furrow of dry sand. It was not Duck. It was a much smaller child. He was in the channel, thrashing about in the racing muddy water and traveling past in it as fast as I could walk, screaming all the while. There was a horrid while when I seemed to stand there staring. But I think I took my shoes off and got out of my rugcoat while I stared.

“Keep swimming!” I screamed at the child. “Swim for your life!” He heard me. A fountain of water went up from his arms and legs, but I could see he had no idea how to swim. I plowed down into the water. I remember squawking. It was far colder than the River is by Shelling, and the bottom was no bottom at all. It was just sinking stuff. You had to swim or sink in the mud. I swam madly. I had never swum in a flood before. My father forbade it. But I think, even that first night of the flood, the current was not as strong as the one in that race. My legs were towed sideways before I was afloat. No wonder the child screamed so. I swam with my whole strength, and yet I could not seem to cross that narrow channel.

I think I caught up with that drowning child simply from being heavier. Since I was trying to go forward, I was carried to him on a slant. That is, I was carried to where I had last seen him. He had gone down a second time by then. I thought he was drowned, and I was thinking of saving myself when a heavy sand-colored head bobbed up just by my fingers. I wound my hand in the hair and pulled.

Then it was all panic. The child's terror got into me, too. We both thrashed and screamed and sank. I roared at him to be quiet, and he shrilled at me to let go, and to get him out, and called me names. I called him a crab-faced idiot and fought him until the water was in spouts round us. While we struggled, the current dragged us along against the land, and I saw we were traveling out toward the sea. I put my hand against the bank to stop us. And my hand stuck in the land, up to my elbow. I dream of that still. The bank was as soft as curd cheese. Somehow, I got us out onto it, out of the sucking waters, and the cheeselike land sucked us down instead. I floundered through it, dragging that poor child by his hair. I came to hard sand under my elbows, coarse as sugar, and I cried with relief.

The child cried, too, on hands and knees, with water pouring out of his mouth and hair. His face was red and blue in patches, and his bare feet and legs were raw purple. He was wearing a silly kind of tunic and drawers which must have been cold even when he was dry. He shivered, and I shook.

“Shut up,” I said. “You're all right now.” He looked at me as if it was all my fault. “You're saved,” I said. “By me. You're looking at the person who pulled you out. How did you fall in, anyway?” He seemed vague about that. He muttered something. “I see,” I said. “You were fooling about and you slipped. Where do you live?”

He gave me a shifty look. I think he said, “I didn't say that,” but he still didn't speak properly.

“Then what did you say?” I said.

“I said some natives pushed me in.” He said it very loudly and clearly, so there was no mistake, and he gave me the defiant look people do when they are lying.

“Liar,” I said, but I said it without thinking. The wretched child was a Heathen. My wet hair was the same sand color as his, and I knew his would dry fair, too. I thought that if I had let him drown, it would have been revenge for my father at least, but what had my father to do with him? I could not have stood on the island and let him drown. “You'd better go home and get into dry clothes,” I said. “Where can I find some water?”

He gave me another sideways look and pointed to the racing channel behind us.

“Very funny!” I said. “Do you think I'm a fool?” He shook his head swiftly. “Water to drink,” I said. “I was looking for some when I heard you yelling.”

He looked at me from the corners of his eyes, very carefully. Maybe he knew I was not a Heathen. Something made him afraid and respectful of me. “There's water up here,” he said, and jerked his shivering chin to the sandy hill above us.

“Show me,” I said.

Both shivering hugely, we marched up and inland, over one sandy hump and round another. The wind was cruel. And there, running between two more sandhumps, was a peculiar little stream, very flat and shallow. It came out of the sand about a foot above my head and, instead of flowing down into the River, simply buried itself in the sand and vanished, just beside my mauve feet. I tasted it, and it was good. “Thanks,” I said. “Now you've shown me, you can go home, but mind you tell them the truth about what happened. If you spin them that story about the natives pushing you in, I shall know at once, and I shall come and get you.” I did not see why he should blame our people for his own silliness.

“All right,” he muttered, pushing at the sand with his poor sore toes. I could see I had impressed him. He was a lot younger than Duck.

“Good,” I said. “Off you go, then.”

He was gone, in a shower of sand, before I finished saying it. He never said thank you. He was a very ungrateful, very Heathen brat.

I knelt beside the stream for a while, playing with its peculiarities. I have since learned that such streams are common at the Rivermouth, but I had never seen anything like it. Dig as I might, I could not find where it came from. Then I noticed that I was freezing cold and that I had no way of carrying the water. I got up and went lumbering on my frozen legs until I could see our island.

It was some way up the shore from me. I could see Duck and Hern bending anxiously over the plowed place where I had gone into the channel.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Where's the water jar?”

Both their heads jerked up. I laughed. They looked out to sea first, expecting me to be there. That was really stupid of them because while I had been digging at the stream, the tide had turned and the water in the channel was rushing inland again. The whole channel was smaller, shallower, and more gentle.

Duck ran away to fetch the jar. Hern tried to yell at me about how I had crossed the channel, and I tried to shriek back about the Heathen brat, but neither of us heard much for the wind. Then Duck came galloping back down the island with the water jar and galloped straight to the water. I suddenly saw he was going to try to cross it.

“Stop!” I screamed at him, remembering the sinking bottom. “I'm wet already.” If I had told him about the mud and the current, that would not have stopped him. I ran into the channel myself instead. My feet sank, but nothing like as badly as they had done before. The water came up to my knees—I was so cold by then that it felt warm—and then up to my waist, but that was all. The current was not fierce at all. I could hardly believe it.

“What was the fuss about? I could have come over easily,” Duck pointed out when I got to the other side.

“I told you—I'm wet already,” I said. I took the jar and waded back. This time the water hardly reached the top of my legs. I shall never understand tides, I said to myself.

When I came back with the full jar, the channel had narrowed again. It was a brisk stream of salt water, which came just to my knees in the middle. On either side of it were wide places of brown sand, but I did not sink in them above my ankles. I could hear it,
trickle-trickle, smicker-smicker
, as the water drained from it, and worms were wriggling up under my toes.