The Wall(53)

The Captain was the only one of us who seemed to have a plan or any sense of what to do. He moved down the rafts. He was even more heavy-footed and off-balance than I was on the moving surface. He got to the very far end and stood with his hands on his hips. Hifa had come over to me and Kellan and she asked a question with her expression. I had no answer. We waited. The ship came closer, plunging up and down, the spray over its bows grey-green-white as it smacked into the waves. James and Hughes came over to us too and we all stood together. The squall which had hit us a minute or so before now hit the boat and again I had that childish wish that when it cleared, the ship would have vanished. A magic trick, here one second and gone the next. But when the rain and wind passed, there it still was.

‘Let’s go over to that end,’ said Hifa. So that’s what we did, picking our way over the rocking rafts, in between members of the community, towards the Captain. I can’t explain the instinct to go and stand with him, other than that it had been ingrained on the Wall, the idea that we were Defenders and that’s what Defenders do, you stand there and wait to see what comes. The community looked at us as we walked past. They were standing still and staring; nobody else had moved since they saw the ship. We got to the Captain when it was only a couple of hundred metres away. At closer range, it looked smaller: not a huge ocean-going ship but a practical working boat about the size of a fishing trawler. There were men on deck; fifteen or so. There was no flag or insignia or writing or identification of any kind. I felt something inside me curdle. My heart, already racing, sped up and was now beating as fast as I had ever known it. These were not Guards. These were not our people.

The ship slowed as it got closer to us and came to a halt, with engines running to hold it in place, no more than fifty metres away. At that range the deck loomed far above us and I could only see four men standing at the bow. Three of them had rifles slung over their shoulders. Even with the noise of the wind and waves and the engines, they were well within calling distance, but they didn’t say anything. The Captain, at the very end of the rafts, spread his arms to their full width. You could see that the gesture meant: we have no weapons. We are at your bidding. He held the pose for all of ten seconds.

One thing you learn in combat is that when people are shot in the head, they are there one moment, and then they cease to exist. They drop in a way that no living thing drops; they fall to earth like inanimate objects, because that is what they now are. The transition from life to death is instantaneous. That is what happened to the Captain. He seemed to fall before the noise of the shot. He had hit the deck of the raft before I understood what had happened. They had killed him just to make a point. Just like that – gone. I heard Hifa make a noise between a gasp and a cry and heard someone else swearing and realised that it was me.

The ship, what we now understood was a pirate ship, manoeuvred until it was sideways on to the rafts. There were the four men at the bow of the ship and about ten or a dozen armed men standing at the side, pointing weapons at us. They lowered their anchor and a ladder and an inflatable boat and eight of them got in it and crossed over to us. Hifa and I bent down to the Captain’s body, lying on the floor of the raft in one of the positions that only the dead adopt, his arms bent under him, his legs folded backwards under his hips, his head, what was left of it, bent down over his chest.

I say ‘his’ – was he a he any more? Probably not. But it is difficult to think of a dead body, a body so recently dead, as an ‘it’. For a few seconds I thought of all the things the Captain had been to me, the different selves he had incarnated, from my first minutes on the Wall through the weeks of duty to fighting together to his betrayal to the time at sea; and through all of that the side of his life I had never seen and did not know, the place he had come from, his family, his people, his overt treachery and secret loyalty and the terrible consistency of his courage and his betrayal. The bravest man I would ever know, and the most loyal, and the biggest traitor. He had at one point been the person I admired most; he had saved my life; he had done me more harm than anyone else; if he hadn’t directly murdered me, he had come very close. For a moment I felt the force of all those things he had been, ebbing out on the floor of a raft on the open sea. And then the pirates arrived. We were still crouched over him when the first of them got onto the raft and came over to us. He pointed his gun, a semi-automatic rifle, at us and wiggled it from side to side. The gesture clearly meant: step away. Hifa and I got up and moved back a couple of paces. The pirate raised his head and two of the other pirates came over. All three of them slung their guns over their shoulders and they stooped and picked up the Captain’s body and pushed it over the side of the raft. It floated for five seconds and then slowly sank.

The first pirate pointed his rifle at us again and jabbed it backwards. We turned and saw that all the other members of the community had gathered in the middle section of the rafts, at the demand of the five other pirates who were walking around the rafts, looking into shelters, opening boxes and water catchments. It was clear that they were taking a rough inventory of everything we had. The thing they looked at longest was our water. They took a long hard look at the stores of firewood and the community’s fuel tank, opening it, tapping it on the side and listening to the echo. That made sense. Water and fuel, the two most valuable commodities out on the sea. The pirates who were taking the inventory called the first pirate over in a language I did not recognise. He went across to them and they talked and pointed. I could see that our supply of water was big news to them. Three of of them tried our drying fish and gulls and passed them back and forwards between them, with commentary.