The Homeward Bounders (6 page)

I thought it was another piece of the same when I looked over the side of the ship on about the fourth foggy day. By then, anything would have been interesting. I noticed there were two big iron holes there, in the front, each with a length of rusty chain dangling out of them. I had seen pictures of ships. I knew what should have been there.

“Don't you even carry anchors?” I asked the Dutchman. “How do you stop?”

“No,” he said. “We threw them away long ago.”

I was so hungry that it made me snappish. “What a stupid thing to do!” I said. “That's you lot all over, with your stupid negative attitude! Can't you think positive for once? You wouldn't be in half this mess if you did. Fancy throwing anchors away!”

He just stood there, looking at me sadly and, I thought, sort of meaningly. And suddenly I remembered the crowned anchor on the front of the Old Fort. I knew better than to mention
Them
to him by then. He never would come straight out like I did and call them
Them
. He always put it impersonally: It is not permitted. But of course he knew that anchors had something to do with
Them
—probably better than I did. “Oh, I see,” I said. “Sorry.”

“We took them off,” he said, “to show that we are without hope. Hope is an anchor, you know.”

A bit of good came of this, though. He got worried about me, I think. He thought I was young and ignorant and hot-headed. He asked me what kind of Boundary I had come in by. “I am afraid,” he said, “that you may have got on a circuit that is sea only, and next time I will not be by. I shall put you on land, because I think it is not permitted for us to stay in company, but you may still end up in the water all the same.”

Oh he was a cheery fellow. But kind. I told him about the stone Boundary and the strange sign.

“That is all right,” he said. “That is RANDOM. Look for the same again and you will unlikely be drowned.”

It turned out that he knew no end more signs than I did. I suspect that he'd been Homeward Bound so long that he may even have invented some of them. He wrote them all out for me with a rusty nail on his cabin door. They were mostly general ones like UNFRIENDLY and GOOD CLIMATE. I gave him a few particular ones I knew in return, including one I thought would be really useful: YOU CAN NICK FOOD HERE.

“I thank you,” he said solemnly.

A day later, thank goodness, we came to some land. It was not my idea of heaven. I could hardly see it in the fog, for a start, and what I could see was wet rocks and spouts of wave breaking over them. It made me feel the ship was not so bad after all.

“Maybe we should go on a bit,” I said nervously to the Dutchman. “This looks rough. It could break your ship up.”

He stood somberly beside me, with his navy coat and his beard and his hair all dewed with fog, watching the spouting waves come nearer through the whiteness. “The ship does not break,” he said. “It does not matter. There are seven holes in the underside and still we float. We cannot stop. We go on floating and sailing forever.” Then he did something I never thought to see him do. He took his fist out of his pocket and he shook it, shook it savagely in the air. “And we know why!” he shouted out. “All for a game. A
game
!”

“I bet that's not permitted,” I said.

He put his hand in his pocket again. “Maybe,” he said. “I do not care. You must make ready to jump when we are near enough. Do not be afraid. You cannot be hurt.”

Well, we came near, and I sort of flounderingly jumped. Perhaps I couldn't be hurt, but I could be pounded and grazed and drenched and winded, and I was. I was so weak with hunger too that it took me ages to drag myself out of the surf and scramble up onto a wet lump of granite. Then I turned to wave to the Flying Dutchman. They all crowded to the side and waved back, him and the monkeys. I could hardly see them through the fog. It looked like a ghost ship out there, ragged and sketchy, like a gray pencil drawing, and it seemed to be tipping to one side rather. I suspect there were now eight holes underneath it. There had been a lot of grinding and rending while I was struggling up the rock.

It simply melted into the fog as I looked. I stood there all alone, shivering. I remembered then what my teacher had said, that rainy afternoon at Home, about the Flying Dutchman. It was supposed to be a ghost ship.

But it wasn't, I told myself. Nor was I a ghost. We were all Homeward Bound, and I for one was going to get there. I just wished I wasn't on my own. The Flying Dutchman was much better off. There was a crowd of them, to my one. They would be in clover, compared with me, if only they could have brought themselves to care about things a bit more.

After this, I set off inland, climbing, slipping and sliding, to where the strangest thing yet happened to me. It was so strange that, even if
They
'd done nothing, there would still have been times when I would have sworn it was a vision or something, brought on by lack of food. But I know it happened. It was realler than I am.

I was very thirsty. It was worse than the hunger. You'd have thought with a wet ship like that, I'd have been all right, but it was all salt, apart from the fog. And the salt I'd swallowed getting on land made me thirstier than before. I don't know how the Flying Dutchman managed. The only drink they had was the firewater he had choked me with, and I think they saved that for using on people they'd fished out of the sea.

But as soon as I got high enough up the rocks and far enough inland not to hear nothing but sea, I could hear water trickling. You know that hollow pouring sound a little stream makes coming down through rocks. I heard that, and it made my mouth dry up and go thick. I was so thirsty I could have cried. I set out scrambling and slithering through the fog towards the noise.

That white wet fog confused everything. I think, if I hadn't been so thirsty, I'd never have found it. The rocks were terrible—a total jumble. They were all hard, hard pinkish granite, so hard that nothing grew on it, and so wet that I was always slithering onto my face. That hurt at least as much as scraping up the side of the Flying Dutchman's ship. You know how granite seems to be made of millions of grains, pink and black and gray and white—well, every one of those grains scratched me separately, I swear.

After a while, I had got quite high up somewhere, and the lovely hollow pouring sound was coming from quite near, over to the right. I slithered over that way and had to stop short. There was a huge split in the granite there, and a great deep hole, and I could hear the pouring coming from the other side of the split.

“Unprintable things!” I said—only I didn't say that. I really said them. But I hate to be beat. You know that by now. I went down into the hole and then climbed up the other side. I don't know how I did it. When I dragged myself out the other side, my arms felt like bits of string and wouldn't answer when I tried to bunch my fists up, and my legs were not much better. I was covered with scratches too. I must have been a sight.

The pouring was really near now, from the other side of a lump of crag. I crawled my way round it. It was a great rock sticking up at the top of the hill, and there was a ledge on the other side about eight feet wide, if that. And there I had to stop short again, because there was a man chained to the crag, between me and the water.

He looked to be dead or dying. He was sort of collapsed back on the rock with his eyes shut. His face was tipped back from me—I was still crouching down, weak as a kitten—but I could see his face was near on as hollow as the Flying Dutchman's, and it looked worse, because this man hadn't a beard, only reddish stubble. His hair was reddish too, but it was soaking wet with him being out in the fog and the rain like this, and you could hardly tell it from the granite. His clothes, such as there was left of them, were soaking too, of course, grayish and fluttering in strips in the sneaking chilly wind there was up there. I could see a lot of his skin. It was white, corpse white, and it shone out against the rock and the fog almost as if it were luminous.

The chains he was locked up in—they
were
luminous. They were really queer. They shone. They were almost transparent, like glass, but whiter and stonier-seeming. A big link of the chain between his right arm and leg was lying on the rock just in front of me. I could see the grains of rock magnified through it, pink and black and gray and white, bigger through the middle of the link than at the edges, and with a milky look. It was like looking through a teardrop.

He didn't move. My strength came back a little, and I couldn't see him harming me in that state, so I got up and started to edge my way along the ledge in front of him to get at the water. When I was standing up, I was surprised to find how big he was. He was about half as big again as an ordinary man. And he wasn't quite dead. The white skin was up in goose-pimples all over him, with little shivers chasing across it. That was why I said what I did about Art, earlier on. He must have been frozen. But I could tell he was pretty far gone. He had a serious wound round on his left side, a bit below his heart. I hadn't seen it till then, and I didn't want to look at it when I did see it. It was a real mess, gaping and bleeding, with bits of his torn shirt fluttering across it and getting mixed up in it. No wonder he seemed to be dying.

I was almost right in front of him, trying not to look, when he moved his head and looked at me. “Be careful not to touch the chains,” he said.

I jumped, and stared up at him. He didn't speak at all like someone who was dying. There was a bit of a shiver caught at him as he said it, but that was not surprising, considering how cold he must have been. But his voice was quite strong and he was looking at me like someone with sense. “Why mustn't I touch them?” I said.

“Because they're made to act like the Bounds,” he said. “You won't get your drink if you do touch them.”

I shuffled backwards an inch or so. I didn't dare go further, for fear of falling off the ledge. “What are they made of?” I said. “I've never seen anything like them before.”

“Adamant,” he said.

That is a sort of diamond—adamant—the hardest thing there is. Granite must be almost the next hardest. I could see the big transparent staples driven into the granite on either side of him, holding him spread out. “You must be awfully strong, if it takes that to hold you,” I said.

He sort of smiled. “Yes. But there was meant to be no mistake.”

It looked that way to me too. I couldn't think why he was so much alive. “You're not a Homeward Bounder, are you?” I asked doubtfully.

“No,” he said.

I went on staring at him, trying to keep from looking at that wound of his, and watching him shiver. I was cold myself, but then I could move about to keep warm. He was chained so that he could hardly move a foot in any direction. And all the while I stared, that water ran and poured, away to one side, with a long hollow poppling which had me licking my lips. And he was chained so he could hear it and not get to it.

“Are you thirsty?” I said. “Like me to get you a drink?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'd welcome a drink.”

“I'll have to get it in my hands,” I said. “I wish I'd got something to hold it in.”

I went edging and shuffling round him, keeping well away from the chains. I could see the stream by then, pouring down a groove in the rock, just beyond the reddish spiked thing that all the chains were hooked into. The ledge got narrower there. I was thinking that it was going to be difficult to climb over that spike on the slippery rock without touching a chain, when I realized what the spike was. I went close and leaned over it to make sure. Yes it was. An anchor. One spike was buried deep in the granite and all of it was orange wet rust, but there was no mistaking it. And all the chains led through the ring on the end of the shank.

I spun round so fast then that I never knew how I missed the chains. “
They
did this to you!” I said to him. “How did
They
do it? Why?”

He was turned to look at me. I could see he was thinking about water more than anything. I went climbing over the anchor to show him I hadn't forgotten. “Yes, it was
They
,” he said.

I put my hands under the little pouring waterfall and filled them as full as I could with water. But I was so furious for him that my hands shook, and most of the water had trickled away by the time I'd climbed back over the anchor. Even more had gone by the time I managed to stretch my hands up to him among the chains, without touching one. He was so tall and chained so close that it was quite a struggle for him to get his mouth down. I don't think he got more than a taste the first time. But I went back and forwards, back and forwards, to the stream. I got quite nimble after a while. I even took a drink myself, after his sixth handful. He was so thirsty it was awful, and I kept thinking how he would feel if I happened to touch a chain and got twitched away just as he'd got his mouth down to the water.

“You should have asked me straight off,” I said. “Why didn't you? Have
They
forbidden you to, or something?”

“No,” he said. “
They
don't have that kind of power over me. But I could see how thirsty you were, and I'm more used to it than you.”