The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [203]
The weight of the small boat was the weight of a shot tower, filled to the skyline with lead. Adam, heaving, thought his heart would crack; knew that Best and Chancellor and the few seamen who could swim could never have done this, beset by drowning, struggling men. When it was over, dancing, half filled with water, it rose above his eyes, blacking the stars, and looked no more possible to scale and enter than the bright gates of Paradise. Hislop caught him as he collapsed, still looking up, and manhandled him up to Buckland, over the gunwales of the pinnace.
The light from the shore was brighter by then; a real bonfire, rising smoking and crackling into the blustering air, with small figures dark round about it. Fisherfolk, from the cottages inland. There was a dark track, as if made by a snail; a boat was being launched. John Buckland said, ‘I must go. You’re certain?’ And the two men, burly d’Harcourt and Hislop, gripping his oar, unable to speak, looked from the small boat and nodded. Then the pinnace lifted away and, rowing, d’Harcourt started to call.
Lymond heard him, an almost indistinguishable sound, flat as a gull’s cry above the crash of the waves on the rocks round about him, and the noise of the surf, like seething fat hissing and the bodiless buffet and thunder of the uneven wind, with its thin solo voices winding and weaving around it.
He had always been a strong swimmer. Even after weeks of short commons, and the remorseless, unremitting strain of the voyage, he was still probably the best of them all, except perhaps Ludovic d’Harcourt, whose Order owed its strength to the sea. And since he had also an excellent brain he used it, to draw certain deductions.
Christopher had slid from the overturned boat. He had slid without being seen, or his father would have caught him. And since he had not stayed near the boat, or shouted to attract their attention, he must have been nearly or wholly unconscious and at the mercy therefore of wind and of tide.
So his father would also argue. Therefore one must swim with the pull of the sea, away from the shore and away from the ship, where one might find, as a very slim chance, the body of Christopher, floating unconscious, or awake now and somehow struggling far out here in the dark.
Or more likely, one might meet with his father, still swimming strongly, intent on nothing but finding and saving his son.
Having calculated so far, nothing remained but to apply the physical laws relating to motion and force. To deal with the violent swinging and constant belabouring of high, powerful waves, their tops sliced into spume by the wind. To avoid, if one could, the invisible reefs. The broken ridge dimly revealed, coursed like a dog by the waves, cheek to cheek with savage affection. The rock which stood ahead in the foam as you were pitched headlong and fighting down the shell of a cataract.
There was not all that much time, for his shoulders were very tired, and his body losing its skill as it chilled. He was, however, as methodical as it was possible to be, and the fire on the beach helped: now very large. He hoped Buckland had had the sense to take the pinnace in and get Nepeja and the rest round its warmth. He believed someone would come out again, looking for him and for Chancellor, and he hoped he would have strength left to shout when they did. He tried to watch the sea all the time, in the faint rosy glow from the fire and thought, the farther outwards he went, the better chance he might have of seeing a swimmer, or two, silhouetted between himself and the shore. On the other hand, a floating man had no more substance than a rock, or a tumbled patch of torn seaweed. It meant, in cold blood, visiting every half-hidden stone in the bay, and he was swimming as if disabled already.
What he wanted was very near. It was typical