The Coming of the Whirlpool Read Free Page A

come to a decision, and looked up at Dow intently. ‘My father thinks you’re a strange boy.’
    Dow wondered if he should be insulted, although he rather liked the way she said strange. ‘ Why?’
    â€˜He says you ask questions you shouldn’t.’
    Dow knew what questions her father meant. Questions about the sea. ‘I won’t be asking them anymore,’ he mumbled. ‘It does no good.’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know.’ Clara reached a hand to his forehead, annoyed seemingly by a strand of wet hair hanging over his eyes. ‘You can ask me anything at all.’ And suddenly she was kissing him, her mouth hot and tasting of salt in a way that drove any thought of the sea completely from Dow’s head.
    They swam together most evenings after that.
    Thus when autumn arrived again, and Dow was fifteen years old and almost full grown, he climbed to the high forests with the other men and there was no special excitement in his heart about visiting the headland. Indeed, he was already looking beyond the coming winter to the following summer, when Clara would be fifteen too, and all sorts of new things might be permissible. In the meanwhile he had sworn to himself that he would cut down trees and be satisfied, hoping for no more. And for the first weeks of the season he held to that vow.
    Even so, he was aware that they were trending steadily north through the forest. Then one afternoon he heard the familiar sea-wind high in the tree tops, and knew that they were very near the headland. When they made camp that night his father spoke lightly of turning south the following day, without actually visiting the edge of the cliff. And Dow realised that this was a test his father had set for him. So he said nothing, and did nothing.
    One by one the other men dropped off to sleep. Dow lay awake, listening to the wind in the high branches. The sound rose and fell, and in his mind he saw waves rising and falling too, and faint in the night he smelled salt. Not the warm salt of the kiss of human lips, but the cold, ancient salt of the sea.
    He resisted. He would not obey the call.
    But nor could he sleep. He tossed and turned, and as the night deepened so the wind grew, and now thunder rumbled, and through the canopy he glimpsed bright flashes of lightning in the sky. A storm had come. Dow was sure he could hear, or perhaps feel through the ground on which he lay, the boom of a sea whipped into a rage and pounding against the headland.
    The night seemed endless. How could the other men sleep through such wind and thunder?
    Finally Dow could stand it no more. He rose and crept away through the trees, navigating by flashes of lightning, until at last he was out of the forest. The headland reared before him. The storm was passing away and dawn was growing in the sky. He climbed to the cliff edge and looked. He saw a wrack of cloud rolling off into the west where night lingered. He saw red daylight mounting on the eastern horizon. He saw the wide tumultuous sea, still roiling from the storm, black except for where it was streaked white with foam. He heard it crashing against the cliff, and so strong was the wind, spray whipped into his face a mile above the waves.
    But none of that mattered, for out upon the ocean he saw something that struck him to the core.
    Ships.
    Great ships, with sails set in defiance of the storm; two of them, one behind the other, only a few miles out from the foot of the cliff. They were heeled far over on their sides in the gale, but nevertheless they plunged headlong through the swell, indomitable, spray bursting from their bows.
    Dow had been told tales of such craft, of the vessels in which the Ship Kings plied the seas, but no story had ever warned him of their fierceness and beauty. And in that moment he understood what had been aching inside him ever since he’d laid eyes upon the ocean. This – this was what he wanted. To ride in a proud ship, face forward as