‘Master Pilot! Three to come aboard!’ He bowed. ‘My humble self, Fynn whom you know, and may I present to you Peg Powler. A useful associate, I have no doubt.’
‘No doubt!’ muttered Jyp, and gestured towards the bow. ‘You’ve the starboard foc’sle cabin. Best you get there and stay for now, you’re upsetting the lads!’
The Stryge bowed. ‘Anything to oblige, Master Pilot! Come, children!’
The strange trio hobbled off, and the bustle on the deck parted to let them pass. I was about to ask Jyp about the girl, but he checked me, caught my arm. ‘There, Steve! Can’t you feel it? Tide’s changing. It’s slack now.’
I glanced over the side. The greyish light was growing, but I could make out nothing but the mist heaving sluggishly below the gunports. ‘I can’t feel a thing. Are we sinking down any further?’
Jyp’s laughter came easily, but there was something in it, something new that set my hair bristling as easily as the freshening breeze. ‘Not the tides of water, Steve, slow and dragging! When our tide turns, when the channels are clear, and there’s no danger of grounding – why then, Steve, we can sail east of the sun itself!’
Even as he spoke, the light changed, and quite suddenly the cold greyness was shot through; the high mastheads sprang into being, tipped with radiant light.
The rigging thrummed like a giant guitar under a rush of climbing feet, and over our heads a great fall of parchment-coloured canvas dropped with a crash, thrashed an instant then filled with a boom and bellied taut.
As the blossoming sails caught the wind they pulled the bows around, out from the wharfside.
I caught the rail as the ship surged suddenly beneath me, heeled slightly and leaped forward, urgent as a living thing.
Over the world’s edge the sun climbed, and its low light played out across the sunken mist that stretched out to meet and merge with the dawning clouds, and turned it to waves of surging gold. The harbour wall slid by, the smells of tar and fish faded in the cold pure wind. I heard the water gurgling beneath us, but it seemed scarcely to exist as that limitless tide of light struck through it, turning all to misty translucency, water and air alike. Looking up I saw the topsails catch the air and fill – or was it the radiance that filled them, so strong, so fresh I seemed to breath it in and be borne aloft myself, a shimmering gust of fire?
Ahead of us the clouds opened. I no longer saw the sun, as if it had sunk beneath our bows; but its light shone up before us, setting a stark and shadowed solidity on the clouds, and edging them with gold. Coastlines took shape there, fringed with bright beaches, peninsulas, promontories, islands darkly mountainous and tree-crowned. Vast and all-enveloping, the archipelago lay spread out beyond our bowsprit, and the azure channels opened to receive us. Our bows dipped, lifted, skipped and lifted again, higher and higher, while the mist broke across them and scattered to either side in tall plumes of slow-falling spray, and over us great seabirds wheeled and cried. In Jyp’s voice I heard the same wild exultation, limitless as the horizonless blue beyond.
As a small boy I’d lain on the lawn, looking up at the clouds passing over our rooftop, imagining they were standing still and that I and the roof were surging upward among them. Now it was happening.
The channel opened before us as we scudded out, wider and wider, a blazing expanse of blue it hurt the eye to look at. Purest, infinite azure above us and below, the depthless blueness of an ideal sea, a perfect sky – if any horizon separated them, it was beyond my dazzled sight. And under the low sun’s long rays the blue turned swiftly to burning gold, seamed with streaks of shimmering white; thin streamers of sunset cloud or wind-driven wavecaps, either or both, both at once – how could I tell? I was beyond caring, beyond thought. I stood rapt. It was in light we rode, light that filled our sails and rippled beneath our timbers, light we breathed, light that filled our veins and quickened our pulses. And outspread before us in hilly swathes of cloud lay the islands of the sunset archipelago.
