in the distance. Without thinking he turned that way.
It flashed again, making him wince with its brilliance, though it was gone so quickly he was aware of it only as an afterimage in his eyes. It had been distant.
Ash frog-kicked with his remaining strength towards it.
His lungs were bursting when he breached the surface, and his throat rasped once for air before he was pulled under again by the sailor’s weight. He regained the surface and fought to stay there.
It was night, and rain and waves lashed down on him. Ash pulled the sailor closer, but the man was dead. As lightning broke the darkness he glimpsed a face staring calmly at the sky.
Ash closed the sailor’s eyes and released him to the sea.
A wave lifted Ash’s body. For an instant he saw the scene laid out before him; a coastline of white cliffs, dark coves, a few pale beaches, a fire burning on top of a hill – and the fleet, strung out across it, thrown into disarray by the raging sea. The ships were making for the shelter of a bay, but some had been blown off course, and seemed in the process of floundering on outlying rocks.
His strength all but spent now, Ash tried swimming for the shore and a beach he could see there. But after only a dozen strokes he had to stop, panting for breath, too tired to carry on. His head slipped beneath the surface. He fought free of it.
Debris was floating all around him. He threw his arm over an upturned stool, found he had barely the energy to cling on to it. The swell lifted him again. He turned his head to see the waves rolling in.
Ash knew there was only chance left to him now.
He released the stool and started to swim as the next wave came roaring in from behind. For a moment he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough to be taken by it, but then he felt his body lift, and with the last few strokes left in him he made one last surge.
The wave caught his legs, pulling them upwards behind him. He pointed his arms straight ahead, raised his chin free from the water as the wave-front rose and curled and carried him towards the beach.
Ash rode it all the way in with a grimace stretching his face, and the blood in his veins singing with exhilaration.
The wave dumped him onto the wet sand, left him there gasping in its hissing retreat back to the sea. Ash coughed to clear his lungs.
He was alive.
Captain Jute, commander of Pashereme’s coastal fort, peered from the battlements through the lashing rain of the storm and waited for another flash of lightning to illuminate the sea.
‘Are you certain?’ he asked again of his second-in-command, Sergeant Boson, a shiftless rogue of an individual whom Jute had come to distrust in all things, save for those matters which concerned his own skin.
‘As certain as day and night. They’re there all right. We’d better be clearing out of here right sharpish too.’
Thunder split overhead, and a bolt of lightning struck the sea out in the boiling bay. The captain hunched forward, clearing his eyes of rain, felt a punch of fear in his stomach as he saw them: ships, hundreds of ships, bobbing through the swells towards the beaches.
‘Sweet merciful Fool,’ he uttered, and gripped the stone battlements to steady himself. An invasion, he thought, suddenly giddy. A bloody full-on invasion!
‘Captain?’ came Boson’s voice through the fog of his shock.
The captain nodded, trying to think straight. He turned to the sergeant, and he couldn’t help that his voice trembled a little as he spoke. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Light the signal fire, and get a bird in the air. We haven’t much time, lads.’
‘In this weather they might not see the fire, Captain. Better if we head to Olson’s fort and pass on the word there, I’d say.’
‘Just do it!’ bawled Captain Jute.
He turned back to the water of Whittle Bay, which was a smaller, sheltered inlet within Pearl Bay itself. On the slopes on the far side of this natural harbourage, the buildings of the fishing village were dark at this late hour. Jute prayed that someone in the village would spot the signal fire and get them all out in time.
Another flash, and the captain saw that boats had already landed on the beach below, and dark figures were scurrying through the dunes towards the hill upon which the fort stood.