The Ebbing Tide (42 page)

It was because she was in such a hurry. Five minutes could seem like an hour when you wanted so passionately to get somewhere— perhaps she'd been traveling for no time at all. . . . She came to a place where the road lay well-defined ahead of her for as long as the beam of light could reach, and her relief sent miraculous new life through her aching legs. She could make good time here; she began to run, stumbling at first.

But some instinct stopped her. For a long time she had been searching for a familiar sign, and hadn't found it. Now, without warning, almost without conscious thought, she recognized the ground under her feet, and stopped.

The light swung forward, and down; it touched the bare tips of little maples and birches growing far below her. From where she stood, the earth dropped away, a granite-faced cliff descended sharply into the ravine which the great glacier had scooped harshly out of the Island thousands of years ago. If she had kept on running, or if she had stumbled again, she would have gone over the edge.

She sat down abruptly on the ground. She lifted a shaky hand to her forehead and found that her face was wet. It was not the escape that sent weakness through her instead of new strength. It was the knowledge that she had gone far off the right path. And now it was really dark, and whatever had happened at Sou-west Point could have happened a dozen times, and she would have been helpless to stop it . . . if she'd really thought she
could
stop it. But who could stop Nils? She wanted to cry. But if she cried, the last of her energy would have melted away, and it was hard enough now to think of moving, of finding her way out of this place.

She knew the ravine. She knew that if she could find the path that led steeply into it, and then made her way across it, she would come eventually to the western shore. She'd still be a long way from Sou-west Point, and just as far from home. But she'd be on the shore, anyway. The woods were beginning to stifle her.

She stood up stiffly; perhaps if she waited long enough in the dark, she could get her bearings. The same instinct that had stopped her at the edge of the ravine would tell her where the path was. Her feet were so numb that she felt clumsy. As she stamped them, trying to bring some feeling into them, one foot hit against something which moved lightly away. A rock, she thought vaguely. She'd knocked it over the edge. . . . And at the same time she went down on her hands and knees, feeling wildly for the flashlight which she'd laid beside her when she sat down. Old spruce cones were in her groping hands, and that was all. The light was gone.

She almost cried then. In the woods, with no light, and so cold and tired— she wanted to cry aloud, to blubber like a lost child.

But in a moment her poise came back to her. After all, she had two hands, and it had been her lifelong belief that as long as you had fingers with which to cling, you couldn't fall too far. She'd go down into the ravine, and make her way across it to the shore if she had to creep. The soldiers had done it in the jungles, hadn't they?

In this interval of determined calm, she moved cautiously backward away from the edge of the cliff and felt her way from tree to tree, her hands before her, until the earth slanted under her feet, slippery with spruce needles. There, this was the easy way into the ravine, and if it took her an hour to get down there, it would be all right. At least she would not be lost any more.

Now she could look up and see the sky, where there would have been stars if the night had been dear. Instead, rain dashed against her face. She began to cross the floor of the hollow. At her first step her feet sank into icy water, and she remembered the swamp; the recent thaw had softened it thoroughly. The tip of a branch scratched her face and made her jump, she pushed it away fiercely and her mitten caught, and pulled off. There was no way of finding it. She kept on, her hands out before her, moving constantly to keep the alder branches from scratching her face again. But they still caught at her hair; and she still walked in water. It was too late now to turn around and go back to solid ground.

After a while she became aware that she was breathing in shallow gasps, her mouth opened. When she stepped on an alder root and her foot slipped, almost making her plunge forward, she cried out, and the sound was eerie through the echoing stillness. She had to stop for a moment then, to control the sick shaking that went all over her body. It was so cold, so black, so quiet; it was all the nightmares she'd ever had, rolled into one horrible eternity. She tried to think back to when she'd been walking across the meadow, seeing the rail fence against the darkening sky, but it was made faint by the haze of time and distance. This was the real thing; there had never been anything but this, the branches dragging at her, scourging her like living, evil things, the water welling icily around her ankles, soaking through her already-saturated shoes and socks and the cuffs of her slacks.

Panic exploded in her suddenly, melting her bones. A treacherous weakness made her reach out with trembling hands to seize the bare smooth trunk of an alder. She knew that she was afraid as she had never been afraid in her life on the Island. She had done a criminally foolish thing in coming here, in rushing like a madwoman through the woods. Had she really believed she could stop Nils from doing what he had set himself to do? And if she sprained her ankle, how was she to save herself? Who knew she was here? She'd let Ellen think she had gone by the west side. She could slip and fall, and hit her head, and if she drowned in six inches of swamp water, who was to know where to find her or what had become of her?

Nils, Ellen, Jamie— their faces swirled in her mind until she grew dizzy and thought she would fall. She could hear her terrified whimpering breath, and knew that in a moment she would have surrendered completely, without shame or dignity, to her dissolving fear.

But she couldn't do it, after all. “I can't stop here,” she muttered. “I have to get out of here, there's nobody else to help me. I
have
to—”

Trembling, breathing hard, she forced herself to step forward, not knowing where her feet would go.

She stepped on another root; her ankle gave, she lunged forward, her hands clutching wildly at space, and found herself on her hands and knees in the water. She laughed at that. She could hear herself laughing, and kept on, because it broke the stillness and she could almost imagine that someone was laughing with her.

After that, she didn't think much about the malicious branches or her feet. She was so cold and wet all over that her feet didn't matter, and when something scratched her face she hardly felt it. She stumbled, fumbled, crawled when she fell, and then at last there was emptiness ahead of her; a whole sweet chill world of emptiness. There was hard grassy ground under her, and somewhere below her there were blessedly solid rocks, and the surf was piling against them with the rote she had believed she would never hear again.

She lay on the grassground, breathing in long shuddering inhalations, and shivering as a dog shivers, in spasms. She was confused as to where she was. She knew she had to find Nils; his name kept beating through her, it kept her from sinking into a warm and pleasant sleep that wanted to envelop her. She murmured aloud. “Nils . . . I'll be along as soon as I get warm. If I can just find a little place to get warm. . . .”

As soon as she was warm, she'd find Nils and stop him from doing some terrible thing. She saw him standing before her, smiling a little with his blue eyes, his hand gentle on the rifle's polished stock. He said, “I'm going to kill an eagle.” And she had known then that she had to stop him, because Dennis was the eagle he meant to kill; Dennis, the man who had been a true friend to them both. And if only she could have gotten to them in time—

Her clothes clung to her wetly, and there was a taste of blood on her lips. She had bitten them when she'd fallen, one time. She flattened herself weakly and without hope against the frozen earth.

She didn't know whether she had been there for five minutes or an hour when it appeared as if she were besieged and then surrounded by light that pierced her eyelids when she lowered them against the brilliance. The sound of the surf had lulled her, and now it was breaking up into voices. Between the voices and the light she was startled into a sudden outbreak of strength. She tried to scramble to her feet, frantic and not knowing why.

“
Joanna!
” It was Nils' voice and she reached for it pleadingly. “Good God, where have you been?” he asked. He loomed between her and the light; he was wonderfully real, and stronger than rock or sea as she clung to him.

“Nils, I've wanted you—I've been looking for you !” she cried with one final, passionate outburst of energy. And then her brief vitality was running out like a fast-ebbing tide. As Nils' arms tightened, she sagged. Light, surf, voices, the whole world, circled her giddily; and the last thing of which she was sure was Nils.

“N
ILS, DID YOU REALLY KILL
an eagle?” she asked him.

She had opened her eyes to see him standing by the window that looked out toward the spruces. The room was full of sunshine, and his head seemed very bright; perhaps because she hadn't seen it for so long. His hands were in his pockets, and he wore a blue shirt that fitted him well across the shoulders. She lay for a few minutes admiring the back of his neck, knowing how it would feel under her fingers, before she spoke. And then her voice came out clearly in the quiet, sunny room.

“Nils, did you really kill an eagle?”

He turned around and came toward her, and he was smiling as if he were happy. “You've been worrying about that eagle for a long time.” When he reached the side of the bed, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. She shut her eyes so that she could savor completely the way his lips felt against her skin.

He put his hands on either side of the pillow and looked at her very steadily, his face close to hers. “Dennis killed the eagle,” he said. “I've been telling you that for three days. Now you're going to have something to eat. . . . I'll be right back.” He went out of the room and she looked at the pattern of sunlight on the ceiling, and then at the small, delicate clouds blown over the spruces by the March wind. Everything looked new and bright and shiny, and she enjoyed seeing it all. But then she tried to remember when he'd told her about the eagle, and all she could remember was darkness. She shivered. He said she'd been talking about the eagle for three days; had they all been dark?

When she tried to divide the blackness into three days, her head swam with dizziness. There would be no way, ever, of breaking that long night into conventional patterns of time. There'd been the sound of surf in her ears for a long period, even after the men's voices and the lights had come. It seemed as if the surf had stayed with her until one instant, sharp as pain, when she was catapulted suddenly through space and found herself in her own room, with the lamp turned low. Then the roar of the waves had stopped so abruptly that her ears had rung with the silence.

She had lain there looking at the lamp for a little while, feeling as if she had no body. She listened to the stillness, she wondered vaguely about Jamie and Ellen, and then Dennis had spoken to her from the foot of the bed. She smiled, and tried to shake her head at him, to show him that she knew he wasn't really there. Then she had fallen asleep. It was real sleep, without dreams; and she had awakened from it just now, to Nils and sunshine, Jamie's voice downstairs, and the fact that she did have a body, after all, because it hurt whenever she tried to move.

She thought back to that long blackness, when the roar had hung perpetually in her ears. It hadn't been an unbroken darkness, because there were faces in it, swimming out of the swirls of dark mist, coming toward her, fading back, shifting. She'd called each one by name, Dennis, Alec, Nils. . . . That was why she hadn't believed it was really Dennis standing there at the foot of the bed, because all the time that she was seeing the faces against the dark, she had known that only one was real; Nils. Always, his was the strongest and clearest, it was to him that she spoke the most often. Now she smiled weakly. She'd been asking him about the eagle.

Bit by bit her mind cleared, groping its way backward toward the truth. She knew then, with a stubborness unhindered by her body's weakness, that she must have
all
the truth. She could not live without knowing it.

She heard Nils' step on the stairs. It was almost even now, his lameness was growing less all the time. She waited, breathing lightly in her expectancy, and he came in with a tray.

“Special nourishment contributed by Gram and Nora Fennell,” he announced. “And your new sister-in-law's been doing up the dishes and looking out for us more or less.” He set the tray down on the stand beside the bed, while she stared hungrily not at the dishes but at him, his cleanliness, his quiet competency, his air of serene happiness. “I've had orders to feed you every time you open your mouth,” he told her.

“I'm going to open my mouth, but I won't eat until you tell me something, Nils.” There it was. She was surprised at herself for approaching him so bluntly. He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand on her forehead, pushing her hair back gently, and she laid her fingers over his. “Nils, please—,

“I'm listening, dear.”

“Nils, I know this sounds silly, but it's probably because I've been sick that I'm asking such foolish questions.” She smiled at him, hoping he'd think it was just an idiotic whim that she must know these things. “But why did you ask Dennis to go with you to Sou-west Point?”

“Because I like him. And he's quiet.” He dipped a spoon into soup, and the aroma made water run in Joanna's mouth. She felt starved. But she had to talk first, for she would want to sleep afterwards, and she had to know before she slept.

“Is that important— being quiet?”