Dead Water Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Man Sunday Ltd.

  The right of Charlie Fletcher to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  First Edition: July 2022

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953445

  ISBNs: 9780316538633 (hardcover), 9780316538619 (ebook)

  E3-20220602-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Varangian: Oath Breaker

  Part 1: First Land Chapter 1: Islander

  Chapter 2: MacBrayne’s ferry

  Chapter 3: Cetorhinus Maximus

  Chapter 4: I got a feeling

  Chapter 5: The girl on the buoy

  Chapter 6: Golden girl

  Chapter 7: Under the funnel

  Chapter 8: One of everything

  Chapter 9: No harm in being polite

  Chapter 10: Hell on wheels

  Chapter 11: How the darkness gets in

  Chapter 12: Warp and weft

  Chapter 13: Behind the eight ball

  Chapter 14: Changing

  Chapter 15: The missing tooth

  Chapter 16: A bad day for the fish

  Part 2: The stone boat Varangian: The Lords of the Water

  Chapter 17: Dead zone

  Chapter 18: Spasm

  Chapter 19: Fish-farm blues

  Chapter 20: Roll on, roll off

  Chapter 21: Stroke of luck

  Chapter 22: Rabbit food

  Chapter 23: Belly of the beast

  Chapter 24: Bad chat

  Chapter 25: Close

  Chapter 26: The get-out

  Chapter 27: In spite

  Chapter 28: Unleashed

  Chapter 29: Firestarter

  Chapter 30: Scar tissue

  Part 3: Cut Off Varangian: Captivity

  Chapter 31: Good dogs go to heaven

  Chapter 32: Left behind

  Chapter 33: Void

  Chapter 34: Torn out

  Chapter 35: Spilt milk

  Chapter 36: Pat the dog

  Chapter 37: Vellum

  Chapter 38: Disconnect

  Chapter 39: Black mark

  Chapter 40: No service

  Part 4: The Walking Water Varangian: The Wells’ Vengeance

  Chapter 41: Arrive late, leave early

  Chapter 42: Baby love

  Chapter 43: Drinkers and non-drinkers

  Chapter 44: Busybody

  Chapter 45: Always the same dream

  Chapter 46: Kiss

  Chapter 47: Carry-out

  Chapter 48: Something in the dark

  Chapter 49: Nobody goes home

  Chapter 50: The drowning chair

  Chapter 51: Boats for the burning

  Chapter 52: Foreseen

  Chapter 53: Woke

  Chapter 54: Point of departure

  Chapter 55: Bloody Shanna

  Chapter 56: Bloody Jamie

  Chapter 57: Into my arms

  Part 5: Red Sky at Morning Varangian: Constantinople

  Chapter 58: Early riser

  Chapter 59: Sea walkers

  Chapter 60: Peeper

  Chapter 61: Kiss of life

  Chapter 62: Last straws

  Chapter 63: Negative buoyancy

  Chapter 64: Addicted to the shindig

  Chapter 65: Rex at bay

  Chapter 66: Van opener

  Chapter 67: Be sharp, say nowt

  Chapter 68: Deadweight

  Chapter 69: Chocolate, no bars

  Chapter 70: Full house

  Chapter 71: Empty house

  Chapter 72: You can never go home

  Chapter 73: Least said

  Chapter 74: Not the time

  Chapter 75: Over the edge

  Part 6: Last Land Varangian: Uppsala

  Chapter 76: Overspill

  Chapter 77: Plan B

  Chapter 78: Bathtime

  Chapter 79: Ill-met

  Chapter 80: Boathouse

  Chapter 81: Bärsärk

  Chapter 82: The stone boat

  Varangian: Epilogue

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  VARANGIAN: OATH BREAKER

  They should have sent more.

  And he was right not to have told them how fast his axe was. They also should have taken more note of the knife and the sword he carried with it.

  He filled the waterskins before he threw their bodies in the well and headed north into the desert.

  More would come. No need to leave them fresh water to drink. Let them pace themselves by what was left in their own waterskins.

  At the time it had seemed like a good idea.

  And more had come. Chasing them as they picked their way homewards from waterhole to oasis to well, and every time they came he met the pursuers with axe and sword and left the bodies bobbing in the water to confound the followers.

  Lords of the Water they might be, but if he could slow them down by leaving that water undrinkable, they might get home.

  Again, it had seemed like a good idea.

  His master, the emissary, suffered a second knife wound the third time they were attacked. It was bad. It might have healed.

  He told the older man it likely would, and because he had sworn a blood-oath to protect him with his own life, his master took comfort and believed him.

  But just as the emissary had been charged with delivering a message, his guard had sworn another blood-oath to the emperor and was charged to return with the reply at all costs. And tending his master would slow him.

  Faced with breaking one oath or both, he steeled himself to break the word given to the lesser authority, and did him the kindness.

  He did it while the wounded man slept because he had liked him greatly and wanted him to go easy. But still, he left his body with the others in the well.

  He meant no disrespect and told himself the emissary would have understood that he had had to break the lesser oath in order to be true to the greater. He also hoped he would have approved of the fact that in death he was doing a last service to his own master.

  If his horse
had not stumbled on a drift of shale and broken its leg as it threw him on to the ground, he might have made it.

  He gave it the kindness as fast as he could, but though it swung sweetly his axe sang a jarringly wrong note as it hit the stones beneath and chipped the blade. He took that as more of an ill omen than the fallen horse.

  He scowled, shouldered the last half-empty waterskin and limped his way north, trying not to think that his bad luck was punishment for a broken oath.

  They found him two days later because the birds had started to wheel above where he lay. By this time, he was close to death and run so mad with thirst that his mind was already halfway out of his body and so close to the cold seas of his heart’s home that he kept mistaking the vultures wheeling overhead for the remembered ravens of his happier life. When he first saw the men who found him, he thought he recognised some of those he’d left in the wells, and he understood in a blurred moment of relative clarity that he was stuck between the worlds of the living and the dead. He even glimpsed the familiar face of his master at the back of the angry crowd before the light slipped through his fingers and he plummeted into the welcoming dark of unconsciousness.

  The men who find him did not give him the kindness.

  They gave him water.

  Part 1

  FIRST LAND

  There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

  HERMAN MELVILLE

  Chapter 1

  Islander

  A pair of ravens ride the brightness on the thin morning breeze above the islands, wheeling high on the updraught as the wind makes first landfall since sweeping off the barren rocks of Labrador more than two thousand cold sea-miles to the west.

  From this height, the main island makes a shape like a hogtied bullock lying on its side, neck stretched for the knife as its mouth gapes wide in a final bellow of protest. The rocky tangle of the skerries to the south looks like a flying gargoyle snapping at the rearmost hoof of the doomed animal.

  The island is not big and lacks the mountainous majesty of its wilder Hebridean siblings to the north. The two low humps of land don’t quite amount to eight miles nose to tail and barely two miles at the widest point, and the tallest hill only squeaks above four hundred feet if measured to the top of the deep heather covering it. It is, however, both first and last land, a barrier island standing guard with its face set to the North Atlantic and its back to the Highlands of Argyll thirty-five ferry-linked miles away.

  The birds spot movement in the water and arc across the ridge of higher ground towards it in case it means food. As scavengers and klepto-parasites, the carrion birds aren’t fussy about where the next meal comes from.

  Something red and white and splashy is disturbing the gunmetal deckle of the inshore waves in a westward bay to the head of the main island, where a long curve of shell-sand makes the back of the bullock’s neck. The beach is deserted.

  The ravens dip a wing and swoop lower still.

  The red is a buoy, one of two at either side of the bay, and the splash is a swimmer, a lone figure in a wetsuit who jackknifes into a slow and very controlled duck-dive. The ravens see the long black swim-fins break water and wave a brief farewell in the air, just like a whale sounding, and then the swimmer is gone.

  Sig is unaware of the ravens above her as she kicks slowly but determinedly away from the light, head down as she matches the angle of the line tethering the buoy to the unseen lobster pot far below. The pot is beyond her reach on the one lungful of air that is all the life she carries with her, but that’s not why she does this.

  She’s not swimming towards something. Freediving without oxygen tanks is a thing she does for its own sake. It’s the closest she gets to a small escape, one she can live with, a way she can find a place where the constant pain in her broken body goes away for a while. More than that, in freediving like this Sig finds – for a minute or two – not just the purity of the practice itself but the end of magical thinking, the death of extraneous thought and a place where the past is finally, mercifully silent. And of course the small escape carries with it the possibility of the larger one if she should lose focus. That’s what gives it the hard straight edge, like the bone-chilling cold in the water around her: in the freedive, nothing matters but the present and the exercise of the rigorous self-discipline needed not to drown in it.

  She fins calmly downwards with slow, stiff-legged kicks for the first ten metres as the buoyancy of air-filled lungs pulls her body in the opposite direction, back up towards the surface. At the ten-metre mark, the all-round pressure of the water is twice what it was at the surface, and her lungs are now half the size they were. She has trained for this and can read the signals her body is sending her, which calms her enough to no longer feel the panic she once did when the physics change abruptly as she hits twelve metres, as the buoyancy that’s been pulling her upwards back to safety disappears and the sea begins to pull her in the opposite direction. She has come to think of this as the invisible trapdoor to the deep: she stops finning and puts her arms at her sides like a skydiver, letting gravity pull her downwards.

  For the next ten metres, she glides deeper into the gloom, feeling a great calmness as she becomes one with the liquid world all around her. And although she is alone, she does not feel lonely, not in the way she has grown used to in what she thinks of as her land-mammal life. Here she feels more and more like a sea creature the further down into the comforting squeeze of the water column she goes. A solitary sea creature, alone, but – here, at least – comfortingly and correctly alone. It’s like meditation for her, this daily practice. And where some meditate to achieve an inner quiet, Sig does it to hear herself. It is here, away from the world, doing this one hidden thing with no one else to rely on, that the chatter disappears and she is able to remember the one voice she misses. Time has worn away the precise memories of other voices she’s lost – her sister’s, for example. Down here, alone in the dark, she’s fallen into the habit of giving herself the necessary calming reminders in that other lost but not forgotten voice.

  At thirty metres, there is a red tag on the line and the pressure is triple that of the surface, and the only sound in what is now the last quiet place in the world is her heart beating about once every three seconds as it slows to half her normal resting rate.

  Below the red tags are four more white tags spaced a metre apart, and then another red tag. They’re depth markers. Once there were more, all the way up to the ten-metre mark. She has slowly built her capacity over the months by snatching them off the rope one by one, going deeper and deeper as her resilience increased.

  This is where she feels the urge to push on and see how much further she can go. To reach the next red tag, deeper than she’s ever been.

  NO. ENOUGH. NOT TODAY.

  The moment she feels that urge, her discipline kicks in hard and she imagines the voice telling herself to turn head to tail. She begins finning again, this time steadily heading upwards towards the light, fighting the impulse to kick frantically as she moderates the oxygen burn to make the most of what’s still usable in her lungs. She has to get back through that trapdoor. The screaming ache in her lungs at this stage used to scare her, but now it’s an old friend, a way-station on her return to the surface and the waiting air. She knows that for one more day she has managed not to push it further than her own self-defined safety boundaries, and she smiles as she rises unhurriedly towards the waiting buoy overhead. This was the right decision for today. Maybe in a couple of days she’ll push it deeper. Today she has a promise to keep. Today isn’t the day to flirt with checking out.

  SMILE.

  Smiling is also something she has disciplined herself to do. It no longer comes as naturally as it once did. She believes the positive feedback of the physical act of smiling calms both the mind and the body and goes some way to muting the pulmonary alarm bells that are now jangling with an ever-growing insistence. r />
  The ravens look down on Sig as she breaks water and clips herself on to the red ball bobbing in the light chop, regaining her breath: she’s too big for prey, too small to be a fishing boat with the chance of scraps tossed over the side that might drift in and land where the ravens might hop from rock to rock and pluck them from the salt water.

  They’re about to move on when they see dark shapes in the depths below her, submarine shadows that lazily swim towards Sig on a converging angle. There are three of them and even the smallest is easily four times as long as the swimmer, who hangs there steadily getting her breath back, normalising her breathing as she floats by the buoy, unaware.

  The ravens wait.

  Maybe there will be breakfast to be picked off the water’s edge after all.

  Below the birds, Sig rolls on to her back, her face a white flash in the black neoprene hood.

  She sees the ravens hanging in the vault of air above her, a pair of ragged black crosses beneath a lead-lined sky, black feathers whiffling untidily in the wind like battle-torn pennants.

  She watches them as she waits. Only when she is sure she is safely re-oxygenated and her pulse is respectable again does she trust herself to unclip and start to swim the home-stretch of her daily routine. She keeps her eyes fixed on them as she arches her spine and stretches out into a regular backstroke, arms reaching far into the wavelets ahead and then pulling deep scallops of water as her legs churn like a machine, powering her towards the other buoy at the north end of the bay.

  Her heart’s pumping normally again, and the water is no colder than it was yesterday. That’s not why she shivers.

  The familiar ravens look ominous and unchancy today. And because it’s early and she’s alone and over deep water, even Sig – who has spent a lifetime honing her mind to be as perfectly rational a tool as humanly possible – has to remind herself she isn’t superstitious, that she can’t afford to be, and concentrates on something she can control, like counting strokes and not getting cramp and above all not wondering what she looks like from the birds’ viewpoint or – worse – to anything watching her from the unknown depths below.