The Devil's Eye (22 page)

Maggie Porter had never contemplated her own death until now, standing wet, exhausted and seasick in a dark and heaving cabin with Alice in her arms, where she saw it was possible to die. And, God forgive her, it might be better than this.

Another lurch. But dear God, no!

When ashore she went to church, of course she did, but had never actually
believed
, having no reason to call on God, even when Alice was born. God was surely for death, not life.

She thought of the world of sailors, full of superstition. Porter, like the other captains, was fatalistic. Like the Japanese; like the dead Japanese diver who now shared the cabin.

Where was Jones? Was he still alive? She prayed for his sake that he was beyond suffering.

Jones, like the other sailors in the fleet, was of a faith that required him to beg God not to kill him while admitting he deserved it. She remembered Porter once
telling him to stop drawing attention to himself and imperilling everyone around him.

But where was their God now? What was Alice’s sin, to suffer so much?

She felt the warm body of Alice through her wet clothes, and her rhythmic breathing. She was now mercifully asleep in her aching arms.

Maggie closed her eyes and prayed for her daughter.

‘Mrs Porter!’

Maggie opened her eyes and Tommy was standing at the cabin door.

She suspected, seeing Tommy at that moment, that life above deck had not been nearly as bad as what she’d experienced below.

Tommy was dog-tired, but he still had enough energy to speak. He was not seasick. He had not been thrown against the walls in the dark. He had not been completely powerless.

In that moment, she hated him.

But then as he waded over she saw his hands, bloodied and torn.

She formed an ‘Oh’ with her mouth, but nothing came out.

‘Mrs Porter!’ he yelled at her. ‘We’re not sunk yet.’

Maggie thought that his face had lost something during the night. Or perhaps it had gained another quality. He wasn’t Poor Tommy any more.

‘Captain Porter says to tell you that we’ve found the hole in the rudder casing. He’s flogging the crew at the pumps.’

The schooner lurched crazily and they stumbled sideways together, Tommy reached out to her although she was more practised now in the art of saving herself. She hoped her baby was still only sleeping. She did not have the strength any more to find the small face, buried into her neck—but then she felt the lips moving again and imagined that she called out for her father.

She found that she was looking into Tommy’s eyes and saw her own misery reflected there. He looked down at Alice and kissed the girl’s hair.

‘We’ve lashed together a raft, just in case,’ she heard him yell. ‘It’s up forward. The hole’s aft. If she does sink, she’ll go down bottom-first and it will be quick.’

Tommy stumbled over to the far wall, reached down into the water and pulled his hands out again, seeing his damaged fingers.

‘Cripes,’ she saw him mouth.

He then seemed to see, as if for the first time, the state of the cabin: the splintered legs of the table still bolted to the floor, the table top bumping against the diver’s body.

He looked at Maggie with something that might have been awe. How had she survived down here when everything else had shattered? Maggie certainly didn’t know.

Tommy went to Porter’s cabin and returned with another rifle. He plunged the barrel straight down the wall, trying to loosen the submerged cot. He put his weight against it and after a minute had levered it free.

He lifted the pathetic bed above the water and emptied out the water, before putting it back on the surface.

He turned to Maggie and held out his arms.

She shook her head.

‘Mrs Porter!’ he called. ‘It floats.’

She saw the cot but could not imagine her baby in it. It would fill immediately and sink. Tommy must have seen her doubt and he pushed the cot under. It bounced back up, half full, but still floating.

‘We’ll lash it to the raft so that it remains upright,’ he said. He made it sound possible, but Maggie could see that the whole idea of a raft carrying a baby in a cot was a fantasy.

But then, life itself now seemed improbable. She gave Tommy her baby.

He put Alice in and buckled the cot’s leather straps across her. The baby began crying again and Maggie’s heart was in her throat; she just wanted to hold her child, more than she wanted life.

‘We have to go forward,’ Tommy said, the wind reaching a new pitch. ‘To the forward hatch. To be ready. If the schooner starts to go down, we need to be quick.’

Tommy carried the cot and Maggie followed.

They staggered with each roll and bumped down the dark corridor, standing on things they couldn’t see.

She put a hand on his shoulder as he led the way.

When they passed the sick bay, she didn’t glance in.

They were up forward in the crew’s quarters, where the floor was three feet deep in water and a soup of clothing and broken boards. Light flickered through a crack in the hatch and Tommy stopped beneath it. He gave the cot to Maggie, and she looked down into Alice’s bawling face. It made her smile, that her daughter still had the strength to be indignant.

Tommy slid the hatch back and a great gulp of air nearly pulled Maggie off her feet. She gazed up past Tommy at the black roaring sky and felt new terror.

Tommy, without a word that she could hear, heaved himself out through the hatch and disappeared.

Then his face reappeared and he opened his mouth. She saw him beckon with his hand.

Maggie held the cot tight. It was surely insane. The schooner shuddered and a wave of water came up the corridor and reached her armpit.

She raised the cot, put her foot on the ladder and Tommy grabbed it with both hands.

But she couldn’t let go.

She heard a cry, from far away. She saw Tommy with the cot in his hands resting on the lip of the hatch. He looked up, away from her. There was a deeper roar
behind her and the
Crest of the Wave
rose as if lifted by a giant hand.

And then it began to roll again. The water in the corridor was sucked away from Maggie and with a great, wracking sob the schooner began tipping over on its beam-end.

Maggie saw the cot in the mouth of the hatch and behind it was a deep, dark valley of water as the schooner climbed the face of a giant wave. As the vessel slowly rolled, she saw that Tommy still had a hand on the edge of the cot and was about to fall down the now-vertical deck. He looked into her eyes and took his hand away. And vanished.

The top of the wave broke over the schooner and it dashed the cot from the hatch and away from Maggie’s hands into the dreadful night.

With a cry she put her foot on a rung of the ladder and threw herself after it.

She fell.

Far away Maggie heard, quite clearly, the sound of Alice crying and in the darkness she reached out for her baby.

Jack Kenny walked around the bare ridge hardly able to believe what he saw. The wind still blew stiffly, but it was a breeze compared to what the night had shown them.

No tree stood and even the fallen timber was stripped of its leaves and bark. It looked as if fire rather than a storm had consumed the world.

The clearing was swept clean of even its grass.

To the west, the land looked like the carcass of a beast butchered and boned. Most trees had been felled in neat lines pointing west. Timber was piled in the lagoon behind the ridge, the landscape around it scoured.

Pompey and Davey were gone and Kenny had sent Euro and Bruce to look for their bodies. They returned from the desolation with four horses.

Kenny put his hand on the horse’s nose. The poor creature was shaking.

‘Where are the others?’ Kenny asked.

‘Trees fell on them.’

‘Davey and Pompey?’

Corporal Bruce started weeping then and Kenny turned away.

Roth was wandering about aimlessly, kicking the carcasses of blasted trees. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

Kenny felt in his pocket for his watch. The glass was fogged; it had stopped just past midnight.

‘Sunday,’ he said.

‘I suppose bacon and eggs is out of the question?’

‘There are plenty of fish down there,’ and Kenny pointed to the beach.

‘No matter. Look at this.’

Kenny looked and saw that Roth’s hand was shaking badly. In the palm was a small octopus, quite dead.

‘Cephalopod,’ said Roth, toeing the sand. ‘I found it here.’

Kenny left him inspecting the ground, and went to sort through the pile of items that the two surviving troopers had recovered.

Euro was digging the shotgun from the sand, but none of the other rifles could be found. Kenny had a revolver still strapped to his waist.

There were saddles, a blanket, some rope. None of them had kept their hats.

In the pile was also one of Roth’s canvas bags, and Kenny tipped the contents out. A tin of tobacco, some paper, matches. Roth was indeed a lucky man.

A sodden paper bag lay on the sand, and it fell apart when he picked it up. The boiled lollies were a sticky
mass. Roth looked on without surprise, then bent down. He shook the tin of matches.

Kenny gave a lolly to Bruce and Euro, had one himself, and put the rest in his pocket.

‘We’ll have to walk,’ Kenny told Roth.

‘Walk?’ said Roth.

‘The horses are too weak. And they’re lame. There’s nothing for them to eat.’

Roth lit a cigarette, a miracle of sorts in itself. The surviving horses stood there with their heads down, wet, shivering, resigned.

Kenny’s horse had a wound that ran from flank to fetlock, cleaned by the rain and white at the edges. But not one fly had come to inspect the potential feast.

Kenny ordered the two troopers to carry what they could and leave the rest. He drew his revolver and started wiping it with a wet handkerchief. He wiped the bullets, and selected four.

Roth watched and said, ‘That would be a cruel and unnecessary thing to do.’

‘It is both necessary and kind.’

‘They might find something to eat.’

Kenny waved the revolver around him. ‘Where? Not here. And nothing within a day’s walk, I’d say. They’d never make it. They would be speared and eaten if the blacks found them.’

‘Then at least they will have served a purpose.’

Bruce and Euro were now watching him closely. Kenny put the gun back into the holster.

Kenny had led the men down to the beach and then returned to the horses.

When he’d drawn his gun, Roth called out, ‘This is not the right thing to do.’

Kenny said, ‘It’s the only thing to do.’

Later, though, Kenny could recall nothing of the incident but that brief conversation and the retort of the revolver.

‘What now?’ asked Roth.

Along the full stretch of shore from Barrow Point south to Red Point, fish were piled high in silver runs.

‘The pearling fleet.’

‘Good idea,’ said Roth. ‘Perhaps we can get a lift back by boat.’

They looked along the coast north. The black mountains of Cape Melville were closer, smaller, without trees.

Hope’s sister was with the fleet. Perhaps they had not had it so bad, behind those mountains.

There was no wreckage on the beach. Perhaps the fleets had seen the storm coming and had gone. It was entirely possible that the patrol was alone in the area. Possible, but Kenny felt a new sense of dread as they made their way north from Barrow Point towards the cape.

The four men picked their way through the marine carnage that stretched as far as the eye could see. They hung their sodden boots around their necks to dry, amazed by the extent of the slaughter. Besides fish there were dead birds of many species and sea snakes by the score.

Even Roth was overwhelmed and lost the heart to inspect them.

Behind them the dirty brown waves and the rising tide covered their tracks and brought other things ashore: planks and ropes, tins and bottles, and then a pumpkin, a shirt.

It was later, as Kenny’s party headed inland towards a pass that would show them Bathurst Bay, that the rising tide brought with it the plump bodies of dead men.

There was no dawn. It took a while for Willie Tanna to realise that he’d been asleep, and then to understand what waking meant.

The world became faintly grey.

At some point the rain had stopped and the wind had eased. Willie lifted his head. He could see some distance, and there was nothing but towering peaks of water and foam swirling around the rocks below.

He stood, stiffly, painfully. Nothing looked familiar. The schooners and the luggers were all gone.

‘Where are we?’ Sam called up to him.

‘Kingdom Come.’

‘Really?’

Willie went around the rocks and found his crew in various states of consciousness, but all apparently alive.

He almost asked where the hell was Charley, and then he remembered.

There was no sign of the man from the
Flora.

Willie managed to put the plank back under Sam, and then left him, to climb to the very top of the boulders.

He looked west, into Bathurst Bay. The sea was still running dangerously high. Close to shore was a small forest of masts rising between the tips of sharp waves.

He tried to find the beach, but he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. It was as if someone had taken a giant bailer shell and reshaped the bay.

He saw that the water was crowded, though. Amongst the vegetation were unidentifiable scraps of timber and cordage. Some cloth, perhaps part of a sail. Dead fish. A spar rode high on a wave, trailing rope like hair.

Directly below him, at the base of Boulder Rocks in the broken water and surrounded by clods of foam, a man floated face down. There was another in the surf, and Willie was sure he would see more if he tried, so he didn’t.

He turned east. Long lines of deep black clouds, low to the sea, marched beneath a thick grey sky.

Pipon Island had been shorn of its trees, every one.

To the south, it seemed remarkable that the cape’s dark hills had not been blown away.

To the north there was nothing at all where the Channel Rocks lightship should have been.

But in the distance he imagined he saw, falling and rising behind the waves, the hulk of a vessel bobbing alone in a grey sea.