The cry of the gulls is the first thing I remember.
Their raucous chatter filled my ears for I know not how long, fading in and out as I rose from the darkness of unconsciousness.
As I drifted nearer to wakefulness, other sounds reached my ears, competing with the gulls for my dazed attention. There was the roaring of the surf, a long low sort of mumble that rose to a rowdy cheer as unseen waves broke on an unknown coast, and then faded once more to a dark grumbling as the sea receded. There was wind as well, a dirge keening somewhere in the invisible sky. Rain, also, slapping like a thousand tiny hands against the earth, and against my cold, wet clothing, and against my skin—
I opened my eyes.
It is a common enough thing to hear from persons who have sailed near to death only to find themselves living once more, that opening one’s eyes after such an experience is at once painful and wonderful—the lancing sunlight is as much a fiery shaft to the eyes as it is a welcome embrace of living light.
It was not so for me.
I opened my eyes, and the world was dark, almost too dark to see.
I blinked, and the separate sounds of gulls and surf and wind and rain, as one, fused into a coherent whole.
I was lying facedown on the shore.
Groaning, I rolled over onto my back, and stared up at the sky. It was a dark, moody sky, not at all welcoming to a man who by any account had no business being alive. There were no discernable clouds, the heavens were a solid, unending sheet of gray as far as I could see—which, admittedly, was only as far as my eyes could rove about in their sockets. One endless track of blank nothing, but thunder still rolled somewhere above and beyond the somber ceiling, threatening worse to come. Gulls wheeled above me. Not the mischievous white birds that roam the docks of London, York, and every other seaport of the isle like toothless, airborne jackals, but black gulls, dark as midnight. And their croaking, it seemed to me, sounded more akin to the bleak calls of old ravens than the airy speech of good, English gulls.
Suddenly, their wheeling, revolving flight seemed a bit too much like the patient waiting of vultures.
Groaning again, I sat up. My head swam, in more motion than the sea before me, but I remained upright, if only to dissuade the dark birds—I was no longer even sure they were gulls . . . but what vulture haunts the coast?—from becoming overly eager. I was alive, and I intended to remain that way.
When my vision had ceased spinning like the fins of a gyrocopter, I began to cast my gaze about, up and down the long, empty shore.
At my feet—swirling all around and over my lower half, really—lay the sea, dark and hungry and waiting. At my back, a jungle crouched, a black umbra in an already shadowed day. To my left and right—the sun being hid, I could not have told in which direction I was looking—the beach ran on, uninterrupted, until, to my left, it was lost in a gray curtain of rain, and on my right, it turned about an invisible corner of this nameless land, and disappeared behind the angled trunks of the jungle.
The beach, as far as I could see, was devoid of any sort of life. I was alone.
The swirling foam and gray water of the sea was cold as ice, and as soon as I was able, I stood, caked sand and mud spattering the ground as it fell from my trembling body. On the whole, I seemed to be fine. My coat and half of my shirt had been lost somehow, and a brilliant yellow and purple bruise was spreading up the side of my stomach and across my ribs—otherwise, I was uninjured.
Somehow I had kept my boots; mud and seawater was leaking from them, running in thin rivulets back down to the sea.
Raising my eyes from my feet, I lifted a palm to shade them, and stared out over the sea. Beyond the low, breaking waves, perhaps a half-mile or so, a line of jagged rocks poked their black heads above the white foam, running like a line of rotted teeth parallel to the shore. Beyond them, the sea and the wind and the rain merged into a seamless globe of unrelieved gray.
Unrelieved that is, except for directly before me where, caught on the distant line of jagged rocks, a large, dark shape bobbed in the endless surge. I recognized the shape, and my eyes went wide as memory—broken with too many holes and splinters to number, but memory nonetheless—flooded back into me, taking the place of the seawater, which felt like it was draining out of every pore of my body and flooding through my boots.
For the first time, I spoke:
“My name,” I said, “is Isaac Hawthorne.”
Memory proved to be a two-edged sword, for with memory came sorrow; but more than sorrow, fear. I fell too my knees and doubled over, clawing at the mud beneath me, coughing and sobbing, my own tears mingling with the dark waters of the sea. I was alone, and perhaps more than alone. To find oneself solitary on a strange shore is bad enough—but to wrestle with the knowledge that the home and country you have known and loved for all the long years of your life has passed into fire and ash is far worse.
Indeed, I was alone.
But the knowledge that one has been left friendless in an evil world bestows a power on a man, a will to survive, to continue living though all seems lost. As I knelt there on the shore, gazing through tear-blurred eyes at the shattered wreckage of the vessel that had carried aboard it the last few, fragile lives of my broken world, I felt this power course through my limbs, urging me back to my feet.
I was an Englishman, and though future generations—should there be any—will sorely curse the hubris of English curiosity, they will never doubt the British will to survive. And if indeed I hoped to survive, there was work to be done.
The rain, rather than relenting, was increasing, and the gray sky gave no indication that relief from the storm would come anytime soon. I needed shelter; but upon eyeing the foreboding wall of vegetation behind me I realized that what I needed more than shelter was supplies. Food, tools, weapons—without these I couldn’t hope to survive. And so I turned again to the wreckage that was caught on the rocks, just offshore.
HMS Integrity had fled two months earlier from England’s blighted coast, a single leaf blown before the hurricane. Its desperate journey, harried by the relentless beasts that had consumed my native land, had ended here—her body gutted and the few poor souls she had carried lost at sea. For a moment, my eyes filled with all that remained of my lost country—despair took me again, and I wondered if my friends who hadn’t escaped the Integrity’s fall to earth were the lucky ones.
But fate deals the cards she will, and I had not drowned. Nor, despite the fears that gnawed at me constantly, did I intend to starve.
It was a matter of only a few short minutes to search the thick scrub that crowded between the trees along the edge of jungle and find a fallen branch large enough to support me in the water. Leaving my boots, ruined shirt, and trousers in a pile well up on the beach away from the water’s edge, I waded out into the gray surf and thrust myself through the first, breaking waves, pushing the branch ahead of me.
Having spent my childhood in the Lake Country of Northern England, I was a strong swimmer; but the fathomless might of the sea was beyond me, and were it not for the support of the branch, I doubtless would have drowned then and there. The dark waves swung around me, spinning me down into deep troughs—where I lost site of the shore and the far rocks on which the Integrity was caught—and then tossing me high on the crests of hills of water. Salty spray blinded me, and the harsh voice of the sea filled my ears.
It seemed I swam for hours, gasping for air between the leaden rollers that swept over me, struggling to keep the branch in my grasp. Almost, I despaired of reaching the rocks and the ship; but then, as one last wave lifted me up in its vast palm, I saw the rocks marching across my way, and the Integrity near at hand. Shouting for joy, I urged my legs to beat faster, working against the water’s backward flow.
Near the rocks, the rolling waves mounted suddenly, piling up in white pillars and columns of foam that beat against the black granite with gray fists and white fingers. The boiling rapids first pushed me back, away from the ship, then—with a mighty surge and a roar of water and wind like a thousand voices—forced me forward, flinging me towards the rocks like a stone cast from a sling.
Frantically, I cast the branch aside, for it hindered now, rather than helped, dragging me wherever the water would. Plunging backwards, I stroked through the rushing deep, fighting the waves that raced towards the deadly rocks and the waiting ship. With an explosive shout the surge smashed into the rock and began to subside. Only then did I turn and make for the rock and the ship once more.
Muscles straining, I fought against the receding waters, pulling myself closer and closer to my goal. My breath was labored, and my limbs felt as though they would fall from their sockets. Gasping, I sunk under the waves, my strength failing, only to claw my way up again. With a final, almost gentle sigh, the water lifted me up, and deposited me on the rough, slanting face of the black rocks, like some dead and slimy weed dislodged from the deep mud by the power of the sea.
For a long moment, I could only lay against the rock, chest heaving, legs and arms twitching and jerking with exhaustion. Above me, in the gathering darkness, I could hear the ship groaning and creaking as its shattered timbers flexed against the unyielding stone. What little daylight that remained was dying fast, and so—though every fiber of my body screamed in protest—I was soon forcing myself up the slick, pitted surface of the rock, using the barnacles and tough muscles that clung to the stone for handholds.
The Integrity had rolled as it fell from the sky, and it had struck the rocks on its starboard side. As luck saw fit, there was a porthole within my reach, its glass pane shattered and lost, when I had ascended to the base of the ship. Quickly, I pulled myself up into the dead and dark hull.
The ship pitched gently beneath my feet as I stood astride the porthole, the movement accompanied by sharp cracks and the resonant pings of bending pipework. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that the once-orderly vessel had been thrown into chaos. Packages and crates, bundles tied with cord—all that we the crew had managed to save from our broken country before fleeing into the night, was heaped, scattered, and piled across the whole length of the ship. The thin, moveable bulkheads that divided the inner ship into different rooms and quarters, had been shattered by the flying cargo, and to my right, gray light streamed in from the gaping whole that yawned where the front of the vessel had been torn away.
Stepping carefully, I began picking my way through the madness, turning over crates and boxes, rummaging through the sodden contents. It was exhausting—and disgusting—work. The ancient tomes, rolls of parchments, and hundreds of books of history, law, and science that had been crammed into the spare corners of the ship had disintegrated in the sea water, melting into a sticky, oil-coated sludge that sloshed noisily around my ankles. Water dripped from the cracked and broken hull above my head.
In a shattered leather traveling case I found a pyromantine lighter, its soladine crystal still functioning. Fashioning a make-shift carrying bag out of a torn bit of canvas, I stowed the lighter, and continued my search.
I quickly added a good—if wet—pair of leather to the sack, followed by a short knife and three lumocite glowbulbs. From a wooden crate that had somehow been spared any damage, I retrieved two woolen shirts and a pair of trousers that looked to be too long for my legs. Beneath the clothing, I found a great treasure: no less than two dozen spare soladine crystals, stored in a thick, glass bottle sealed with wax.
After this discovery, my progress slowed. A tailor’s leather script floated past me at one point, and I added it to my sack’s growing trove. After digging through a pile of heavy canvas and thick rope, I discovered a broken barrel of apples . . . some of the meager food supply we had managed to collect before our departure.
The light was almost gone when I found the armory closet at the far end of the ship. The tall cabinet had been built into the wall of the ship, and so been spared the tumbling suffered by the rest of the cargo. The closet was, of course, locked—our ships commander, Captain Giles had kept the key round his neck—but a bit of copper piping I managed to rip from the wall served well enough as a lever to pop the lock.
I collected, as quickly as possible, half a dozen weapons from the armory. There was a naval sword of good Kentish steel, complete with sheath and belt, and two pyromantine daggers. The soladine crystals in the dagger hilts had been shattered, but it would be a simple matter to replace them once I reached the shore. There was a small keg of black powder that had—miraculously—remained sealed during the crash. I slipped it and two matchlock pistols into the sack with the bladed weapons. Finally, with the last bit of light slipping from the ship, I retrieved an old ray rifle from the rack and slung it over my shoulder.
I was just turning away from the cabinet, when I noticed that a smaller cupboard had been built into the upper right-hand corner of the closet. It too was locked, so—curiosity overpowering my better judgment—I retrieved my makeshift lever and popped the smaller door open. To my growing astonishment and joy, I found a Sensing Cap. With trembling hands, I pulled the odd-looking assembly of brass, crystal and leather, from its shelf and turned it over. A cursory examination was enough to show that the lenses, levers, vacuum tubes, and soladine crystals were in good order.
Issued only to the elite dragoons and spies of Her Majesty’s Imperial forces, Sensing Caps were a rare wonder—a priceless treasure for one in my circumstances.
Grinning in the darkness—no fear of night now!—I pulled the helm over my head, tightened the buckles in back, and adjusted the brass cups over my ears. Instantly, the roar of the sea and the moan of the ship were muted. I could hear the faint hum of the audiocrite crystals, pulsing in their housings. Fumbling around behind my ear, I found the brass knob that controlled the volume of the crystals, and turned it clockwise. The sound of ocean and ship returned, amplified and sharpened, so that I could sense both the direction and the distance of even the faintest of sounds.
Next, I began to toggle with the rows of small levers that were positioned on either side of my head, just in front of my ears. Flipping through the spring-loaded switches one-by-one, I cycled through the multitude of different lenses. Finally, I found one set of lenses—rounded slivers of nocturnite—that washed my field of vision with a pale, violet light, so that the whole ship was revealed to me, as if the sun itself were shining into the ruined hull of the Integrity.
My task done—and more successfully than I could have hoped—I secured my sack of supplies and made for the porthole.
Ten yards back from the broken hole, I found the remains of a barrel—the bottom half, to be precise. Struck by sudden inspiration, I righted the barrel and stowed my supplies inside. Casting about, I quickly found enough pieces of cord and rope to fashion a whole rope some twenty yards long. Going back to the armory, I retrieved my makeshift lever, which I then wedged down into the barrel until it bit into the wood at both its ends, making a crude handle of sorts. Tying one of the rope to my barrel-basket, I then lowered it through the porthole and down towards the sea. When the barrel hung a mere yard or so above the sea—which, in my absence, seemed to have calmed somewhat, though the rain had grown in violence—I looped my end of the rope round a broken truss and secured it. Then I too, dropped through the porthole and left the Integrity forever.
