“Nand’ Bren will come after us once he misses us,” Antaro said.
“He will,” Jegari said. “And his big boat can go faster than this, surely.”
“His boat and nand’ Toby’s certainly can. They can cross the whole ocean in a day, almost. Well, from the Island to the north coast. And you are right. They will be looking for us. We must surely be easy to see. The big boats have a much better view.” He sat and thought, and thought, and the wind puffed at their sail, and the sail filled, and took them further south.
He thought it was south, at least.
And he had learned one thing about boats, or, to tell the truth, remembered something that nand’ Toby had once told him, which was that the tiller could not turn the boat if the boat was not going faster than the water was, and they had had ample proof of that fact. So he turned the boat as much toward where he thought land was, as much as he could get without losing the wind, and with his two companions gazing hopefully at him, he tried to remember everything else he had learned from nand’ Bren and from nand’ Toby and from Barb-daja about boats. He thought he at least lookedconfident, with the boat moving again, and his hand on the tiller.
He did not feel that confident at all, and he was trying to remember his maps, which he had studied, whether they had already passed Kajidami Bay, too, and whether Kajiminda Peninsula jutted out far enough they could run into it. There was Dalaigi Township, beyond that, but Kajiminda Peninsula was a huge hooked jut of land with yet another deep bay that he thought inset into the continent, so they could completely miss it, and end up in the Southern Ocean where the seas got really rough.
It was just a mess, was all. A very unfortunate mess.
Antaro had had the best idea, hoping for Bren to turn up. So did he. Bren would surely be looking for him about the time he failed to appear for lunch. Bren would search the whole house, and know right where to look—and somebody would surely miss the sailboat. The only foreseeable problem was that the sailboat they had taken was the boat that would help nand’ Bren get out to the big boat to come after themc but Bren would find a way. He believed that.
Bren would be out looking, by now. They would have to search the shore first, and now that he thought about it, he was sure he would have been a lot smarter to use the wind to carry them straight across Najidami Bay to land on the northern shore.
But he had not been that smart. So it would take nand’ Bren time to search where he should have been, and only after searching the shores would nand’ Bren figure they had gotten out of sight of land, and start looking for them out in open water.
Nand’ Bren would search where the wind blew. Nand’ Bren would waste no time in the other direction—and if the wind had only changed beforethey had gotten out of the bay, they could have gotten back to Najiminda and had no problems at all.
Wishes are no substitute for planning, mani had told him once, severely.
He had hoped, for instance, that nand’ Bren had not called his father to send airplanes, which would just make a terrible fuss.
But as the sun went lower and lower in the sky he began earnestly to wish he would see an airplanec
Because the white glare of the water faded to a colder, less fortunate shade, and the sun began to go down not below the horizon, but behind a bank of clouds in the west.
He had learned something about weather from nand’ Toby. Weather came out of the west and blew to the east, and clouds in the west always meant rain on its way.
He had thought their situation could not get worse. But the clouds were getting taller as the sun sank lower, and their wind was sinking as it became a reddish sky with purple clouds.
Sunset dyed the water orange where it was not gray. The sky looked thoroughly ill-omened.
They were not moving much, now: the sail flapped. And when he began to wish for a wind, he could only think how storms did come in, swept in on a lot of wind.
With that cloud building to the west, there would be a storm wind coming down on them, pushing them toward land, for certain. But rain was coming, almost certainly, and more water inside the boat meant less difference between the water outside and the water inside.
Which could mean, besides them being very wet and cold and exposed to lightning, that their boat could just fill up and sink. They could throw water out: they had a little metal cup that rolled around under the tiller seat, but if the waves got rough, their boat was very low to the water.
That was a scary thought.
It was very scary.
Chapter 8
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The Brighter Daysrode off to starboard of Jeishan, at the limit of vision, while the sun came down into rising clouds. The Najiminda headland showed as a dark rim on the lee side—a situation which afforded a little hope: that if the wind got up, the lee shore might receive a drifting boat.
Calls to the estate had turned up the information that, yes, the sailboat had oars aboard, as well as the two life preservers: the major domo was very sure of that. But whether the youngsters could row with any skill, or enough strength, was a question.
Fisherfolk had come out past the end of the bay, a fair-sized little fleet, and used their knowledge of the currents to scour the coastline and likely rocks. The wind, which had backed around once, had been fickle, but that cloud on the horizon would bring a driving wind as well as strong waves—two other forces that might push the little boat, this time shoreward and across the current. But waves could easily swamp the boat, in a moment if the youngsters let the boat go broadside to the waves. The boat could survive in the hands of an expert: but one mistake, one miscalculation, and they would just roll under and come ashore like those mysterious splinters of driftwood— from some boat, a long, long time ago.
They had to find them, was all—before the gust front got here.
The dowager’s plane should be landing soon—and now they had one search plane aloft, scanning the shore. The young lord of Dur had gotten a call from Najida, and that young man, a pilot himself, discreetly contacted a few southern fliers he knew as trustworthy, so they were coming, but that took time, and involved the airport down at Dalaigi. Right now, only that one plane was aloft, quartering the sky, running out to sea and back, and thus far turning up nothing.
Lord Baiji was out from Kajiminda in Geigi’s yacht, searching that outer coast, and all their people who had boats, no few, made a net as tight across Kajidami Bay as they had people to make. Therewas their greatest hope, because the main current ran as it ran, generally southward, and it swept inward right there, give or take what the storm did to the waves. Lord Baiji and the Edi folk were a vast catch-net, to prevent the strayed boat from getting out of their search area.
And if the young gentleman and his companions turned out, after all this, to be asleep under some hedgerow along the estate road—having lost the boat on launch—
Or if the tide had taken the boat, and the youngsters were out on some lark—
He would be outstandingly reasonable if that proved ultimately the case. If it was all a mistake, a missed communication— he would be so everlastingly grateful.
But as evening came on, as time elapsed with no word from the estate, the more likely their almost-worst fears became, that the youngsters were out here in the path of the storm— their worst fears being that the small boat had already capsized out here in rougher water and the youngsters were at the bottom of the bay.
But, he told himself, it was a wooden boat. It wouldn’t just sink. It would float along capsized, if the youngsters had sense enough to stay with it and cling to it and its balloon of trapped air—an overturned boat was a far, far easier thing to spot than one boy in all that water. The Taibeni youngsters would insist that Cajeiri should wear that bright yellow life vest. Cajeiri would, of course, insist otherwise.