Mitt shook his head, knowing how long it would take two boys to get in this mass of great wet sail and bend on another. “We’d be caught with our pants down. Maybe we are, anyway. She rides awful high. Get tying. Quick!”
They tied cold, wet reef knots until their fingers ached. Hildy stood on the seat, with her foot on the tiller, and laced away at the sail over her head. Mitt and Ynen crawled up and down the cabin roof, tying knots there. They did it again with a second fold, and then all over again with a third. By this time, Wind’s Road’s sail was an absurd little triangle, with the long bare mast towering above it. The rain was coming in gusting clouds now. They could see nothing much beyond a gray circle about thirty feet across. But, inside that circle, the waves were yellow-green, heaving high and pointed. The bare mast swept back and forth. The deck was up and down, sickeningly steep both ways.
“Don’t untie that boom till we got the foresails in,” Mitt shouted at Hildy. Somehow the weather was much louder, though it was hard to tell what was making the noise. Mitt and Ynen hauled and grappled at the clapping sails in the bows, slithering on the wet planks round Old Ammet. One moment they were skyward, soaring into lashing rain. The next Old Ammet was plunging, like a man on a toboggan, down and down a freckled tawny gray wave side.
Ynen swallowed giddily. “Is it going to be bad?” he yelled.
Mitt did not try to deceive him. “Real shocker!” he bawled back. But he thought it was just as well that he did not have breath to spare to explain to Ynen that these autumn storms sometimes went on for days. Mitt knew they would be drowned long before the day was out. Now he was fully awake, he knew, with nasty vividness, that Wind’s Road would capsize. He could feel it in the movement of her. She was only a rich man’s pleasure boat, after all. And as Old Ammet launched himself furiously down another freckled hill of water, Mitt was as terrified as he had been when he crouched among the marble-playing boys in Holand. He was blind with panic. It was as if he had run away from himself and left the inside of his head empty. Mitt knew this would not do. It was no use thinking Ynen could manage by himself. He had to run after himself, inside his head, and bring himself back with one arm twisted up his back before he was able to pick up an armful of soaking sail and stagger with it to the hatch. He thought, as he pushed and kicked it down and clapped the cover on and banged the bolt home, that there really was nothing left of the old fearless Mitt anymore. He had never been in charge of a boat before. He wanted to whimper because Siriol was not there.
He and Ynen crawled back across the seesawing cabin roof. Hildy, seeing them coming, obeyed instructions and started to untie the lashings round the boom. She knew they had been idiots, she and Ynen, sitting under that tarpaulin and letting the storm creep up on them. She had been trying to behave with smart efficiency ever since. She did not want people like Mitt thinking her a fool. But she had no notion how fierce the wind was now. She loosened the main knot.
The wind tore it all out of her hands. The sail slammed round sideways, jerking Wind’s Road broadside on to the next huge wave. The boom mowed across the cabin roof and caught the side of Ynen’s head with a thuck. It knocked him clean out. He was carried helplessly with it toward the side.
14
Hildy screamed. Mitt flung himself after Ynen and just managed to catch him round the ankle with both hands. Water thundered down over them, hard and heavy, and fell away, sucking and rilling, pulling Ynen against Mitt’s straining arms and dragging both of them down the tilted cabin roof. Mitt had no idea how they survived, any more than Hildy. Hildy knew Wind’s Road had gone like a bullet, slantwise through the top of that wave. But how she came to have the fighting tiller in one hand and the sail rope in the other she did not know.
“Ye gods! I’m sorry!” she screamed at Mitt when she saw him, drenched and horrified, sliding down from the cabin roof and heaving Ynen after him.
“Don’t dare do that again!” Mitt screamed back. Wind’s Road was plunging downhill now, and he made use of it to slide Ynen into the cabin. Ynen was alive, to his great relief, stirring and muttering miserably. Mitt did not dare linger with him. He wedged him hurriedly in place with blankets. “Don’t move!” he bawled, though the cabin was almost quiet. “You took a knock there.” Wind’s Road, trembling sickeningly, mounted upward again. Mitt threw himself downhill into the well and wrestled the tiller out of Hildy’s weak hand. The storm was too loud even for screaming now.
Mitt found he had arrived just in time. The huge autumn storm roared and howled and bashed around them. Wind’
s Road was half sideways in the trough between two heaving walls of water, caught in the backwash of the last wave. Worse still, while she wallowed there, half the thundering gale was blocked by the water. The sail was coming smashing across and threatening to capsize her. Mitt, as he worked at the sluggish tiller, shrieked and made gestures at Hildy to pull the rope in and hold the sail. It seemed a lifetime before she understood and the rope came yelling over its blocks into her hands. She still had a silly, puzzled look on her face, but Mitt had no time to attend. He could only thank Old Ammet he was stronger since he was last in a boat. Wind’s Road was the hardest thing he had ever had to handle. She would not come about. They were creeping crabwise up a great slope of water, up and up, until they were hanging, almost over on one side, just beneath the raving crest of the wave. Wind’s Road had suicidal urges. Mitt felt her going over, and heaved on the flaccid tiller.
The full force of the storm hit them as he did so. Mitt and Hildy both screamed. Their voices burst out of their throats without their being able to help it. The wind hit with a roar and a crash. The sail rope yelled out from between Hildy’s fingers, nearly dislocating both her shoulders. Great lumps of water loomed and fell, smashing across the bows, banging down on the cabin, thundering over Hildy and Mitt, until they were as bruised as they were wet, and went fizzing and boiling away behind.
The man in the bows with the flying fair hair understood their danger and leaned into the wave, dragging at Wind’s Road’s forward rigging. Wind’s Road did not want to come, but Mitt thought the man dragged her round by main force. He saw him clearly for a moment, with his hair as white as the snarling spray, gesturing aside the horses that were trying to overwhelm Wind’s Road. Then Wind’s Road lashed herself over the edge and down another watery hillside, and Mitt had all his work cut out to hold her straight. Beside him, Hildy, to his relief, was trying to help the sail rope as it came rattling in again when Wind’s Road plunged.
Mitt could not hold her straight. Wind’s Road went down into that valley of water and wallowed sideways, with every intention of never coming up. But the man was there against the foam-laced surface of sliding black water, wrenching Wind’s Road straight for him. Mitt wanted to thank him, but by that time Wind’s Road was on her sickening way upward again to lay herself sideways to the next wave top.
And so it went on. Mitt thought they went from sudden death to sudden death so often that they lost count of how long. The world was a lathering uproar, and Wind’s Road hit and buffeted until she jerked all over. Mitt and Hildy were bashed by water until they hardly felt it. Water fizzed into the cabin and swirled round Ynen. The tarpaulin floated round the well, mashed up and neglected, and got in the way, but neither Hildy nor Mitt had time to get rid of it. Hildy’s attention was all for the rope, either yelling out or rattling in, and Mitt’s for battle with the tiller, Wind’s Road’s yawing death urges, and the gestures of the fair-haired man when the wind hit with a clap and a shout.
He and Hildy got quite used to seeing him, up there in the bows, either gray with storming rain or whiter against the black side of a wave. They were glad to see him there. But the horses bothered them both. They were beautiful gray horses galloping, arching their necks under flying manes, dashing up the slopes of waves, frolicking and rearing on the crests. Mitt and Hildy never had time to look at them properly, but they saw them all the time out of the corners of their eyes. They knew they were imagining things. Sailors told stories of horses playing round doomed ships, frolicking at the death of mortals. Mitt and Hildy would much rather not have seen them. They kept their eyes ahead on the next danger coming. But there were still horses galloping on both sides of the boat, though ahead there was nothing but fizzing foam and shuddering waves and occasionally the man with the flying light hair.
He’s doing us no harm, that’s for sure! Mitt thought.
In the cabin Ynen got to his elbows and put a hand to the big tender lump on the side of his face. He could have sworn somebody had shaken him and told him to get up. But he was all alone, lying among sopping blankets. “Ugh!” he said. He could feel Wind’s Road yawing and staggering, and he wondered what was causing this awful sluggish movement.
The cabin door slammed open against the stove, and a wave of dirty water rushed down on Ynen, soaking him to the bone. He stared uphill at two pairs of slithering feet and more water bashing across them. Ye gods! he thought. The water we must be shipping! He scrambled up while he was thinking it and climbed uphill into the well.
The first thing that met his eyes was the lovely head of a thoroughbred gray horse, flying past among the rain and spray. It was gone at once, as if it was galloping faster than Wind’s Road could sail. Ynen was hit by the rain and gasped. It was lashing down. He could hardly see the withered and wind-whipped figures of Mitt and Hildy, let alone the woman kneeling on the stern behind them. It was as much as Ynen could do to make out that this woman had long red-gold hair, flapping and swirling in the wind. He saw she was giving Hildy a hand with the rope—or he thought she was, until he realized she was pushing at the tiller as Mitt braced his feet and shoved it. The rain made Ynen very confused. But he realized the woman was pointing at the locker where the pump was.
“Yes, of course,” Ynen said to her. He was still dazed, but he clipped the lid of the locker up, moved the tarpaulin off the scuppers and began to pump.
The storm raved on for another hour or more. Ynen pumped away, without a hope of emptying the boat, but perhaps doing just enough to prevent Wind’s Road’s swamping. Sometimes he wished, in the fretful way one does in dreams, that the lady in the stern would help him, too, though he knew she had enough to do with Mitt and Hildy. Sometimes he thought the man up in front might come back and give him a hand. He knew this was an ungrateful thought. The man had stopped Wind’s Road from turning over several times, and he was keeping off the horses, too. But Ynen’s arms ached so.
At length the roaring and thundering grew less. Wind’s Road, from sliding up and down, went to heaving and lurching, and from that to a staggering slap-slap-slap, with only the odd spout of water coming aboard. They sailed through a brown light. The rain hissed down and seemed to flatten the tossing sea further. Then the rain stopped. Ynen, pumping and pumping, felt far too hot.
“We did it!” Hildy said. “It’s over.” As she said it, Ynen heard the squelching that meant the bilge was nearly dry. He straightened his back thankfully.
There was a blinding sun right in front of the bows, low on the edge of the sea. The storm clouds were above the sun in a heavy black line, getting smaller and smaller. It was hot. Wind’s Road had steam rising from her decking and salt crystals forming like frost on her. The small triangle of sail sagged. There was a mess of tangled ropes everywhere, and Wind’s Road was riding with a surge and swing unlike any Ynen or Hildy had ever experienced. Mitt knew it for the surge and swing of deep ocean. He looked back, across the little salt-coated figure of Libby Beer, away and away over empty sea. There was no land.
Weak and trembly though they all were, they burst out talking and laughing, in overloud hoarse voices, telling one another what each had thought the worst bit was. Ynen said it was when he saw the boom on its way to hit him. Hildy said it was the horses.
“No,” said Mitt. “It was that first time she tried to capsize, just before we saw the man.”
“I thought that, until the horses kept being there,” said Hildy. “And I tried to tell myself I was just imagining them because I was so scared and tired. But I knew they were there.”