The Ruinous Sweep by Tim Wynne-Jones

Author:Tim Wynne-Jones [Wynne-Jones, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780763699086
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2018-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

He awoke to a splash. His eyes flew open. It was light. Gray dawn, everything shrouded in a heavy curtain of mist. His mouth was open. There was spittle on his cheek. He wiped it off, closed his mouth, swallowed hard. His throat was dry.

Something was moving nearby. He looked over the gunwale and watched a black nose, poking out of the water, head past the boat, leaving behind a V of tiny wavelets. A beaver, he thought, but too small. A water rat — something like that. It must have seen him for it dived suddenly and was lost to view. He leaned his chin on the gunwale and waited, but it never came up that he could see. He smiled to himself. It had seen him. He was pretty sure of that. And that was good, wasn’t it? It meant he was real.

He listened to the morning gathering itself around him. Birds chittering, some land animal nattering. A clonk, clonk, clonk that he guessed might be a woodpecker. He stared east. He didn’t think he had ever thought just how wonderful morning was, even if there was only a silvering of the sky to indicate that there might be a rising sun back there somewhere. He couldn’t see the eastern shore of the river. Couldn’t see beyond the marsh grass and bulrushes. And that made him feel safe. Safe as Moses. Except for one undeniable problem.

He was still on the wrong side of the river.

A red-winged blackbird sat on a bulrush only a few feet away. He watched until it, too, seemed to notice him and flew off. A wise decision. Stay with me, man, and there’s no telling what will happen. But, oh, for a pair of wings with red epaulets. Sadly, he was earthbound. Correction: waterbound.

He was sitting in several inches of water. Had it rained again? He didn’t think so, not this much. He crawled to the bow of the boat and stared over the side. There was a hole. He looked back the way he’d come and saw a boulder some ten yards upstream. The culprit. The crack wasn’t big, but when he reached down he could feel the water bubbling in. He rested his arm on the foredeck and his head on his arm.

I wake up to this?

After a moment, he lifted his head and looked into the gloom of the near shoreline. It was as far away as first base. Time to disembark. Either that or do the right thing and go down with the ship. But that was only true if you were the captain, he thought. And he was not the captain of this ship, just an ill-fated passenger. Then he heard a noise in the underbrush and looked again and there was someone coming. A figure moved out of the shadows into the light at the shore.

Jilly.

He heaved himself over the gunwale and lowered himself to the cold bottom, gasping as the water reached his crotch. But that was as far as it went.

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