Veracity (40 page)

I knew that if I could get into the leeward shadow, where the current was being blocked by the land, there might be an eddy that would pull me back toward the cape, so I swam parallel with the cliff, though still watching its features closely, trying to judge where the unseen currents were dragging me. The new side of the peninsula was opening up like a broad-shouldered body turning toward me, which meant (and not very surprisingly) that I was being carried out to sea. And within a few minutes, the land that had only seemed like a long swim away had come to appear impossibly far, almost intangible.

I had to think of ways to stop myself from panicking. I began counting my strokes, slow methodical arcs with my arms, smooth kicks with my feet, whispering numbers out to the fading light.

Then, finally, I passed through a few strange waves that were twisting the surface with tiny whirlpools, and felt a rush of current tug at my clothing in one direction, and then in another. This was the eddy line. I had crossed over from the main current that was pushing me into the bay, and was in the eddy that would draw me closer to the peninsula. After only a few more minutes of swimming, now toward the cliff, I noticed it rising for the first time. Which was lucky, because I was getting incredibly tired. At one point, I rolled onto my back to take a rest, heaving air into my lungs that never seemed to fill them. My strokes were becoming ineffective, my limbs sloppily sifting through the water, probably holding me back more than they were propelling me. It was up to the currents now.

The sky was growing pasty, its colour fading. Soon it would be dark, and it occurred to me that I might meet my end while scraping along the rocks, looking for a way onto land during the night, which almost seemed worse than being crushed by the waves during the day. I could picture myself struggling to climb out of the swells and onto the cliff, the inky sea pulling me in after each failed attempt, wrapping around my face, shoving its fingers up my nose and down my throat, smothering me, putting its palms on my shoulders and pushing me under the surface. Understandably, I allowed this image to enter my mind only once.

When I was finished resting, and turned around to face the peninsula again, I was amazed to see how much closer the currents had brought me. And even more amazed to see a recess in the cliff, something like a cave, which, in what little light there was left, looked like a yawning mouth with a tongue of rounded boulders, like giant taste buds, licking the very edge of the water with its tip. It wasn't a beach by any stretch of the imagination, but at least there seemed to be a
possibility
of getting onto land in the dark.

I settled into an exhausted pace, steering myself in the cave's general direction while the current carried me along. I stopped counting my strokes, my movements becoming reflexive and constant. I lost track of minutes, of time. The sky darkened; everything became colourless, and then black. The fuzzy silhouette of the cliff neared, looming over my head, splashes resonating off of its walls in different directions. I continued until the rounded boulders at the mouth of the cave were taller than I was, their globular heads shimmering with night, looking down at me, feeling nothing.

I could sense land everywhere; the crispness of the echoes, the loamy breath of rock, the pockets of warm water. My legs, overtired and heavy, sunk under my waist. My arms, still trying to make circles, but quickly fading into useless flaps instead, lifted out into the water at my sides. I seemed to be waiting for my body to bump up against something, a blade of coral, the spines of sea urchins, rock. Which happened. My knee finally struck one of the slimy boulders, and this is what initiated my flustered and pathetic scramble to find a way out. I seemed to wake up. I was there. I had made it. I just had to get out of the water.

I felt around until my hand ran over another slick surface. I moved closer to it, pawing the stone until I found a divot on one of its sides. Then I started to pull myself through the water with one hand, and searching for the next hold with the other, moving toward the loudest sounds.

Swells were bouncing off of rocks, capping, tossing me from side to side. One struck me from behind and pushed me forward. I felt things sliding along my legs, and ended up being jostled between two boulders, where I stopped, a hand on either of them, teetering on a notch that was made where they met under the water. I tried to steady myself, but couldn't, and fell forward into a channel that was filled with large rocks, my chest crashing against one of them.

The sea rushed over me again, and I took in some water, my hands fumbling blindly in all directions. Finding nothing, I put my feet flat on the rocks and pushed off of them, shooting above the surface, and succeeded in hitting the side of my face against one of the boulders. I bounced off of it and fell once more to the side, somehow managing to land on my hands and knees in a pool of small stones. My head was above the water for the first time. Land.

As much as I wanted to stand while I had the chance, I had to cough the water out of my chest before I could do anything else. I might have even been on my way to recovering when I heard another surge of water tumbling through the channel behind me. I hung my head in frustration, braced myself, and was hit from behind in mid-cough, and carried along with the rush of the swell. The water dumped me further up the channel, my hands and knees settling onto smaller stones where the pool was shallower.

As soon as the wave subsided I tried to stand, still coughing, the earth swaying uncontrollably under my feet. I stumbled and fell backwards, but got up quickly and tried again, managing to walk two, three steps before falling. Only this time, when my hands hit the ground, they were holding onto a fistful of dry stones. But this wasn't enough; I needed to be higher; I needed to be sure that the sea couldn't find me in the middle of the night and drag me out again. I stood one last time, every muscle in my legs shaking with fatigue, and walked forward, feeling around, until my hands scuffled across a ledge of some sort. I pulled myself toward it, and, with all the energy I had left, lopped myself on top of it.

The moment I'd settled there, and was sure I was secure enough and wouldn't fall off during the night, I let myself relax, coughing until I recovered. After that I just lay there, taking syrupy air into my lungs, breathing, breathing very deeply, my head resting against the cold stone, staring out into the noisy darkness, until my eyes closed of their own volition. The very last thing I remember about that night was the sensation of my tingling body, drained of everything, melting into the rock.

31

I woke up coughing, a hand reaching out to steady myself on the ledge, the other in a fist at my mouth. When I recovered, I rubbed my eyes at the grey morning light, jumped off the ledge, and stood on one of the boulders, clearing my throat. The muscles in my legs and arms were stiff, and my nose, ribs, and the left side of my face were sore, but, really, considering all that could have happened to my body, there wasn't much to complain about.

As I turned in a slow circle to take everything in, the first thing I noticed was that I'd somehow managed to stumble upon the ideal place to get out of the water. The channel that I'd accidentally fallen into, and was then pushed further along, seemed to be the only access to land that wouldn't have involved climbing. Steep boulders, which probably would have been impossible to scale during the day, let alone in the dark, rose out of the water everywhere else.

I kept turning until I was looking up at the cave, where birds' nests clung to its roof, and stone protuberances of every imaginable shape dangled around them like petrified drips of water. The mouth of the cave seemed to be exhaling; a cool, stagnant air, which had a vague smell of urine and bird droppings, cascading over the boulders as slow and constant as breath.

Then I looked to the right of the cave and noticed a weakness along the wall. There was a point where the cliff sloped to a more modest angle, and the limbs of bushes and stunted trees sprung out of a vertical crack that ran from the bottom of the cliff to the top, essentially creating a ladder of vegetation that disappeared above me, where the steepness of the wall tapered off even more.

Seeing as there wasn't a shore to walk along, I really only had two options of finding a way out: I could either take my chances with the ocean again, swimming along the peninsula to look for a better way to access the top, or I could try to climb this weakness beside the cave. I looked at the swells just once before making my decision; then cleared my throat again, turned, and started making my way over the rocks toward the crack in the wall.

It turned out that the ladder of vegetation was easier to ascend than it had looked, and only became more so the higher I climbed. Though, as the slope of the cliff tapered off, the crack also became more vegetated, which meant that I had to fight my way through denser foliage, branches scratching at my face, and pink lines streaking down my forearms where twigs had scraped them. Eventually, the rock on either side of me was replaced by sloping earth, and I clambered up on my hands and knees, grabbing onto grass and shrubs, pulling myself up the forested hill until I could finally stand. Once on my feet, I continued up the rise, this seeming like a natural thing to do. The forest that I climbed through was thick, and it was gruelling work hopping over and ducking under branches, breaking through the netting of underbrush, all while having to fight against the angle of the hill as well. After quite a while, the slope of the rise continuously lessening, I came to the rounded ridge at the top of the peninsula.

I had imagined, for some reason, that once I found myself at the highest point there would be a grassy clearing; however, if anything, the forest had become thicker. I leaned against a tree whose texture I'd never seen before and caught my breath. And the more I was struck by this strange bark, the more I looked around and realized that
everything
was foreign to me; the insects crawling along the branches, the vegetation at my feet, the smells, the sounds of the birds, the calls of the animals in the distance, everything. And now that I was out of immediate danger for the first time in days, there was a part of me that just wanted to sit down and take it all in; to stare up at the sky and acknowledge that I was finally free, that I'd made it.

But being out of immediate danger didn't mean I was safe. I had no water, no food, and no shelter. Which meant that, realistically, I couldn't afford to waste a minute of daylight. I had to keep moving; at least until I found water.

Luckily, like every ridge I have ever seen in my life, there was an animal trail that followed its crest, which made the going quite easy. While I walked through the forest toward the mainland, my bare feet getting used to the new ground, roots, and leaves, I could hear animals in front of me, fleeing from my smell and the sounds that I was making in what must have been their normally quiet world. Birds sprung out of trees and into the air, explosions of flapping sounds that quickly faded into silence, flashes of wings between the leaves that would vanish the moment they appeared. Once, I even caught a glimpse of a four-legged animal as it thrashed through the undergrowth, running down one of the sides of the ridge. I was happy to have come across it, as it meant that there was fresh water within a reasonable distance from where I was.

After walking for an hour or two, I saw a break in the trees up ahead, a light that was brighter, filtering through branches that stood at the edge of a clearing. The trail became wider as it drew closer, and I walked along it as quietly as I could, thinking that I might come across some exotic animals grazing in it. But as I stepped out of the trees, I found something much more interesting than that.

There was a tower sticking out of the shrubs of the clearing. It was incredibly thin and high, constructed of metal bars (that had since helplessly rusted), which were joined in a row of triangles that climbed toward the sky, getting narrower right at its peak. It probably would have crumbled to the ground years before were it not for the cables that were securing it from every side; some of which were taut, while others were drooping ineffectually with their own weight.

As much as the Elders had educated me about the ruins I would come across in this land, there are some things that I couldn't exactly be prepared for. For some reason, I'd expected the relics to be quiet, had already pictured the tattered buildings, the glassless windows that would gape open like deadened eyes, woodless doorways creating awestruck mouths; I'd imagined the stillness in the settlements as the buildings slowly buckled at their joints and collapsed to the ground. Yet I could see that there was going to be nothing silent about these things. Unlike coming across a dead animal, which might give a few clues as to its death, things that were structural or inorganic had the capacity to relay a record of how they lived. I wasn't going to find a world of decayed flesh and liquefied remains which could no longer be recognized, but skeletons of an existence that were still poised in movement; things that not only asked questions, but responded to them. This tower was demanding me to contemplate what a massive finger of metal sticking up into the sky could possibly serve. I had no idea, of course - and still don't - but I know that the answer was there, somewhere. And though I didn't have time to try and find it, it was enough to recognize that this new land was going to be telling stories, that it would relate how my ancestors had seen the world around them, give an account of their accomplishments, their defeats, and where they went wrong. I watched the tip of the tower move steadily through the sky as I crossed the clearing, amazed, trying to imagine how they had built it, what they had done around it, and how often they had come to this place to use it.

When I arrived at the other side of the clearing, to my surprise, I found a massive track along the ground that cut through the trees ahead of me. I'm sure that at one point, like the walls of the shelter, the entire lane was cemented over - a road, as I had seen in books - which must have been built to access the tower. Grass sprouted from the cracks in it and snaked along the surface in blotchy patterns, and there were a few trees that had fallen across the width of it, which would be nothing to hop over. I would be able to cover a lot of ground quickly and easily.