Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [13]
‘Juno thinks the winds could be strong enough to wreck our yachts. Go to the others and instruct them to tie themselves to the decks. Everyone must be secured.’
She frowned with concern. ‘Of course.’
‘You must come aboard as well.’
‘I am safer below the waves, Principe. I can swim deeper.’
‘But what about the xoc? They will seek the depths too.’
‘We ... I mean, they .. . don’t feed during the storm.’
His heart lurched at her slip of inclusion. Every day she became more a part of the sea. Would he be able to win her back when they finally found a place to stop?
‘Principe?’ called Juno. ‘No more than an hour, I estimate.’
Trin leaned down to kiss the top of Djeserit’s head. Crux protect us all.’
She gazed up at him with the smile that never failed to soothe him; a smile of belief and love. ‘Be safe, my Principe.’
She pushed off the yacht and with a flip of her legs was gone.
It took less time than Juno Genarro had supposed for the wind to whip the waves. Djeserit had not returned, but Trin could see the women preparing, shuffling about their yacht until they lay close together, clinging to each other. Then the swell began to shift the yachts in different sequence so that he only glimpsed the others when his own peaked on each wave. Juno Genarro fixed their rudder and reduced the sail width, so that they drove straight up the face of the enormous waves. Trin’s fear began to abate with the regular rise and fall of the water and was replaced by exhilaration. The sea was more magnificent than anything he’d ever experienced. He listened to the shouts of the other men and wanted to join them, screaming into the face of the giant waves.
But the storm had more than elation to give them; the wind strengthened, drawing the swell into impossibly high peaks and bottomless troughs, ripping away their flimsy spine bush covers and tossing them about the raft.
Clouds scudded across the sky, giving them scant protection from the sun as they clung to each other, drenched and terrified.
We will die. Trin knew it, as surely as his fingers ached from clenching the weed rope and his muscles cramped with the effort of staying aboard. Nothing could survive such seas.
And yet, finally, the wind blew itself out and the waves gentled, and they were still afloat — desperate little barnacles clinging to their posts.
When it was possible to speak and sit upright, Trin called for a head count. They’d lost one overboard to the storm: an ‘esque from the mines, a brawny fellow whose woman had died in the walk from the shaft to the Islands. Trin hadn’t known his proper name. The Carabinere just called him fratella.
‘Principe, the other yacht. It’s missing,’ shouted a hoarse Carabinere voice.
All the men scrambled to look to the stern.
The women. No! It was the second yacht of men. The ones who’d come from the mines. Cass Mulravey’s boat seemed intact and carrying its full load.
Trin stared, dumbfounded. How could all those men have been lost, and yet the yacht with the women had survived?
‘We need cover,’ said Joe Scali. ‘Before the cloud breaks up.’
‘The spine bush is all gone. We have no other shade.’
A wild shout echoed to them from the bow, and the men turned toward Juno Genarro who stood, staring ahead, as he had done since the moment they’d begun their journey. ‘There is our cover. On the island. The wind has given us wings.’
The island lay just beyond a set of gentling breakers. It loomed large and thick with brown vegetation. Tears welled in Trin’s eyes, and he let them run, unchecked, down his face. Dios and Crux. We are saved. We are saved.
The men got to their knees, or their feet, yelling in jubilation. Trin sat back down and let his legs trail in the water - his signal to Djes. Exhaustion and relief and sadness and elation combined into a strange and disembodied sensation. He felt as if he might float right across to the island of his own accord. Walk across water and lie beneath the lush bush.
Something splashed his face. He wiped it away. But it splashed again and again. Drawn from his daze