“Cat!” he shouted. “Water is rising! Can yee hear me?”
“I’ve got him!” I tugged him through a slime of mud down to the opening. They got hold of his feet, so I shimmied back to cradle his head as they started to pull him out.
A wave poured in, dragging at Kofi and Vai as they braced to hold on to the old man. I lost hold as water surged into the cavity and slammed me into the ribs of the boat.
Then it sucked out. My foot caught and twisted on the rower’s bench above, trapping me under the boat. Spewing and choking, I freed my foot and pushed up to hands and knees. A skin of grime coated my lips. When I breathed in through my nose, a spike of salty water lanced up behind my eyes in a hot knife of pain.
“Cat? Cat!” A shadow blocked the hole. “Throw me some cursed rope, Kofi!”
I heaved, lungs spasming.
Barely heard over the rough tearing rumble of the wind, men cried out in warning.
The whole building rocked as the flood slammed into it and boiled up underneath, filling the entire overturned boat, which was my prison. I had time to suck in one gasp of air before the slippery grasp of the water embraced me. Its moist mouth fastened over my lips to inhale the breath out of my lungs. A liquid voice murmured in my heart: “Let go, little sister. Walk with me and me brother who is the thunder. Walk with us into the storm.”
I open my mouth to call for my mother, for it is her hand clutching mine, but the furious water wrenches her away and I am drowning in the churn of the flood.
My head hit a corner and my knee scraped up splinters like a nest of prickling burning bites. I fought, but fear tore out my courage as water streamed through my parted lips.
Then Vai’s arms held me, and he dragged me out. Foam popped at my nostrils. My head breached. I gasped in air. Vai hauled me up. I hung on him as a dead weight, for I was a quivering frightened drowning child who had lost her papa and mama to the flood.
He carried me over the wreckage of the under-space, slipping and sliding. Kofi had already gone up with the old man. Distant shouts barked a warning.
Another huge wave slammed into the building, shuddering the structure half off its stilts as the entire building groaned. Water gushed into the under-space, rushing up to engulf everything including us.
My ears popped as the temperature dropped. The wave crackled into a ragged, rippled curtain of ice, stopping just short of washing over us. Above, water poured down through the hole on top of us and slapped into the ice wall, hissing and grinding.
Vai was shaking all over, his skin as cold as winter. He had his free arm outstretched. In the curve of his forefinger and thumb, he was holding a necklace chain with a round metal ring like the eye of a spyglass. Within the ring was a circle of what looked like cloudy glass. He released the ring, and the chain dropped limply against his wet singlet.
“I can’t use that a second time,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You’ve got to stand, Cat.”
The rippled curve of the ice wave began to pit and sink as a fresh swell surged up below.
“Ja, maku!” Kofi stuck his head down. “Hurry, yee jackass. Another wave coming.”
I was not a jackass. I jumped; Kofi caught my hands and hauled me up as another man cast down a net for Vai. I had used the last of my strength. Kofi threw me over his broad back and ran, me retching as water chased us across the avenue.
The tearing baleful wind, most frightfully and dreadfully, ceased.
I wriggled and slipped, and landed on my knees as pain pierced into my brain and every joint in my body screamed with a bone-drilling ache. The sky turned yellow. I looked up into the eye of the Angry Queen. The spirit of the hurricane was a woman, a vast looming face with a brow of thunderclouds and a mouth of lightning. The curve of her arms was the tearing circle of the howling winds. Here, under her face, the world lay still.
Vai splashed up carrying rope, net, and tools.
“She have got the kick of a mule, I swear!” said Kofi. “I shall have a bruise.”
“Why did you let her crawl under the boat?” Vai demanded. “She almost drowned!”
“I was too big to fit through. But maku, tell me now, have yee ever tried to stop her doing some thing she mean to do? Had yee much fortune with that? Hurry! The worst is coming, and it shall hit like the hells.”
The woman loomed over us. They did not see her, for she was a spirit, not a body.
She bent down and, with a lick of her salty tongue, she ate me whole.
I stood on a beach of fine white sand as cool as silk beneath my bare toes. I wore nothing but a gauzy shift like a caul of light. My lips were cold, and my feet, sipped by wavelets, were warm. The Angry Queen stood on the surface of the water. She was tall, with broad shoulders and powerful arms ropy with muscle, and the girth of one whose appetite makes her strong. Her eyes flashed with lightning, and her presence was the gale.
“Yee sire is waiting. Go to him.”
“No.”