The Black Tide

up by the sun, the sky a hard blue and the sea sparkling in every direction, very clear, with the horizon so sharp it might have been inked in with a ruler. There were a lot of ships about and I knew I had to keep awake, but at times I dozed, my mind wandering and only brought back to the job on hand by the changed movement as the dhow shifted course.

I could still see the Omani shore, the mountains a brown smudge to the southwest. The wind died and haze gradually reduced visibility, the sun blazing down and the dhow rolling wildly. The sea became an oily swell, the silken rainbow surface of it ripped periodically by the silver flash of panicked fish. The heat ripened the stench from the lazarette beneath my feet. Twice I forced myself to go down there, but each time he was unconscious. I wanted to know what it was he had said about oil, for the exhaust was black and diesel fumes hung over the poop in a cloud. I began listening to the engine, hearing strange knocking sounds, but its beat never faltered.

Water and dates, that was all I had, and standing there, hour after hour, changing my course slowly from south to sou’sou’east and staring through slitted eyes at the bows rising and falling in the glare, the mast swinging against the blue of the sky, everything in movement, ceaselessly and without pause, I seemed to have no substance, existing in a daze that quite transported me, so that nothing was real. In this state I might easily have thrown him overboard. God knows there were fish enough to pick him clean in a flash, and skeletons make featureless ghosts to haunt a man.

I can’t think why I didn’t. I was in such a state of weary unreality that I could have had no qualms. I did go down there later, towards the end of the afternoon watch — I think with the conviction he was dead and I could rid myself of the source of the stench.

But he wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t unconscious either. He was sitting up, his back braced against the stern timbers and his eyes wide open. It just wasn’t possible then. I couldn’t pick him up and toss him overboard, not with his eyes staring at me like that. And as soon as he saw me he began to talk. But not sensibly. About things that had happened long, long ago — battles and the seeking after God, beautiful women and the terrible destruction of ancient castles.

He was delirious, of course, his mind in a trance. And yet he seemed to know me, to be talking to me. That’s what made it impossible. I got some sea water and began cleaning him up. He was trembling. I don’t know whether it was from cold or fever. Maybe it was fear. Maybe he’d known and that’s why he was talking — you can’t throw a man to the fishes when he’s talking to you about things that are personal and take your mind back, for he was talking then about his home in Wales, how they had moved up into the old tin hills above a place called Farmers, a tumble-down longhouse where the livestock were bedded on the ground floor to keep the humans warm in the bedroom above. It was odd to hear him talking about Wales, here in the Straits with Arabia on one side of us, Persia on the other. ‘But you wouldn’t know about the Mabinogion now, would you?’ he breathed.

I told him I did, that I had read it, but either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t take it in. His mind was far away on the hills of his youth. ‘Carreg-y-Bwci,’ he murmured. ‘The Hobgoblin Stone. I’ve danced on it as a kid in the moonlight, a great cromlech on its side — and the Black Mountain visible thirty miles away. It never did me any harm,’ he added in a whisper. Then his hand reached out towards me. ‘Or am I wrong then? Was I cursed from that moment?’ The dhow rolled, rolling him with it, and he clutched at his guts, screaming.

I steadied him and he stopped screaming, gulping air and holding on to me very tightly. I got his trousers open at the fly and in the light of my torch could see the neat hole the bullet had punched in his white belly. He wasn’t bleeding now and it looked quite clean, only the skin round it bruised and bluish; but I didn’t dare turn him over to see what was the other side, in the back where it must have come out.

I cleaned his trousers as best I could and all the time I was doing it he was rambling on about the Mabinogion, and I thought how strange; the only other person ever to talk to me about it was Karen. She’d got it from the travelling library, asking for it specially. And when she had read it she had insisted that I read it, too, the four branches of it containing some of the oldest stories of the Welsh bards. A strange book full of fighting men who were always away from home and wives that gave themselves to any valiant passerby, and everything, it seemed, happening three times over, all the trickery, the treachery, the blazing hopes