By Light Alone (48 page)

Nine people had been killed, and two more must have drowned, because when everybody in the water climbed or was hauled back onto the raft they could not be accounted for. The raft had some manhole-sized holes in it, and a portion had been broken away from one corner; but it still floated. The women most skilled at the task did their best to repair the damage, with whatever material was lying around.

They watched and waited, for further attacks. But none came. As the sun went down, Sudhir made a speech. She sounded more weary than outraged. ‘Let none of us doubt that we’re at war,’ she said. ‘Let none of us forget our honoured dead! Mam Chen! Helena! Bella! The others!’ There were murmurs, but everybody was too tired and drained to respond more energetically. ‘We are going to New York,’ said Sudhir, and Issa’s heart leapt up – despite the horror of the afternoon, and the shock of the sudden bereavement, she felt some great wriggling joy inside her. They
were
going to New York! ‘We are going to seize the great emblem of the revolution – Neocles’ best friend himself!’ Sudhir was saying. ‘Rodion! His
right-hand man
! The last living remnant of the great Redeemer! We are going to liberate him from the prison of New York, and he will become the figurehead of the Third Spartacist Rising! We’re going to smash New York and free Rodion! With him as our banner, longhairs everywhere will join us! All who revere the Redeemer! With him as our banner, we will sweep the world in a united mass, and avenge the deaths of, uh,’ but her energy was fading, and the sun had buried itself behind the world, and the speech petered out. Life on the raft sank to muttering and shuffling and sleep.

Rodion
, thought Issa.
New York
and
Rodion
.

The next morning Sudhir spent her time going from group to group, from individual to individual. This is what she said: ‘I wasn’t supposed to reveal our mission until we were past Gibraltar. But you know now, so we’re all in this together. The deaths shocked me, and I couldn’t keep it to myself any more. We’re going to smash New York and release Rodion! We’re part of the most important mission in the history of humankind!’

‘I think I know your Rodion,’ said Issa, when Sudhir came to her.

‘Of course you do – and you’re the Queen of New York.’

‘But I actually do.’

‘I thought,’ Mam Elessa put in, ‘that Rodion
betrayed
the Redeemer?’

‘No, no,’ said Sudhir, firmly. ‘It wasn’t like that. That’s a
lie
put out by the forces of evil. He was the Redeemer’s best friend! He was
himself
betrayed by the wealthy, who manipulated him and tricked him to reach the Redeemer.’

‘Yes,’ said a young man called Mika, with limbs skinny as rope, his knees and elbows like knots. ‘I heard that.’

The land came closer, and the rafters watched the skies anxiously. There was no trouble for three days, by which time land was visible on both sides of the water. Sudhir was very agitated, and kept running from one side of the raft to the other. The Fwn was always in her hand. ‘The bottleneck!’ she said. ‘The bottleneck!’

So: they had entered the bottleneck.

The land was scrub, pale brown and exhausted yellow-green. New houses, many built on elevator platforms – stalk-legs glinting in the sunlight – overlooked the waterway. From time to time it was possible to see the inhabitants of these expensive domiciles watching them from their terraces. Once, a figure aimed a rifle at them and fired – a little ragged ball of white smoke, as if he were puffing on a long thin cigar, and the crack of the shot seconds later – but he didn’t hit anything. With the following day’s dawn they discovered that another raft had come up behind them. It was just as densely packed, but was smaller; and its size gave it an advantage in terms of speed. During the course of the day it overtook them. ‘I wish we had their speed,’ cried Sudhir, in an ecstasy of agonized waiting. And it
was
agony; the knowledge that there was nowhere they could go, and nothing they could do but carry on down this narrow channel, vulnerable to any attack that might be launched against them, existed for Issa like a sort of toothache of the mind. She never felt rested; sleep at night was fitful, dozing during the day would inevitably end with her jerking awake in blank fright.

The land to the west and the east closed in upon them like a press. And then they were drifting right down the middle of Stanbul, the sunkites sliding their shadows over the water, the land on either side crowded and busy, flitters in the air. The old Bosphorus road was visible just below the waterline. They floated between the two towers that had once supported the old road bridge; and then, an hour later, with a sense of déjà vu, they drifted past another set of submerged road-bridge towers.

They watched the sky anxiously, of course, but the flitters all seemed to be civilian, or at least uninterested in them. Night fell, and Issa drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of water’s incessant slurping and knocking, and the more distant, melodious distortions of Stanbul’s noise echoing off the flat. She woke properly when people started yelling. A flitter was coming. As it moved through the air, it opened and closed two massively elongated mandibles of light in front of it. The cones of these searchlights moved over the raft, and something dropped noisily into the water some metres from the raft. It sounded like a diver, leaping from the flitter to divebomb the water. And (count one, two, three)
then
there was a huge angry-god roar, a grinding cacophony, and a huge tree-trunk of water upthrust from the sea, white as bone and gleaming in the moonlight. The raft, entire, was lifted and shaken like a sheet. The shutter flash, like disco lights, snapping people in succession of frozen wrought postures, hands reaching, mouths screaming. Issa fell down. Everybody fell down. As she tumbled, her arms went between two sets of barrels – part of the fabric of the raft. It was this that prevented her from falling into the water. But the night was full of people yelling and splashing into the sea. Then the raft was laid back down flat upon the water, as a rug laid on a floor, and the great tree of water broke up into crumbs and splotches and fell as rain down upon Issa’s back. The sound was a million tons of gravel poured onto the ground.

She looked up, and saw these two slender cones of light closing and opening as they passed over the sea. Soaked and shivering, she got to her feet. She watched as the flitter located the other raft. There was a flash, and the yellow-white bubble of an explosion, and the raft began to burn. As it shone, the flitter circled it and dribbled blocky chunks of fire down upon it. She could hear the sounds of detonation and conflagration, almost covering over the screams of people. She could feel the heat of it across the water.

People were splashing in the Bosphorus all around her, calling for help: people from her own raft. So she went to the edge and did her best to help them back aboard the structure. After a while she was too exhausted to carry on, and she fell asleep like that, with her arms over the side.

She woke in the dark with everything quiet, save for one girl weeping. She dozed again and woke with the dawn. The girl – Tapa – was still moaning. Issa went over to her, and discovered a knot of older women already there: it seemed Tapa had broken her arm during the attack. There was nothing to be done, of course, but she could not be induced to stop groaning.

In the daylight it was possible to take stock. The raft had lost much of the cargo stowed upon its surface, including the crate that the shorthair had delivered. Four people had gone, although Sudhir insisted they had not drowned. ‘It’s a short swim to the shore,’ she said. ‘They’ll pitch up on Stanbul, and they’ll be fine.’ Issa wasn’t so certain. Nobody else was injured, with the exception of Tapa – a remarkable thing. There was no sign of the other raft, which had evidently not been so lucky.

They were not attacked that day. Perhaps Issa had reached a point beyond anxiety, for she found she no longer fretted about the possibility. Flitters passed through the air behind them, but did not approach. The land withdrew on either side. A pleasure boat, a hundred metres long, skimmed past on its splayed hydrofoils; the decks busy with shorthairs filming footage of the raft.

Another night and another day, and the land withdrew completely away on both sides. People on the raft began to talk as if they had passed through the bottleneck. Sudhir was exactly as agitated as before, however. ‘It is only because we are a small raft,’ she told people. ‘That is how we have slipped past their notice.’ A
small
raft? Issa tried to imagine what a large raft would look like.

Tapa’s arm swelled up, and went black as eggplant. Her fingers sank into the boxing glove of her own flesh. Her whimpering quietened, and then it stopped altogether. Some said they should simply pitch her body over the side and into the water. Others said that they should weigh it down, although it wasn’t clear what they would use. ‘It’s more respectful,’ said the weighers-down. But practical considerations intervened. Almost all the junk that would have been heavy enough had been knocked overboard in the Bosphorus. They said a prayer, in the name of the Redeemer, and sang to the sun, where God, Christ and Allah would welcome her. Then they pushed her body in. But it floated, buoyed by its distended and monstrous-looking arm. Worse, it seemed to follow them as they moved into the Mediterranean. People muttered that it was a very bad omen to be followed by a corpse, but though they poked her off with poles, and a few enterprising people swam out pulling her body further away, whatever they did she still bobbed and followed in their wake. They tried altering their course, but, as if tied to the raft by an invisible thread, the corpse followed. Only when they sailed, slowly (it took hours) right round in a great O, circling the dead girl, and heading off again did they eventually shake her off.

So it was they passed southwest, into the Greek seas. One day a tiny raft, no bigger than a double bed, approached them. There were seven longhairs aboard. When they were close enough to talk to by shouting Sudhir brought out a gun – a rifle, no more than a few decades old – and held them at bay.

‘Did you know she had a gun in that cabin?’ Mam Elessa whispered to Issa.

‘No,’ Issa replied.

‘What do you want?’ Sudhir called over the water.

‘Our desal is kaput,’ said one of the newcomers, in a raspy, accented voice. ‘Can we come on you?’

And they did look like a ragged band, their mouths crusted with sores.

‘Where are you from?’

‘From Stanbul, or just down the coast at Stanbul. My cousin, she helped another woman steal the motor. It’s a good motor! You can have motor, make your raft double fast – if only we can come on board and drink! Our desal is kaput.’

Sudhir thought for a time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘One at a time.’

Two women tied the little raft tightly alongside. The seven new folk staggered, or were helped, over to one of the desal pumps, where they drank like babies at the teat. Six fell asleep straight away, and the one who had spoken before – Sabah, she was called – stayed awake to tell their tale. She spoke in a very weary voice. ‘Things very bad for longhair in Stanbul now, much hate.’

‘More than usual?’

‘More than that. They clearing us out from areas. They do fire, burning fire, and gun. On the northern shore they spread special sickness. Very bad!’

Sudhir, though, seemed pleased. She inspected the new raft’s motor, and declared it sound. ‘It won’t double our speed,’ she said. ‘But we will go faster.’

Rather than remove the motor from its housing, Sudhir and two women lashed the new boat tight to the side of the raft.

‘Faster’ was still very slow, however. They drifted day after day across smoke-grey waters. Issa watched the black-bearded stormclouds clashing on the horizon, shading the space between them and the sea with rain. The clouds became bigger, the hissing sound of the storm upon the water, and then the clouds were above them, and the lightning was around them, and thunder dinned, and water flew in every direction. The sea was shrugging itself, pushing humps and jags up that palpated the whole raft, and the only thing to do was to grab some of the strapping that held the elements of the craft together and hold on. But the storm didn’t last for ever. Issa found herself thinking that this was the truth at the heart of things: that nothing
does
last for ever. That the only skill a person actually needs, in fact, is endurance. She stood, the deck of the raft misty in the sunlight, her own clothes steaming, looking back in the direction they had come. The storm was still tormenting that one patch of Mediterranean with its mindless hostility.

Life on the raft settled into its particular social geography. Everybody knew everybody, of course, but not everybody spent time with everybody. The men tended to keep separate from the women. A crowd of younger men and lads spent their days as idly as any male land-lubber, gawping at the sea, eating as much sun as was possible. One of them, Niki, owned a pack of cards, so filthy and ragged that it was possible to tell the identity of pretty much all the individual cards from their backs. But it was all the group had, by way of pastime. The rumour was that Niki charged his friends to use the cards – two wanks or one blow-job – but since nobody ever saw the boys sexually interacting with one another, and since privacy was an evident impossibility on the raft, maybe this wasn’t true. Sex did happen, of course. But it was a low-key, rather restrictive affair.

The women, socially speaking, fell into three groups. There were those who were closest to Sudhir, or at least considered themselves close to her. There was a group of older women who spent the days chatting and reminiscing, and who attracted a group (about as many again) of younger girls. Issa was one of these latter. The mood of this group was indulgent, accommodating, pleasantly gossipy. And then there was the largest group, consisting of many variously disaffected women of various ages. This last lot were motivated, it seemed to Issa, by resentment, and they spent their time rehearsing the evils of the world and the most effective way of remedying them. Since what they talked about, inevitably, was Spartacist doctrine and strategy, Sudhir approved, and spent a good deal of time with them. But Issa’s own private judgement was that they were a flaky bunch, interested more in opportunities to vent their individual frustration than in the coherent political vision Sudhir preached.