We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [89]
Had I let my guard down? Did I fail in my responsibility? I can't answer that question, and it haunts me still.
A massive wave seized us and flung us at the reef, making the entire ship shudder and flinging the last mast overboard. I found myself with my back against a rail, my shoulder and arm in such pain, I thought I'd broken them. Then a second wave pounded the ship and nearly overturned her; a cascade of water flooded the deck before streaming back into the sea—and washing me overboard. I grabbed at a piece of the broken rigging, then screamed in pain as it tugged my arm, but I managed to hang on, so at least I knew it wasn't broken. The ship never righted herself. Each fresh wave hit her like a fist bashing a defenseless face, smashing everything to smithereens. Soon there'd be nothing left of us but a wreck on the reef. Clinging to the shreds of rigging, I crawled back up onto the skewed deck and saw that the Kanaks had cut the ropes to the raft—which now slid along the deck and vanished into the bubbling foam. The Kanaks jumped in after it.
I hesitated for a moment, then leapt. The sea was heaving across the reef in a continuous motion that sucked me right down: I felt sharp coral slash my feet before the water's pressure forced me upward again. When I broke the surface, I spotted the raft a couple of meters away. Within a few strokes I'd reached it, and the Kanaks helped me clamber on.
We clung to our raft, hoping the surf would carry us into the lagoon. The reef, which had snared the ship, allowed our flat-bottomed craft to pass, but I'd miscalculated when I'd thought we'd find safety in the bay. Here too the sea was in uproar. The reef broke the rhythm of the waves, but it didn't stop them. They were just as mighty within the bottleneck as they were outside it.
The raft and its makeshift lashings groaned.
And yet it wasn't fear that consumed me now; on the contrary, I was aware of a huge, spreading sense of relief. I'd got rid of the Flying Scud. When I reached land, I'd be leaving Jack Lewis behind. Trusting that the sea would erase all traces of the Flying Scud, I'd already set to work rechristening the splintered ship with a new, but for me familiar, name: the Johanne Karoline, after the old fore-and-aft-rigged Marstal schooner that we'd all dreamt of sailing in before she sank with Hans Jørgen in the Gulf of Bothnia. This was my new version of events—and who would be there to deny it? It wasn't that I wanted to avoid being answerable for my actions. I just wasn't prepared to take the blame for misdeeds that weren't mine. It was a way of sidestepping Jack Lewis and the ugly taint that came with him.
We were still clinging to the raft, which shuddered from the blows the sea pummeled us with, one whack after another. The green mountains were very close now, but they'd darkened to shadows: the poisonous violet clouds had blocked the sun, and the rain seemed to be lashing the mountainsides as violently as waves on a reef. The storm was at its peak, and though the coast was near, it offered no respite.
We could hear the thundering surf. Hoisting myself up on one elbow, I could see how close we were to the white beach. From my perch on the cresting waves I seemed to be level with the tops of the swaying coconut palms. That's when I saw the futility of my hopes, just as clearly as if I were sitting on the roof of a collapsing house: the wave we rode was about to crush us all under a mass of water. When it broke with the roar of a thousand waterfalls, the raft shot away beneath me and I was in whirling free fall, with the sky below and the sea above.
I can't say everything went black: in fact it went as green as the tropical sea itself. But I was off in some place lost to memory: full of nothingness. When I came to, I was in the arms of one of the Kanaks. Behind us another giant wave crashed down, and I saw we were in the middle of the roiling spume, where the huge waves spent themselves before surrendering to the suck