Into the Wilderness: Blood of the Lamb (Book Two) (12 page)

As Ruth and Lazarus struggled to bring down the main and raise the storm-sail, another wave hit them full force. Water crashed over Maryam and Ruth fell heavily, her head barely missing the solid wooden mast.

“Are you all right?” Maryam yelled, her heart rapping out messages of warning from her chest. They had no help, no one to tell them what to do, if one of them was badly injured.

Ruth rose gingerly, fighting the ever-increasing see-saw of the boat. Her teeth had slammed into her bottom lip, blood trickling down her chin. She wiped it away roughly, working her way over to the shelter at the centre of the boat. “Extra ropes,” she cried to Joseph, snatching them from his hands the moment he offered them up. “Here,” she said to Lazarus, throwing him one of the ropes. “Tie yourself to the boat.” She flung a second rope at Maryam. “You do the same.” She secured the third around her own waist with shaky hands, lashing it to the base of the mast as best she could.

“Good thinking,” Lazarus called, and Maryam saw a brief flash of pleasure light Ruth's frightened face.

And it
was
a good idea: the instant Maryam secured herself to the boat she felt again more in control, freed at least of the fear of being swept overboard. But lightning was crackling overhead and the doleful roll of thunder seemed to vibrate right through her. And to make matters worse, stinging rain began to fall. She hunkered her head down into her shoulders, silently cursing every time another wave washed over her and down her neck.

Up at the mast, Lazarus and Ruth were struggling to change the sails. They fought hard to bring the main down, but the wind caught the thick woven sheet and tore it from Lazarus's grip. It billowed out again, filled with violent air, then, with
a sickening retort, it ripped away from its bindings, shredding itself on the side rails before it plunged into the sea.

Lazarus threw himself towards the edge, desperately trying to catch hold of the sail before it sank beneath the waves. His lifeline was stretched to full measure as he slithered under the side-rail and hung down into the frothing wake.

“Lazarus, no!” Maryam screamed at him. This was total foolishness—one rogue wave and the rope surely wouldn't hold. It was one thing to rely on their ropes to secure them while still on deck, but leaning out over the sea like that, Lazarus tempted fate.

Ruth must have had the same thought, for she lurched over towards him and grabbed him roughly by his feet, hauling him backwards despite his loud and furious demands that she leave him be.

“Get your hands off me, you stupid girl. Without this sail we're lost.”

“Forget it,” Ruth screeched back at him, reeling him in with the rope. “Better a sail lost than someone's life.” She was strong, Ruth, and stubborn when she set her mind to it, and Maryam could only watch with admiration as she put all her effort into dragging Lazarus back aboard.

Meantime, the sail filled with water and disappeared beneath the foamy surface of the sea.

“Damn you!” Lazarus cried, scrabbling back up to his feet. He raised his face to the heavens, closing his eyes against the hard pellets of rain. “Damn you to Hell.”

This was too much for Ruth. She sprang at him and slapped his face. “Never, ever curse the Lord like that again. We need Him now to keep us safe. I will not let you risk our lives.”

Maryam might have laughed had she not been so preoccupied—Lazarus had clearly never seen Ruth so riled before, protecting her Lord's good reputation like a distraught mother would her child. He made to swing back at her, but the boat was floundering now without a scrap of sail to steady its progress, and he was tossed away, crashing against the denuded mast.

“You'll keep,” he finally managed to spit at Ruth, rubbing his shoulder before he shrugged and began collecting up the storm-sail, keeping it tucked in the lee of his torso as he struggled to lash it to the mast.

“What on earth is going on?” It was Joseph, emerging from the shelter. Maryam could hardly hear him above the noise: the wind, the rain, the groaning timbers of the boat, the clash of thunder from the skies.

“We lost a sail,” Maryam yelled back, using every scrap of air inside her lungs to reach his ears. She motioned him to stay inside, but he was standing now, steadying himself against the roof of the shelter.

Ruth was helping Lazarus raise the storm-sail, their tiff put aside as they wrestled to stay upright while the wind increased and the waves built. Above them a bolt of lightning split the sky, followed only seconds later by a clap of thunder so prolonged and deafening that all four ducked as if they feared the sky would shatter and fall.

The next hour became one long fight for survival, as the wind screamed in the rigging and the swells became virtual mountains, the boat surfing—out of control—down their sides. Deep in the troughs, it seemed the waves behind would break right over the top of the boat, reaching out for them with icy spray. Never in her life had Maryam felt so terrified. The storm-sail
strained against its ropes, the boom swinging and jolting as the hulls crashed from trough to trough. Timbers groaned and cracked, lashings stretched to breaking point, and all the four could do was hold on to the railings with all their might. No one spoke now; each was locked in a private nightmare fight as the black clouds intensified overhead, turning day to gloomy night. The deck was awash, making the timber treacherous and slippery, and it was almost impossible to stay upright as the bucking hulls were jostled forward on the surge of sea.

The soaked crew huddled together by the tiller, clutching onto each other for support while Ruth prayed aloud. She turned her head to look behind, and let out a terrified wail just as Maryam, too, saw the great wall of water that rose above them, its crest taller than the main mast at its peak. Time froze in that one instant just before the wave was set to break, looming over them like an enormous building, and before the boat began its frantic scramble up the next swell. But, as it broke, the last of the wall of water caught them, crashing down with such force Maryam feared she'd drown in it and would never again break free to air. Inside the tumble of confused sea they held on to each other by sheer force of will, fingers digging into arms and legs to hold them safe.

When at last she burst free of its fury, Maryam saw the damage the wave had wrought. The pandanus thatching of the shelter was almost entirely torn to shreds, and flapped precariously now in the roaring winds. And the storm-sail, their one means of forward momentum, had been ripped clean away from the mast and trailed in the water in the gap between the hulls.

Joseph lunged as though to rescue it, but Maryam threw herself after him, holding him back.

“Leave it,” she cried out to him. “You're not tied down.” Her voice was whipped away by the wind almost as soon as it left her throat, yet there was no doubting her intent.

He turned to her, his face so pale his colour reflected the surface of the foam-washed sea. Consumed by white water, the sea itself almost mirrored the cloudy boiling of the sky while, in the small patches between the spray and foam, the depths were black as night. He called back to her, but his words did not have the power to break above the howling wind.

Then Lazarus was edging on hands and knees towards the fraying sail. Twice he was thrown onto his stomach by the pitching boat before he managed to reach the spot where the sail dragged. It was held by barely a thread and, as he tried to haul it in, the last rope snapped, sending it—their final remaining hope—down to the ocean's depths. Maryam and Joseph together fought to work the tiller, trying to gain some kind—any kind—of steerage or control. But it was impossible: the force of the water was so ferocious Maryam feared if they pushed it any harder the tiller, too, would break. Tears of fury and exhaustion in equal measure welled up in her.

Just as Lazarus crawled back to join them, Maryam glanced past him off to starboard, and now it was her turn to scream. A towering spout of water had been whipped up from the sea and was racing beside them. She had seen such things before from the safety of the atoll's shores, and old Hushai had warned her of their danger in the days leading up to her escape.

“Into the shelter!” she yelled, pointing to the pulsing, unearthly, spiralling umbilical cord of condensed wind and sea.

She abandoned her futile battle with the tiller and clawed for Ruth's hand, tugging her across the slippery wooden deck.
Lazarus and Joseph needed no such encouragement, and were scrambling towards what remained of their shelter. They tumbled in and huddled together at its centre, while their stores washed about them in total disarray. The roaring of the wind and the pressure in their ears was almost unbearable.

They could hear the churning vortex of the waterspout as it passed them by like a thousand demons released from Hell. When the roar finally died away there was a lessening of the pressure in the air and, despite the continued attack of the storm itself, all four found themselves smiling with relief that this ordeal was over. But it was not. Another huge wave had built behind them and now it scooped up the boat as if it were nothing more than feathers on the breeze. The hulls pitched onto their prow—suspended in an endless moment of impossibility—then, just as suddenly, completely overturned.

Maryam's lungs were near-bursting as, buried by furious water, she tried desperately to hold her last precious breath. But she was thrown against the shelter's timber frame, tumbled and twisted, minced and mashed, in a thick soup of flailing bodies and broken stores. Her hair streamed out over her face, tying itself in strangling tangles tight around her neck.

Just as she thought she could hold her breath no longer, she felt the boat flip over on its axis. Water streamed from the shelter as the craft righted itself on the roiling surface of the sea. Maryam crashed down onto the deck, her arm twisting under her, and somewhere close to her she heard a crack. Pain splintered her mind, and all else seemed to ebb away. Only in a fleeting moment of clarity did she register that the bone inside her arm had snapped.

Maryam could hardly think past the stabbing pain. Around her, the shelter lay in ruins. The wooden framing had splintered and the whole structure slumped at a precarious angle towards the prow. Their stores had been devastated, most of them washed away or broken as the boat had flipped. Ruth was bleeding from a gash on her forehead and Lazarus was retching up sea water; Joseph coughed so violently he surely risked expelling his lungs.

Nausea swept over her as she looked down at her left arm and saw the reddening lump where the broken bone pressed at the skin just below her elbow. When she tried to straighten it the pain was so appalling she nearly passed out and bright flashes of light fractured behind her eyes.

Around them the storm raged on, the boat tossed helplessly on the vicious waves. Without the shelter of thatching they had no protection from wind or spray, and Maryam felt a chill settling over her—her whole body was soaked and shaking, and nausea was rising up so fast she couldn't hold back the strings of burning bile that rose into her mouth.

Lazarus was the first to recover, ripping off his shirt and roughly tying strips around Ruth's head to stem the blood. Ruth's eyes were glazed, as though her mind had fled the scene. She sat amidst the slushy rubble, rocked at will by the seas, emitting an unearthly moan. As Lazarus worked to patch up Ruth, Maryam saw angry red grazes puffing up along the central line of his spine, and noted in a strange detached way how he winced each time his body twisted with the jolting of the boat.

Now Joseph was crawling over to Maryam, the ugly marks of Te Matee Iai so pronounced around his neck and chest the skin looked black. His lips were split and seeping blood, his eyes so bloodshot she wondered how he still could see.

“Are you hurt?” Joseph rasped. Up close she realised he was cut and bruised as well.

Maryam nodded, unable to speak. It took every scrap of concentration she had left not to scream out with pain. She forced herself to raise her arm, presenting it for him to see.

“Oh no! Is the pain bad?”

Somewhere inside her dazed brain she laughed.
Bad? That depends on the scale.
Was it worse than their predicament? Worse than everything she'd survived up until now? All she could manage in response was one tiny nod of her head.
Yes, it burns just like the fires of Hell.

Behind Joseph, Lazarus had finished strapping up Ruth's head and was crawling towards the shelter's doorway, balancing himself on the shattered framing as he pushed his head out past the remnants of the thatch, straight into the full force of the storm.

He did not last long—the rain drove straight into his face—but he'd seen enough. He tipped back into the shelter and dropped his head into his hands. The other three watched him, preparing for the worst as he finally lifted his head. Shock bruised his eyes and washed him ghostly pale.

He cleared his throat, his Adam's apple sliding up and down several times before he spoke. “We've lost the mast. The big one. It's snapped right off.”

Maryam heard the words clearly enough, despite the roaring of the wind, but she couldn't really comprehend what he'd said.
Lost the mast?
What did that mean? She tried to think through the consequences but the constant lurching of the hulls ramped up her pain. She moved her arm, attempting to brace it more securely against her chest, but the torture was too much for her, wrapping itself in a tight band around her forehead and pressing at her brain. She cried out, unable to hold the well of agony inside her now. Then she blacked out.

Was it hours or days before she regained sufficient sensibility to think? She'd been locked in a nightmare daze, jumbled images washing in and out of her consciousness as the storm raged on. Day like night; night, lit up by lightning, just like day. Constant pitching and jolting. Thirst and hunger. Pain on pain.

When she finally managed to focus properly on the carnage around her, she registered that at least the others were accounted for and now asleep. Ruth's blood-smeared head rested in Maryam's lap, one hand stretched out and clutching at a bamboo strop, the other holding tightly to her sodden Holy Book. Joseph lay curled up next to her, his breathing shallow and laboured. He was bolstered against rolling by Lazarus, whose arm reached tightly around him even in sleep.

It was impossible to tell if it still rained; the gale was so fierce the spray drove horizontally into her face. The wild wind shrieked in her ears, and as the minutes blurred again into hours, its caterwauling conjured up a host of disconnected voices.
Take this faithless whore and cast her out.
Her father's voice, so clear she startled and cast around for him, before she realised how ridiculous that was.
This is your fault, you stupid girl.
That,
she knew was Lazarus, and yet he lay there sleeping at Joseph's side. But the voices were so real, the hairs on her arms rose up as she heard Ruth's voice above the wind.
I testify against you this day that you shall perish.
Again, the proof before her eyes belied the phantom voice.

It was as if she'd died—been pitched through some terrible tempestuous limbo to a place where all the voices of her past laid bare her many sins. Perhaps it was the Lord Himself who now berated her, making her pay for her treachery towards Him by casting her straight into Hell. Was
this
the Tribulation re-enacted? Sent forth to punish her for her disbelief? She tried to pray, pushing past the consuming pain that dulled her mind:
Forgive me, Lord—and, if you can't, at least somehow protect the others here and make them safe.

As if to answer her, lightning flared overhead, illuminating the wreckage of the boat. Beneath its cold, furious flash the faces of her friends transformed to masks—hollow-eyed death masks that left her accused of responsibility for their fate. Her chest ached with the burden of repressed sobs, yet she found she couldn't cry. Everything inside her had been sucked away, leaving only the husk of her, held together by her pain and guilt.

Dizzy and exhausted, she closed her eyes.
Nanona! I am here!
Her mother's voice!
Only she knows my real name.
Maryam spun around, certain the voice was right behind her, forgetting that she cradled Ruth's head in her lap. Ruth stirred and groaned, her eyes springing open and fixing on Maryam's face.

The only thing Maryam could think to do to soothe her was to stroke her blood-streaked hair, crooning wordless comfort as Ruth's eyelids flickered again and closed.

Maryam forced herself to focus on the real world, to take stock of their situation with her rational mind. Although Lazarus was bruised and battered, he did not seem to have any major injuries that she could see. Ruth's head wound had clotted underneath the makeshift bandage, but the effects of the blow she'd suffered were less than clear. Somewhere in her memory Maryam was sure she'd learnt that if someone's head was badly knocked they shouldn't be allowed to sleep. She couldn't recall the logic of this now, just knew it was important to act.

She gently rocked Ruth's shoulder, and Ruth reared up, her head knocking Maryam's broken arm. The jolt shot stars of pain up behind her eyes, making her pant so as not to vomit all over Ruth's dazed face. Once she'd recovered enough to think again, she saw the exercise was in vain. Ruth had slipped back into her slumber and would not be roused.

Instinctively, she turned her attention to Joseph, whose chest was fluttering in time to his feeble, bird-like breaths. The skin around his lips was blue, his fingers so white they looked transparent in the scrappy light. She wanted to reach out to him, to wrap him safely in her arms and make him warm, but she just could not summon up the will to move.

Then a vicious gust of wind hit the boat side-on, shunting it sideways so that one hull teetered between the ridges of the waves. As the boat tried to right itself, a terrible splintering rent the air. The aft handrail ripped clear from the deck and flew into the sea, leaving only splintered fragments in its wake.

Forward, Maryam was stunned to see the figure of the warrior remained in its position at the prow. He was hanging in there for his life, slapped by waves and blinded by the whirling spray. How was it he'd survived, when destruction reigned all
around? Had his ancient fighting spirit kept him safe? She didn't know. But she wished for a little of his spirit too, instead of the heavy pall of hopelessness that weighed her down.

She closed her eyes, overcome by drowsy seasickness as the boat pitched and rolled.
I give up
, she conceded to the Lord.
Take me now.

It was pitch black when next Maryam woke. Neither the moon nor a single star was visible in the sky, but the wind and rain had stopped at last. The sea was still huge, its motion unrelenting, but at least now it seemed the worst had passed. She could barely make out the shadows of the other three, though she could still feel their presence close by—a kind of innate warmth that reached out to her soul.

“Is anyone awake?” Her voice was croaky and not at all like her own.

“Sister Maryam?” Off to her left, Lazarus stirred, and now she could make out his silhouette against the eerie iridescence of the white-capped waves.

“Are you all right?” she asked, relieved to hear another voice—one that was real.

Lazarus snorted. “I still live.” She heard him groan as he shifted towards her. “My back has taken the worst of it, but I don't think anything is broken, just badly bruised. And you? How is your arm?” The genuine concern in his voice made her want to cry.

“Right now it feels strangely numb.” She didn't dare move it: for the moment, the pain had gone. “And Joseph?”

Even through the pounding of the waves she heard Lazarus sigh. “He sleeps now, thank goodness. Did you hear him ranting a few hours back?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“It's the fever, I think. He was calling out to his father, Uncle Jonah, as if he were here.” She could see him a little more clearly now her eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He bent down over Joseph's sleeping form and spread his hand across his brow. “He's still burning up.”

“We need to get some water into him, to bring his temperature down.”

“I thought of that. But I couldn't find any containers.”

“We've lost our water?”

“Maybe when it's light we'll have more luck finding something in this mess.” He stretched his arms above his head, stifling another groan. “How is Sister Ruth?”

“I'm not too sure. You did a good job stopping the blood, but I'm worried that the blow to her head has done some harm. What do you think? Should we wake her or not?” The comfort of sharing her worries, even with Lazarus, was immense. Just to voice her fears aloud made them less hard to bear.

“Why? I don't think I could cope with her hysterics right now.”

Maryam bristled at his arrogance, but, in truth, she found she agreed with him. It was hard enough to keep her own swirling fears at bay. “I suppose you're right. At least while she is sleeping she's calm.”

For a while they slipped into silence. Maryam knew that if they had lost all their provisions—especially their water—they were doomed. But try as she might to put the thought from
her mind, it seemed it would not shift now that she had placed it there. And it made her so thirsty thinking of it; her mouth tasted sour and her throat felt swollen and parched.