He could feel the air crackling between them, and the longer he sat there, the more likely it seemed that he was going to end up electrocuted.
Kite was looking right away now, into the far corner, as if he were trying to will himself somewhere else.
‘So the Kingdom,’ Agatha said. She said it normally, but it wrenched Kite’s eyes back to them in the same way a yank on a chain around his neck would have.
Joe shifted, so uncomfortable now that he wondered about pretending to be more seasick than he was, just to duck out. He wanted to tell her to be less savage, but maybe she was right, maybe this was justice.
‘The Kingdom came from your time,’ Kite said to Joe. Every word twisted out like a tooth. ‘It’s how we know about this place. It sailed from Eilean Mòr in eighteen ninety-one. Surveying for that lighthouse. But they sailed home without going back through the pillars. They ended up off the coast of Southampton in seventeen ninety-seven.’
17
The English Channel, 1797
Kite had been a signal lieutenant on HMS Defiance on the day they saw the Kingdom. He’d been twenty-five and awake for about six months, because unlike their own captain, Admiral Howe on the flagship did not believe that signalling was only a pointless fad of the Admiralty.
Whenever he did manage to sit down and talk to somebody, he ended up speaking a weird mix of English, Spanish, and naval signal code numbers, so noticeably that the other lieutenants had started drawing out flags on napkins if they had to pass him a note. If he was ever going to hallucinate, Month Six was the time. He was already sure the dragonfly in their cabin was imaginary. No one else ever seemed to see it.
That was what he thought was happening, to begin with: that he was seeing things. It was not such an extraordinary prospect as it would have been on land. Even well-rested people in their right minds saw things in dense fog at sea; Kite had, on several occasions. Towering leviathan things which, of course, were never really there.
They had sailed in inches all day, powered only by the current. The fog was so dense off the Dorset coast that with his hand in front of his face, Kite couldn’t make out the anchor design on his sleeve button. The duty watch were taking ten minute turns to ring the great fog bell by the foremast. Five second bursts of ringing, once a minute, every minute. It sounded lonely, and cold.
The noise that blasted through the fog then was so loud it hurt. It wasn’t like anything he had heard before. It thrummed in the deck and down his bones, and the men on the quarterdeck smacked their hands over their ears. When it stopped, no one moved. The silence was fearful.
There was a light in the middle distance. It hovered sixty feet above the water, hazy in the fog but brilliant, far too bright to be a lamp. He had a panicky thought about falling stars, but he’d seen those before, and they didn’t float. A tiny cabin boy rushed away from the rail and hid behind him. The only sound was the sea and a low unplaceable hum. Kite looked around twice, to make sure everyone else was seeing it too. They were. The whole deck crew had frozen.
‘I wasn’t even christened properly,’ someone whispered.
‘Quietly,’ Kite said, just loud enough to carry across the deck but not beyond, ‘send the children below.’ He nudged the little boy towards the hatchway. It seemed like the right thing to do, even though God knew a few inches of wood didn’t seem like much to put between the children and whatever was behind that awful light.
He stayed there to mark where the hatch was for the children – it was impossible to see otherwise – and then to murmur down to the anxious men who had come to the base of the ladder below. He didn’t know what to tell them, except to keep the boys down there. He couldn’t say there might be an archangel a few degrees to port.
Fear not, said he, for mighty dread had seized their troubled minds; and well it bloody might. Everyone was staring at the light through the fog, and Kite didn’t think he was alone in hoping for a voice, however chilling, to explain itself.
There was no voice.
Christ, you sat there complacent in church while some bore droned