Ison of the Isles (22 page)

“He could barely believe we’re here,” the scout said. “If you could see what lies between us, you’d doubt it, too.”

So there was no army at his back after all. Mentally, Harg tallied up what he had. Twenty guns and their crews, about two hundred men. Assorted drovers and packers, fifty more. A pathetic sum, if they were attacked. No, he corrected himself mentally—
when
they were attacked. Night might protect them now, but in the morning they would be exposed.

He felt the mountain’s presence, insistent in his brain. He didn’t need an army to conquer Tornabay. All he had to do was point his finger, and a torrent of fire would flow down on the city, entombing it in glowing rock. Or perhaps, if he wanted, the mountain would torment it over the ages, like that other city he had seen, still preserved in its agony. After Tornabay was only a smoking rubble he could stand over it, lord of all the wasteland, and even the Innings would have to fear him.

We can do it ourselves
, he had once said.
With our own hands. No help from gods, no guidance from the Lashnura
. He looked around at the men waiting for his order. They probably had families down there. That was why he had chosen them. This was their home.

“Get the men to the guns, Brixt,” he said. “When the moon is halfway up the sky, we’re going to start firing.”

Brixt’s eyebrows bushed out and he seemed about to say something, but Harg silenced him with a glance.
Don’t ask me anything
, he thought.
Don’t make me admit I am just using them up while they are still mine to use
.

As the gun crews made ready, Harg sent Gill with some soldiers to form a ring of sentinels around them, and guard the way back to the tunnel. When the first cannon bellowed out orange flame, everyone peered through the night to see where the ball would hit. There was no sign.

“Well, make your best guess,” Harg said to the gunners. They were almost sure to hit the surrounding city, aiming blind like this; but Harg no longer cared. Terror was the important thing now.

He paced up and down the line of guns as they erupted into the night. Their jarring power filled him with a mad exhilaration. He wanted to turn and shout at the mountain,
This is
my
fire. This is
my
havoc. I can turn this city to ash without you.

Out beyond the harbour, Jearl had seen the attack and joined in. Harg could see the occasional flash of a broadside from one of the ships, aimed at the forts on the headland. A bright spark of fire was showing in the city at the palace’s feet, the only evidence that the bombardment was having any effect.

Harg shouted encouragement at the gunners, to keep them firing and create the most destruction they could in the time allowed them. Every moment he expected one of the sentries to come running up with the news that the counterattack was upon them.

It didn’t come. Hour after hour they kept on, with no reaction from the enemy. Only once did they see a flash of answering fire from the palace walls, and the gunners paused to see where the shells would hit; but Harg called out, “They can’t touch us. We’re too far above them; they can’t raise their guns high enough.” And it proved to be true.

Fires now twinkled out from a dozen different locations in the city, red and yellow stars. It was strangely beautiful. Watching it, Harg felt as if time had looped around and placed him back in Drumlin. He could almost feel Jory at his side. “What are you doing, taking a nap?” he yelled at the nearest gun crew, who had paused in exhaustion. They moved mechanically to resume working.

When day came, the city was shrouded with smoke. Whole blocks of buildings were ablaze; others had been gutted in the night. The fire was still spreading. Harg watched it. They would remember him now.

“Ison, come here!” Brixt called from the cliff edge. “Look at this.” The Inning flag above the palace slowly begin to sink.

“What’s going on?” Harg said, unable to believe what he was seeing.

Training his spyglass on the palace walls, he saw the nearest gate begin to open. “Cease fire!” he said. The cannons had almost stopped already. The crews were all at the cliff edge, watching as a mob of people issued from the gate into the square far below. They seemed to be celebrating.

Harg called for a messenger to run down and find out what was going on.

It didn’t take long. “The Adaina rose up in the night,” the messenger panted out. “When they heard us bombarding, they came streaming into the palace through the cellars, and overwhelmed the soldiers. They’re calling for you to enter the city now.” His voice dropped. “You’d better come quickly. It’s turning ugly. The mobs have been sacking Torna shops. Those fires you see aren’t all our work.”

Harg gave the orders for a guard to remain with the guns, and assembled the rest to accompany him.

They were met at the edge of the city by a riotous crowd of raggedly dressed, lank-haired people with a feverish glow to their thin faces. They looked like ovens stoked so high with fire that their metal had begun to glow. All around them, the air was combustible with vengeance.

The crowds grew thicker and noisier as they neared the Gallowmarket gate into the palace. Almost all Harg saw was brown Adaina faces, wild with victory. Ahead, some young men were climbing the lampposts, while others carried booty from some smashed shop windows, oblivious to the soldiers approaching. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air.

When they entered the Gallowmarket, the mob pressed in, jostling so close to the ranks of soldiers that they could scarcely keep their places. The people were chanting, “Ison! Ison!” Some were waving sabres.

Brixt’s face was tense with anxiety. They were a small troop of armed Tornas in a crowd of vengeful Adaina. “We’ve got to get through to the gate before they lynch us all,” he said.

Or before some panicked soldier fires
, thought Harg. He pushed to the front and shouted, “Clear a way! Let us through!”

Slowly they edged forward toward the palace gate. As they reached it, a hush fell over the crowd. A woman had appeared alone under the arched stone opening. She was dazzlingly beautiful, but radiated such menace that no one dared to come close. With the eyes of all the crowd on her, she held up a butcher knife in a hand gory with blood to the elbow. The triumph in her face flamed so bright it almost seemed to light the black underside of the clouds. The watching crowd gave an audible gasp.

Harg felt the fire climbing his legs. Before him, Calpe was coiled with firesnakes. He could do nothing but walk toward her across the empty pavement, his limbs worked by some other power. The yearning and terror of all who saw her beat on his back.

When they met, she took his hand and held it to her heart. “Ison,” she said, “You are my lord, and I give you this city.” Then she turned and led him over the threshold of the palace, under the gate. Behind, he heard a roar as of the sea.

Inside, the palace had been sacked. Curtains were ripped from the broken windows, the muddied floors were bare of rugs. Here and there people were still at work prying mirrors from the walls and lugging off the heavier furniture. Calpe led him through a hallway whose carved plaster ceiling now gaped open to the sky, and into a warren of wood-panelled rooms. She stopped at a door where two dead Torna guards lay, one with his guts spilling out onto the parquet. It was now guarded by a pockmarked man with a sabre who eyed her hungrily as he stepped aside to let them through.

The room inside was untouched. A thick red carpet yielded like flesh under Harg’s boots. A huge gilded bed with a canopy dominated the room. “Your enemy,” Calpe said, pointing with the knife toward the bed.

An Inning was lying there naked, spread-eagled, wrists and ankles chained to the bedposts. In the soft flesh of his upper arm were two marks where the slivers of achra had gone in hours before. He now had the hollow-eyed look of someone whose ecstasy had worn away.

Harg stood over him, looking down. “Who is he?” he said.

“Provost Minicleer.” Calpe snaked an arm around Harg’s waist and stood looking down at the prisoner.

The Inning jerked at the manacles fastening him to the bed. His face was flushed; the rest of his body was very pale, very smooth, almost hairless. “You treacherous whore!” he spat at Calpe.

Calpe whispered in Harg’s ear, “Let’s make love right here, in front of him.”

The thought made Harg’s loins throb. He looked up to find Gill standing in the doorway, looking sickened. “Go find someone to take charge of this prisoner, Gill,” he said.

“No!” Calpe’s voice was so intense that Harg turned to her, silent. She went to the foot of the bed, one hand on either bedpost, looking down on Minicleer with a glittering hatred. “Ison, give me this man. It’s all I ask for giving you Tornabay.”

Harg felt the firesnakes squeezing him, tight as shackles. “What do you want with him?” he said.

She said slowly, “I want him roasted over a fire, so slowly we can carve off pieces of his flesh and make him eat them.”

At sight of her, Harg felt every old wound in his body open anew. Everything Inning had ever done to him was answering her,
Yes. Yes, we will watch him die together, and then make love on his bed while the city around us burns
. He reached out and clasped her bloodstained hand across the bed. He loathed himself. He was just the sort of person to say yes to her.

“He’s yours,” he said.

Her bloody fingers twined through his. “And I am yours,” she said.

Calpe took a set of keys from her girdle and began unlocking the Inning’s manacles. She called a name, and two unkempt men smelling of sweat crowded through the door to seize him. Harg left the room, feeling a wave of nausea.
What is happening to us?
he thought.
What are we turning into?

A soldier was coming down the hallway toward him. “Brixt is looking for you, sir,” he said.

“Has he secured the palace?” Harg asked.

“Yes, sir. We’ve closed the gates and are trying to clear the rabble out now. We found some Inning officers and their lackeys locked in the basement.”

“Take me to Brixt.”

The captain was on the palace wall, overlooking the Gallowmarket gate. Harg leaned against the wall, looking out over the city. Smoke was rising everywhere. The Gallowmarket pavement was littered with glass from broken shop windows. A clump of rioters raced by.

“There are wild bands looting all over the city,” Brixt said. “They’re after Torna shops, Torna homes.”

Harg said nothing. There was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t have enough soldiers, and the ones he had were the wrong race. “Is the palace secure?” he asked.

“It will be soon.”

“Good. Man all the gates. We can only sit tight and wait till Drome gets here.” He paused. “You’ve done well, Brixt.”

The captain was eyeing him. “What about the city?” he said. “There are law-abiding people out there.”

Harg looked out at it. “This is the Innings’ doing, and Tiarch’s.”

But it was he who had swept down like wildfire on Tornabay, and loosed all the pent-up energies of vengeance. It was only just, after what the Innings had done to the South Chain. He could make it twice as horrible, and still not match them.

His feeling of sickness returned, and he leaned against the parapet, covered with cold sweat. Behind him, he heard Gill say, “I wish Spaeth were here.”

It would do no good
, Harg thought.
Not even a Lashnura could forgive me now.

There were riotous voices in the courtyard below. He turned and saw a ragtag mob leading Minicleer across the courtyard to the gate. He was still naked and barefoot, his wrists shackled behind him. They were tugging him forward by a rope around his neck.

“Stop!” Harg shouted, and the mob came to a halt. Harg came down the stairs to the courtyard and walked slowly across the flagstones toward Minicleer. He stopped mere inches away, looking at the Inning’s face. It was stripped clean of everything but pure, primal terror.

“Ask me for your life,” Harg said.

Minicleer said nothing. Even now, stripped and inches from a death too horrible to think of, he couldn’t beg for mercy. Not from an Adaina.

Harg gestured over some soldiers from the guard at the gate. “Take him down and put him with the other Innings,” he said curtly. “Don’t let anyone at him.”

There was a cry of rage from the mob. Calpe stepped forward, her face feral. “You promised me!” she said.

“I changed my mind,” Harg answered.

There was a scuffle, and the soldiers had to lower their bayonets to force the mob away. Other soldiers came running up to surround the rabble and drive them toward the gate. They were screaming curses at Harg as he turned to climb the stair to the wall, where Brixt and Gill were still watching. He couldn’t meet their eyes.

Spaeth didn’t move when Nathaway came into the room. She didn’t move when he sat down on the edge of the bed she lay in. She did not want to be roused into the aching vacuum of the world.

She had scarcely stirred for a week. The lethargy had been growing on her slowly, as her senses shut down one by one to relieve her of the constant pain. She was sleeping fifteen or sixteen hours a day now, and the time awake was hazy and muffled. The only vivid things in life were her dreams, where she and Harg were merged like conjoined twins; his blood flowed in her body, his nerves ran all through her, and she felt full of him beyond bearing. Then she would wake, and the void would return. Awake, she was nothing but a walking, breathing cavity.

There was still a bond between them. She had been hanging onto it stubbornly, tenaciously, knowing that whatever she had to bear, he did as well. It was a contest of wills, which of them could hold out longest. It had already gone on longer than she would have thought possible. How could he still be walking the world, functioning, not feeling it?

Nathaway brushed some strands of hair from her face. Her bandhota. He had been so tender with her, so loyal, so forgiving. She wished she could have repaid him better. Now she turned to him and said, “Is there any news?” He would know what she meant: news from Tornabay, news of
him
.

Nathaway shook his head. “No news,” he said.

She turned away. The bed she lay in had been Harg’s, and it was still alive with his presence. When she touched her cheek to the pillow, it was his face. When she ran her fingers through the fringe on the bedspread, it was his hair. She could feel him burning against her, tantalizingly close, agonizingly withheld.

“Spaeth, get up and come down to the harbour with me,” Nathaway said.

He had been trying to distract her for weeks. At first she had allowed him to drag her along on his visits to the harbour, where the refugees from the South Chain were camping. He had been spending his days with them, helping to distribute rations and clothing, setting up tents, even digging latrines, as if in penance for his race. Everyone in Lashnish thought he was a little crazy.

She didn’t like going to the refugee camp. The sight of it only maddened her with a hunger that none of the people there could fulfill. She could have given dhota to them all, and still be empty in the end. She closed her eyes.

“You’ll just get weak if you lie here,” he said. “You’ve got to get up and move around.”

He thought it was something she could overcome by discipline and force of will. How like an Inning. They thought they controlled everything, and were responsible for everything.

There is no power for us but in surrender
, Goth’s voice said in her memory. She had always thought it might be true for him, but not for her. That night in the Isonsquare, she had thought the destiny of all the Lashnura lay in her hands, and she could change it. Now she knew: the broad sweep of events would never be her arena. She was to be trapped forever in internal spaces, in personal wars.

She was drifting away again when Nathaway threw back the covers, seized her under the arms, and dragged her into a sitting position. She groaned in protest, but he only began pulling stockings on her feet. He tried to thread her arm into a jacket over her nightshirt till she finally said, “Leave me alone, rot you.”

“Will you dress yourself?” he asked.

He wasn’t going to let her rest. “Yes,” she said.

It took her a long time, since every movement pushed her farther into the world. Her legs were weak. She brushed her hair out of her face, and found it was lank and oily. When she hobbled across to the chair by the mirror, the face that looked out at her was starved and sunken-eyed, like a victim of famine.

Nathaway had a donkey cart waiting at the door. Spaeth drew her hood over her head, hoping to avoid recognition. Everyone in Lashnish wanted something from her, and she had nothing to give.

It was raining, as it had been doing more or less constantly for weeks. It was not cold, but the grey buildings were so bleak that Spaeth shivered. Nathaway put his arm around her. She leaned against him. His body was warm, comfortable, familiar. Her thoughts strayed to memories of how she had enjoyed him on the trip to Lashnish. They had not been able to sleep together since the night of dhota-nur. She knew how hard on him it must be, and yet he never reproached her or complained.

When they came in sight of the shore, Spaeth drew in a breath. The refugee camp had grown. It started on the edge of the outlying warehouse district, and stretched a mile or two farther on down the shore. It was a makeshift city of driftwood shanties and waterlogged canvas tents. The smoke from a thousand campfires rose into the overhanging clouds.

There was a rutted track running through the camp, and the donkey cart splashed on down it. Some Adaina children came rushing out to meet them, running alongside and holding out their hands for money. Their hair was plastered to their foreheads with rain. Spaeth glimpsed the faces of gaunt mothers peering out from inside their hovels.

“I don’t want to see this,” she said. “I want to go back.”

“It won’t go away just because you’re not looking,” Nathaway said.

“But I can’t do anything about it.”

“That’s what everyone says. That’s why the problem never gets solved.”

They went on in silence. The camp was organized into enclaves, each from a separate island, for even here the common enemy had not wiped out old divisions. As they passed deeper into the camp, they seemed to be fording streams of smells: sewage, rotting fish guts, smoke. When they passed through the tent-village of people from Bute, Spaeth momentarily locked eyes with a ragged girl who stood watching their cart pass with a look of black anger. Half of her right leg was missing.

“There are gangs of young boys who go round terrorizing the rest and stealing food,” Nathaway said. “Each island seems to have a faction of them that wars with the others.”

“Where are their families?” Spaeth asked.

“They’d probably like to know that themselves.”

Far down the shore they came to a part of the camp that was newer and ruder than the rest. Here there were no wood shanties and few tents; the people were living under overturned boats and scavenged scraps of canvas. Nathaway pulled the donkey to a stop.

Spaeth climbed down stiffly. When she touched ground, the mud oozed over her shoes. Nathaway approached an old lighter propped on its side, a canvas awning stretched from its raised gunwale to the ground. Before he reached it, the canvas flap rose and Tway stepped out.

She looked strained and weary. “It’s no good,” she said to Nathaway.

“You mean—?”

“The baby died.”

Nathaway stood looking helplessly angry. Tway said, “They’re almost out of fuel here. Can you find some?”

“I can try.” He turned dejectedly back to the cart.

Tway saw Spaeth, and made a shooing motion with her hands. “Go on, go back, Spaeth. There’s nothing you can do here.” She turned back to the propped-up boat. Stepping around Nathaway, Spaeth followed her.

Three people were sitting cross-legged around a smoky fire inside. They looked up when she entered, and Spaeth recognized Wilne, Gill’s wife, and her two children.

“Wilne! What are you doing here?” Spaeth said. A terrible thought struck her. “Have the Innings been to Yora?”

Wilne shook her head slowly. Her face was streaked with either rain or tears, and her voice sounded like rocks grinding together. “We left ahead of them. It was easy to see that they were heading there. They would scarcely let it be, since all the trouble started there.”

She coughed, then went on. “We went first to Thimish, but those pirates wouldn’t have us. Ekra wasn’t safe, so Strobe found us a boat that would take us here.”

“Can’t you find better lodgings than this?”

“We came too late; the city is full. People want too much money for rooms.”

Spaeth looked to Tway. “Can’t you find them something?”

“I’d have to find lodgings for Tish and Argen and Pilt and Gimp and all the rest, then,” she said. “There are hundreds of people living like this, Spaeth.”

Spaeth saw then that Wilne held a cloth-wrapped bundle on her lap. It looked very like a baby. Wilne saw her gaze and shrugged, drawing aside the cloth to reveal a tiny, waxy face. “She died an hour ago,” Wilne said. “Her name was Pira. Gill never even got to see her.”

The two children were crouched silently behind Wilne. The older one was drawing something with a stick in the dirt. She glanced up at her mother’s wooden face with an expression that seemed too old for her. As if she saw her own future there.

“I didn’t know,” Spaeth whispered. “I could have saved her.”

“There are hundreds more like her, Grey Lady,” Wilne said. “You can’t save them all.”

There was a long silence.

Spaeth had to get away. She felt like the breath was being pressed from her body.

“Where is Mother Tish?” she said.

Tway gave her a warning glance. “You don’t want to see her, Spaeth.”

“Yes, I do.”

They found Tish and Argen together, sitting on the ground by a fire under a makeshift canvas shelter. Spaeth was shocked to see the change in Argen. He had always been the strictest and angriest of the elders; the children had feared him. Now he seemed shrunken—merely an emaciated, frightened old man. His jaw was covered with an unshaved grey stubble, and the outline of his skull showed under his skin. He sat there chewing slowly, dazed.

Tish had lost some of her teeth, and her face was creased more deeply, but she recognized Spaeth instantly. Her eyes were sharp, devoid of deference or fear. “So you’ve come back to us, have you?” she said. “Ready to take a bandhota yet?”

“I have one now,” Spaeth said.

“So I hear. It looks like he’s left you no happier than the rest of us.”

Tway said angrily to Spaeth, “She blames Harg for all of this. Even though it was the Innings who did it.”

“The Innings were friendly, once,” Tish said.

“Now we see what was under their friendship.”

Tish regarded them both, then shook her head. “You foolish young people. Challenging the Innings was like taunting the wildcat or provoking the gale. There’s an old saying the sailors have: ‘If you cannot tame the wind, let it take you where it will.’ If we had let ourselves be blown before the Innings’ wind, we might have survived. But no, you warmongers wanted to stand in their path as they moved out to conquer. You wouldn’t bend before them, in order not to break. You have doomed us all.”

“The other way, we would have lost our land,” Tway said.

“What do you think you see here but people without a land?” Tish said, gesturing around her.

“We’ll get it back,” Tway said. “Harg will see to that.”

“It’s too late for me,” Tish said. “And not just because I’m old. It’s too late for the children, too. Once you’ve lost everything, there are parts of you that never grow back.”

She turned to stir up the fire and throw on another faggot. The rain was pattering hard on the canvas. Watching her, Spaeth had a sudden premonition that it didn’t matter whether they won or lost—the nation that had started to fight was gone. The thought disturbed her so that she stood to leave.

“Go on,” Tish said, not even glancing at her. “Go fight the wind.”

After leaving, Spaeth stood for a few moments outside in the rain and the churned-up mud. There was a vast, unlocalized pain around her. It seemed everywhere—in the ground beneath her, in the smoky air. As if the entire island were aching. No, all the Isles together.

She drew her hood further over her face and walked down to the rocky beach.

Here, apart from the people, she could feel again the breathing of the sea. The mountains that sheltered the bay were shawled in mist. She listened, trying to feel the sleeping island around her. It was not the deep sleep of the drugged, as she had always supposed; it was only a light doze. She wondered what Roah was dreaming about.

A wave batted at her toes with white paws. Spaeth stopped, staring at it. “What do you want?” she said sharply. She had thought the sea would never speak to her again.

The receding wave hissed in the pebbles. “So,” it said, “do you have what you wanted?”

What had she wanted?

Once—when last she had listened to the voice that now spoke to her—she had wanted to span the circles—to pass, as it were, into another state of being: to become dangerous. All of that seemed bitterly futile now. She was trapped, like all of her race, in dependence.

“I want things back the way they were,” she whispered. “Before any of this happened.”

White fangs bit at the rocks. “Silly girl. You could have it. I could help you. I could set you free.”

Was that really what she wanted now? To be without lures and entanglements, without longing, without all their precious, poignant humanity?

“Then he would never be cured,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“Doting fool. He will never be cured anyway. How could you not know that? You made him what he is, you and your precious Goth. You create a being as dangerous as that, then think your good intentions will tame it. Just like Lashnurai. Do you think he cares that you’ve given up your freedom for him? He’s Ison now; it’s all he needs from you.”

For a moment she wondered if it could be true. Could the forgiveness of dhota be blinding her so badly? She tried to think clearly.

“I have to get back,” she said.

A wave pounced over her feet, and clung to her ankles. “No. Think of your land. He has abandoned you, and all of these people as well. No one is going to save them, unless you do.”

“This is too big for me,” she said, looking down the beach, at all its thousand campfires. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You just have to think beyond dhota. The world has outgrown it.”

Nathaway’s donkey cart was returning down the path, a few sticks of wood in the back. When he pulled up, Tway met him and helped carry the wood into Wilne’s hovel. As Spaeth came up, Tway was saying, “We’ve got to find better shelter for them. Can’t you talk to Tiarch again?”