The Sea Hawk

'Annie!' The word - it was somebody's name - was filtered through glue.

I opened my eyes slowly and carefully. There was a greenish light flickering above me, but it was a long way off. If I wanted to reach the light I would have to swim up to it. It was going to take me a long time. Perhaps it wouldn't be worth the effort. It was warm and soft where I was lying. Why not stay there?

- 0 -

'Annie!'

Do go away. Stop bothering me. Just leave me alone, can't you?

- 0 -

'Annie!'

'What?'

'Annie, it's me. Mum! Quick! She's woken up!'

'Oh. Hi Emmy. What're you doing here? This is my room. Where's my boat?'

'Oh, Annie. We've been so worried.' Warm arms around me and a kiss.

- 0 -

'I thought you were going to die. I couldn't bear it.'

I lifted my head from the pillow. 'Me die? I don't think so!'

Roy put out his hand and rested it against my cheek. It was such an unexpectedly gentle thing for him to do... I smiled uncertainly. 'Annie McLuskie doesn't just die, you know. It's not as easy as that. You have to stab her with a seaman's dirk or dangle her at the end of a hangman's noose in Execution Dock.'

'Oh, stop it!'

- 0 -

'Annie!'

I was sitting, cosied up in several layers of jersey, in a wicker chair on the terrace of Porth Leaven Hospital Garden when Roy came to see me for the last time. He carried a bunch of bougainvilleas which he held out to me.

'Thank you,' I said, reaching up and taking them. They dribbled slightly onto the blanket the nurse had carefully draped across my knees.

'Oh. Sorry. Wait a mo.' Roy disappeared into the building behind me and came back with a glass of water into which he stuffed the flowers. 'Here you are.'

'Thank you,' I said again. 'Grab a seat.'

Roy sat down next to me and I leaned against him. I was still feeling a little woozy from the drugs and it was nice to be able to rest my head.

'I can't stay long. We're leaving soon.'

'Back to Tanly?'

'We'll land at Maybe Aerodrome first and take the train home from there. School starts again the week after.'

'Are your parents cross about you losing your boat?'

'Dad went on about a "shocking waste of valuable and irreplaceable materials" but Mum shut him up in the end.'

'What about the trade talks?'

'Oh, I think they went all right. Nobody's said much.'

'You've got to collect the trophies before you go. Mum'll give them to you if you ask. Just tell her I said it'd be OK.'

'No! You must be joking!'

'But you reached the Ring before me...'

'And you rescued me.'

'But it was my fault you needed rescuing.'

'I won't hear of it.'

'Oh, all right. I won't argue. You can win them off me next year. If you're up for it, that is.'

'Oh, I expect I will be.'

'And look; I haven't thanked you properly for saving my life. Nobody's said much about it - it's been "Annie, sleep now" and "you need a rest" and "later". So come on, after we got back to the Inner Sea, what happened then?'

Roy turned to face me. 'Actually, it started before we reached the Inner Sea. While we were still outside the Ring you were acting a bit funny, you were talking strangely and you were so hot I could feel it. But you were sailing Albatross all right and we were making good progress towards the barrage so I didn't worry too much about it. I should have been more concerned, I know that now. I'm sorry.'

'It wasn't your fault.'

'Whatever. So, we were maybe a hundred yards from the barrage and the inflowing current was just starting to take hold of us when you did something very odd. You let go of everything and you stood up and held your hand up as if you were telling someone to stop. And you shouted something, but the words were blurry and tangled up and I couldn't make out what you were saying.'

'I was telling the foy to leave us alone.'

'The foy?'

'Yes.'

'But... there wasn't any foy. The water was swirling around a lot, but that was the current. There wasn't a foy.'

'There was!'

'No, there wasn't. Come on, Annie, do you think we'd be here now if there'd been a foy waiting for us outside the Ring? We'd be dead!'

'But... there were ten of them.'

Roy was open-mouthed. 'Ten foys? No, Annie, no. There weren't any. Honest. What happened was that you shouted, like I said, and then you sat down again. I took the controls and held us steady while we shot over the top of the barrage and back to safety. You sat on the thwart. You seemed to be even more unwell than before; you kept muttering and talking below your breath. It was the fever, of course.'

'The fever, yes.'

'Anyway, I sailed Albatross along the side the Ring for a mile or so. I knew the tide would turn soon and I didn't want to take the risk of us being sucked out again. Like an idiot I went the wrong direction, away from the sea-lock, so I couldn't call the lockkeeper for help. You were getting worse - you were raving and being sick and I really thought you were dying.

'But then we had a stroke of luck. You remember my phone had got wet and stopped working?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I was sitting there panicking with you all curled up in the bottom of the boat and moaning and crying… and then my phone rang! It was my Dad, asking me where the heck I was and why wasn't I at the hotel where I was meant to be.

'I was feeling pretty confused by then, but I managed to tell him where we were and I read the lat and long off the phone to make it more precise. I don't know what Dad did then and how many strings he pulled but it can't have been more than half an hour later before the LAV Lemon Sorbet was hovering overhead. They sent a man down on a line and first he yanked you up and then me.'

'What about Albatross? What happened to her?'

'I think they called the lockkeeper. She's probably moored up next to the barrage now.'

'And that's the whole story?'

'Yes, pretty much. They took us both to the hospital and they rushed you into a side room. Mum and Dad were there, and your Mum and your brother turned up only a few minutes after we did. Everyone looked worried for an hour or two and then the doctor came out of the room and said she'd stabilised you, that you had an infection and that they'd given you stuff to deal with it. And you were sleeping and weren't to be disturbed. So we all went away again except for your Mum. Your aunt whatsherface…'

'Agnes.'

'Agnes. She collected Emmy and took him back to Parrolindon.'

'How long have I been here?'

'This is the fourth day. You were very ill. They said it was damp clothes and swallowing water that did it. I was lucky - I had my survival suit.'

'And there were no foys?'

'Absolutely none. We were incredibly lucky. That's what Dad said - among a lot of other things - when he was yelling at me back at the hotel.'

I didn't know what to say. What about the foys and the 'Down and the cavern? What about the locator and the fusor and the lasers? What about Deep?

'But… oh, never mind.' I didn't want to sound like a mad girl.

Roy stood up. 'I've got to go now. We're leaving on the midday flight. It's… it's been great sailing with you, Annie. I'll send you a message when I'm home. Will you read it this time?'

He looked so helpless, so lost, so like a boy.

'Of course I will. Oh, come here!'

I reached up and Roy leaned down and I flung my arms around his neck and gave him the biggest kiss I could manage, full on the lips. He deserved it.

'Goodbye, Roy. See at you next year's Regatta! You'd better practice. I'm going to be bloody good!'

You bet I was.

- 0 -

Only… only when I finally got home and it was a week later and I was feeling stronger Mum came to me as I sat on the porch at the front of our house. I thought she just wanted a chat, but as she went on and her voice became increasingly taut and the lines on her face became more and more visible, I began to realise exactly what I'd done. To put it straightforwardly, I don't think I've ever seen her so angry and upset, and I don't ever want to see her that way again. She's got enough to put up with.

I don't want to talk about that conversation either. It hurt more than anything I've even been through. She talked about Dad, of course, and about losing people, and fear and worry, and about trust and promises. And she said, oh, the worst thing she could have said. I was to lose Albatross; not for ever, she wasn't going to be sold because she was the McLuskie family's boat. But I was not going to be allowed to sail her.

'Not ever?' I asked, trying not to cry.

'Not for a long time.'

'How long?'

'Until I say.'

And that was all. Mum got up and walked away and left me.

- 0 -

Things were difficult between us for several weeks afterwards. Albatross was brought home, and that made it worse because I could see her, drawn up the slipway and parked behind Ronni's Skin Shack. Every few days I tormented myself by going down to look at her and one afternoon when nobody was looking I untied the locator from the mast and took it home with me. Mum had said nothing about it.

That evening I got it out and looked at it. Was it the 'Down? No, of course it wasn't. The whole story, all that silly stuff about foys and caverns and laser beams, it was all nonsense. I could see that now. It was so obvious. Me, the centre of the tale, heroic Annalisa McLuskie, facing up to the foys and the 'Down, saving the whole world? It was ridiculous. It was just like the storybooks I'd read when I was a little girl. There was always a boy or a girl who ran away from the grown-ups and accomplished heroic deeds. The stories were only there to make ordinary kids like me feel as if they were special, or they could be special, if only… They were a dream or, worse, they were lies. At the best they were no more than a bit of fun. They weren't real. Real was school and fishing and an annoying baby brother and a mother I still found it hard to talk to and… no boat. But, if I couldn't sail, I could at least do what I used to do with the locator. I could plot courses and imagine myself at the helm. Or I could look at the records it kept and remember the trips I had taken when I was still the Skipper and Sluts and Roger were my desperate crew.

So I turned the little box on and I talked to it and, of course, it didn't reply. I scrolled up and down its menus and tried to relive past adventures, but it wasn't as much fun as I'd thought it would be. Eventually I found the log for the day I'd sailed over the barrage and into the open sea. The locator displayed Albatross's course in red against the blue and brown map of the sea and the land, and there were green crosses at intervals with the time stamped next to them.

The scale was very large and the locator had only a tiny screen, so I had to wheel the view in to see our course in detail. Yes, here we were crossing the barrage at the ebb tide and there we were stationary while I righted us and got the sails back up. Here we were looking for Roy and there was the pause when I found him. Then I could see where we hove to until it was time to make our way home, and here where we started our desperate run for the barrage. I zoomed in closer. There we were; nearly there and…

And our course veered to the right. And we sailed for nearly an hour east by northeast. And then we passed under the solid rock of the Ring where we stayed for several hours. And then we emerged inside the Ring and Albatross remained stationary for three days until she was first taken to the sea-lock and then brought home to Leaven Peak.

I put the locator down on the bed next to me. My head was spinning and I was breathing heavily. What was I to think? Was Roy talking rubbish? Or had he been unconscious, as he had been in my so-called fever-dream, and simply missed all the fun?

This machine, this locator - or was it the 'Down after all? - it couldn't dream, could it? Or lie? It could only record cold facts. Oh wait, perhaps this was one of my imaginary journeys, like I'd programmed in last year. I checked. No, the locator could tell the difference between real and unreal voyages. This was our actual track.

I lay back and stared at the roof. If this record was true… then everything was true. You couldn't have one without the other.

So what did that mean?

- 0 -

I've done a lot of thinking since that evening. After all, without my Albatross I've had a lot of free time to do it in. And the outcome is that it seems to me that we, humanity that is, have been getting things wrong on Glory. I'm sure you can think of one or two examples, like the arguments between the lands and the way the Wedgies like to push the rest of us around. But mostly, the mistake - the big mistake - has been trying to turn Glory into Old Earth. You can see it everywhere. The lands pretend they're countries like there used to be on Earth - England, France or America. We get tourists on Leaven because it looks like Earth does in the films the 'Down shows us. We watch those films and we weep for the lost world they show even though we don't actually remember it. That can't be right, can it? And worst of all, we lie to each other about the Great Tide that's coming because it's going to destroy this imitation Earth of ours and there's nothing we can do about it.

What we've got to do is let go. We've got to stop being Earthmen - alien invaders from outer space - and become true citizens of Glory. This is a world of water, not land. The lands are an accident and if they hadn't been there we'd have done the right thing from the start. What we need, and what my agreement with Deep means we might get one day, are ships.

I can see them now, those ships. They will be high, and wide, and tall, and they will roam the seas of Glory under tremendous sails, billowing white, filled with our world's unceasing winds. Thousands of people will live and work and laugh and play and raise families on board those ships. They will be cities, greater than Maybe or Tanly or Shore, and they will be safe. They will be safe from the foys, with whom they will share the oceans in harmony. There will be ambassadors who will go between refugee humanity and Glory's native sea-life and they will not allow conflicts to spawn or grow or fester in secret. There will never be a war in all the history of Glory. And they will be safe from the Great Tide, when the lands of Glory will be washed over and scoured of every trace of humanity's coming. They will surge over it, as the Ark did when the Flood came on Earth.

Above all will be the 'Down, with her network of comsats, Monitors and locators. She will have a better view than any of us and she will be the first to sound the alarm when the deluge comes. Then the airships will rush to the lands and save the people who are still there and we - foys, aeroforms and humans all - will ride out the flood until the world settles down again.

Those ships; they will need to be designed and built. The brains of the School on Horn and the wealth of the manufacturers of Edge, the life-skills of the Golden; they will all come together, as they did before when, faced by the horrors of the Ochre Plague, we left the Earth and the worlds of the old sun behind.

But above all those ships will need crews and they will need commanders. And one day that will be me, Captain Annalisa McLuskie, standing at the helm of the SS Sea Hawk, of a million tons displacement. She will be bigger by far than any of the ships of Old Earth and no less beautiful; with her cobalt-blue hull, polished wooden decks and acres of white mono sails. She will journey the seas of Glory for ever, stopping at the lands whenever she wants. She will have her own fleet of airborne tenders keeping station overhead, flashing silver and gold in the light of the Blessèd sun. Foys will swim alongside her and we will talk to them, and they will talk to us, and we will live in peace.

And on the foredeck will be a set of davits, and suspended in them will be a twelve-foot carvel-built Bermuda-rigged sailing dinghy; my Albatross, my very first boat, that my Daddy would have given me himself if he had been spared. And sometimes the skipper of the Sea Hawk may decide to take leave of absence from her post for a few hours, and the officers and crew will nod to one another, and carry on with their duties as if she were still on the bridge.

And I, Cap'n McLuskie, Terror of the Inner Sea, will be alone once more at the tiller of my boat, holding tightly to Albatross's mainsheet and feeling her surge and bound beneath me as we scud across the wave-tops on a broad reach with the wind on my cheek, salt spray on my face and the Jolly Roger flying at the masthead. And if someone, scanning the horizon from the upper promenade deck of the Sea Hawk perhaps, should spot me, I hope they will see my smile and smile along with me. And if they raise their hat and cheer, then I will raise mine and cheer too. For this is our world, our Glory, in all its richness and beauty; and it is ours to celebrate and share in love for ever.

Anne, with her father is out in the boat
Riding the water
Riding the waves
On the sea

Mercy Street