Page 86 of The Gods of Chaos and Chance

Chapter Fifty-One

‘What’s that?’ Ben’s voice was a whisper, a croak from a place Aleksey had never heard before.

He paused his long, repetitive strokes and hung, paddling.

‘There. Yellow.’

Aleksey could see nothing, but Ben’s eyes were better than his. He followed Ben’s agonisingly slow progression towards whatever it was.

It was a buoy, anchored, but swelling on the surface, standing about eight feet high from its base. It had a little lamp at the top.

They clung to it. Neither of them could lift themselves up from the water onto it, but it was a blessed relief just to stop, to have their faces out of the water. It had rained heavily for a while as they’d been slowly plodding on, a squall buffeting them from the bank of clouds he’d seen approaching. The sun had gone in, but that was good. They were hot from the unrelenting effort to swim and the sun had only added to the misery by cracking their skin and allowing the salt to bite. But they had to endure. They needed the sun to navigate east. It was all they had. Aleksey could picture in his mind the little dotted line on the chart: Les Dents, due east to La Luz. He recalled his supposition that Scilly was merely one landmass, just flooded into islands by the ocean. A true archipelago, he reflected ruefully.

Ben was definitely looking worse for wear, and Aleksey suspected he was probably worse.

He adjusted their floats a little, tightened their straps and generally tried to turn them into the lifejackets they possibly should have been wearing.

Ben revived a little. He began to take an interest in the buoy, possibly searching around it for a boat.

‘We could light a fire when we get back and cook those gourmet sausages you bought. Local pork, apple and cheese.’ Aleksey could fucking taste them himself, sizzling and hot, let alone conjuring this image to get Ben motivated.

Ben completed his circuit and croaked, ‘What is this for?’

Aleksey had no idea. He hazarded, ‘A warning? It’s…yellow.’

Ben nodded. ‘Reefs.’ His voice was almost gone. ‘Remember? Thousands of islands, most of them just uninhabitable islets…we might be near one.’

It spurred them both on.

It was another hour or so before they saw white water breaking on black. In a boat, it would have been the work of a few minutes to sail from the warning buoy to this undeniable hazard. It was a rock about twenty feet wide and sixty long, and it rose sharply about twenty feet from the water at one end, but sloped down from that point to the ocean. It was the spear-point of an ocean god, thrusting out of the depths to impale unwary ships.

They reached it.

A lot of the reef was submerged, so it was shallow all around the spear. They were able to stand, until legs collapsed, and then they crawled out of the water.

Apparently, his sacrifice to the gods had not gone unnoticed. Not only were they now not struggling through the seas, there was a crevasse in the spear and it had filled from the recent rain shower. They drank and were sick then drank and retched, but finally drank until they could hold no more and lay, feeling their bellies sloshing, faces to the sun.

It was blessedly peaceful. Aleksey stretched out a finger—it was all he could do—and found Ben’s hand. They were starfished on the rocks, completely exhausted, eyes closed to the weak early-evening sun which had resurfaced from the squall.

‘I hope your satellites aren’t monitoring us now.’

Aleksey smiled and rolled his head to Ben. ‘I am afraid there is not much to see at the moment.’

Ben smiled and sat up, removing the cushions and putting one under his head and one under his back. It seemed a very good idea and Aleksey did the same.

Eventually, Ben stood up and climbed gingerly to the tip of the spear. ‘Anything?’

He took his time looking around, one leg braced slightly below the jagged point, one almost on it to gain maximum height. Aleksey began to laugh. ‘You are a figurehead on the prow of a ship. You are Poseidon, surveying your domain.’

‘Hmm. I’m fucking hungry, that’s what I am.’

It did nothing for Aleksey’s laughter and finally, at Ben’s stony glare and thump back onto his mat, he admitted, ‘I was remembering about a man I once read of who—’

‘Oh, bloody hell. I’m going to get one of your horrible stories, aren’t I?’

‘Naked men should not be disrespectful. This man was marooned on a rock just like this one. He was a doctor, and he was smuggling drugs. A very stupid and evil man, therefore… Anyway, all he had on the rock with him, which had survived the crash of a plane, I think, were his medical bag and his drugs. Cocaine, possibly heroin? I do not understand these things.’

‘I’m not going to like where this goes, am I?’

---