Graceful Abaddon

War of the Stricken (1-2)

Chapter One 

Alli Numas pictures the familiar scene:

Gustave Peters Copleston – that is, the man who claimed said title – gripped the helm and tensed his arms. His elbows locked. His wrists were veined. With sleepless eyes assaulted by the sting of sea, he gauged the distant cliffs that marked Port Lincoln headland. The Athene shook fearsomely, catching on frequent occasion a hapless mutineer. All those desperate screams, the cries of the already damned, cut short as their skulls cracked hard on splintered wood; lungs impaled, innards spilt by jagged snags of timber; people cut to pieces on the gnashing oyster-razored rocks; swallowed by the fearsome hiss of lapping spray. Bodies mutilated, chunks of severed limbs a pinkish flotsam ...

Lucy Flintock tells the violent, not entirely undeserved, demise of those aboard the Athene. Her fulsome, smooth and creamy legs are goose-bumped. Alli pretends to listen, nodding his head appropriately. His mind is on that day in 1796. Eighteen men, all criminals, deliverers of untimely death themselves ... smashed and ripped and broken on the rocks that flanked the now-calm Gulf Saint-Vincent.

Relapsing to the swell beneath his suntanned feet, Alli catches himself gawping Lucy's legs. Lifting his gaze, he clears his throat, straightens his back. Regards the group of passengers.

Crowded onto the vessel McQueen - a small, open-aired boat owned by the Adelaide-based Southern Divers Tour Company - their current charge comprises nine tourists: three South Koreans, all of whom are more interested in watching something on one of their phones; a Canadian businessman of some sort; four middle-aged women from Melbourne and a skinny nineteen-year-old from Scotland. This kid – Harry something - Alli feels a liking for. He barely speaks, and when he does he's hard to understand. All the same, Alli has discovered that, like him, the guy likes nineties rock, the Pumpkins and the Pixies especially.

As a gift for not flunking school, Harry's dad booked him a round trip of Australia. In what Alli considers a most inconsiderate itinerary, the kid was scheduled, yesterday, for a cage confrontation with that "terror" of the Southern Sea: the great white shark. With his sheltered, northern-hemispheric mind now fired with the nightmare of such a fish, he will enter its domain without the protection of a metal cage. Merely a skin-tight wetsuit and a poorly-fitted facemask.

"When the Athene struck the reef," Lucy continues, enjoying this historical segment of the tour, "the men that were lucky – or maybe unlucky – enough to make it off the ship then suffered three or four days of dehydration, exhaustion, wild seas and probably the attention of curious sharks".

Here, one of the Victorian women looks up. "So there are sharks out here".

Alli glances at his Scottish friend. Harry's fair skin is sickly pale.

"There are sharks all over the Southern ocean," Alli says calmly. He speaks with practiced confidence. "You don't have to worry about them bothering us here though. Especially the bigger, more dangerous ones prefer deeper water. Or the shallows off the coast. This area we're diving, as Lucy's been saying, has too many rocks reaching up from the seabed. Believe me, anything larger than a dog would rather stay away from here - unless they wanted to get caught on the rocks and cut to pieces". He pauses, enjoying the attention he now commands. Clients always seem to look to him. Call it pure instinct. Call it the advantage of prideful self-assurance. Alli calls it sexism.

"The drop-off is nearly half a kilometre from here. And that's over points where depth can get to less than a meter. I can promise you I've been swimming out here for six years, and the biggest thing I've seen is a medium-sized groper fish".