Free Inner Circle by Jerzy Peterkiewicz Page B

stepped right into it. We saw their heads close to each other, two hairy bubbles, now large now very small, then they seemed to knock at the waves, two quick knocks at a time, finally they vanished.

    ‘Shall I give them a big yell now, Dover?’

    ‘They’re on course, Leeds.’ I thought the tip of the rock emerged for a moment, but the sunlight was in my eyes. ‘Or they have sunk,’ I added, without meaning to upset the women. Rain and September grew pale, and Rain, who now trusted her movements more than her words, flapped both arms in imitation of Sailor’s first gesture on entering the water.

    ‘I wish we had made use of those heads yesterday,’ said Leeds. ‘Ah, how very obliging! there they are again.’ I couldn’t, of course, twist my neck as well as he could operate his turret, but 1 certainly tried, and noticed nothing resembling the horror we had seen. Only something like a dark line shifted on the sea surface, and once again the light of the sun confused me.

    It was September who decided to see for herself. She believed everything Leeds chose to tell us from his turret heights, and seemed eager to prove that she did. Now she rushed towards the shore, and I marvelled at both her resolution and the strength of her knees. They didn’t weigh her down. Neither did her hands need a support. Strange that we should have crawled on all fours not so long ago.

    Leeds was a master of indirect experience: he preferred to learn from September’s risk. Admittedly, I also stayed behind, being, as it appeared, responsible for my less irresponsible wife.

    Standing near the patch of weeds, September bent and lifted something from the water.

    ‘Clever girl,’ Leeds said over my head, ‘she needs so little guidance, doesn’t she!
    A mere hint is enough for a wife of her potentials. We can be truly proud of her, Dover, I mean the two of us.’ I disliked his obvious familiarity. Then he stepped between me and Rain, and took our hands. ‘Let’s go!’ He squeezed my wrist. ‘We must see what the clever girl has found down there.’

    Very carefully, eyeing us both in turn, Leeds moved his feet forward. We were slow in arriving, but when we reached September, she stood with a wet rope in her hand, watching the heads of Sailor and Joker out in the sea, safely above the water.

    ‘Someone untied the rope at this end, that’s why we couldn’t get hold of it at the start. And Joker thought it was a long piss tube, the longest that ever ran away to sea.’

    Sailor had much to tell us after emerging from his natural element. And he looked most virile with all those muscles glistening in the sun.

    ‘The heads, you know. . . .’ Joker began and immediately grabbed Sailor by the leg to keep himself steady as he came out. ‘They sure tried to hang on to that thing, but you can’t swim with your teeth biting ropes in the water, can you now!’

    ‘What is it attached to at the other end?’ I asked him.

    ‘To the tree.’ Sailor answered for his brother.

    ‘There isn’t anything else on the rock.’

    ‘Perhaps they wanted to pull it out with all the roots.’ Rain was speaking of the vanished heads, and a moment later I saw pain in the corners of her mouth as she observed her own feet pressing against the wet sand.

    2

    Even my two wives found the crossing easy. The moon had paved our way: the tide was at its lowest and the rope at its straightest. We could see it ahead of us, touched up with silver and almost resting on its own reflection. The moon also showed bits of rock sticking out from the shallow waters. Joker and Sailor kept the conversation going by reminding each other how very dangerous it all was the other day, though they had swum as if it wasn’t in the least dangerous.

    Leeds boasted from time to time that he could, of course, have carried September on his back and Rain in his arms, had the water been higher, but in fact he wanted us to wade on in a sort of circle, three on this side and