The Heretic Land (2 page)

Silent, resigned, Bon caught one last glimpse of Leki as she was ushered down into the second hold. She was not looking his way. That gave him a surprising stab of loss, and his heart was in confusion. On the ship until now, he had given no thought to his fate. Life for him was over.

The hold grating slammed shut, locking them inside. Excited, frightened chatter filled the shadows. The roar of the approaching giant sent shockwaves through the sea and against the prison ship’s hull. The Fade priest sat silent and motionless. And as he waited for the end, all Bon could think was,
I want to see her again
.

Bon’s hold was not completely dark. Many of the prisoners had brought candles, and the fifteen other deportees down there with him listened to the chaos with flickering flames reflected in their wide, frightened eyes.

Crewmen shouted, waves thudded into the ship as they swung booms and changed direction, harpoons hissed and whistled as they were fired, and three times something immense struck the vessel, impacts knocking Bon and the others down, wood creaking and metal bracings shrieking. The attack did not last for long, but Bon was far more afraid than he had expected. He was thinking of Leki in the neighbouring hold, and when after the second impact someone shouted that they’d been breached, he heard water hissing in and the cries of those drowning, and Bon dashed across to the separating wall. Banging on the wood, he shouted her name. Screamed it. It was only as an old man grabbed his arm to
quieten him, and he pressed his ear to the wall, that he realised the hull had not been compromised at all.

Later, a guard opened the hatch and threw down several bags.

‘What happened?’ someone asked. ‘Did they kill the spineback?’

‘Kill it?’ the guard scoffed. He slammed the hatch, laughing, and the prisoners went about sharing out the food.

As Bon ate he looked around at the others. Before today he’d had little interest in them. But the closer they drew to the huge island of Skythe – a hundred miles from east to west, and its northern limits unknown – the more he began to wonder. Some would be political dissidents like him, banished by Alderia’s rulers, the Ald, for questioning their word and the tenets of their rule. Others could be religious exiles sent away for being too vocal in their own beliefs; some fringe religions were allowed, but if they actively challenged belief in the Fade they had gone too far. Perhaps there were murderers, rapists, or terrorists. He would not ask, and few people seemed willing to betray their crimes. They might all be classed as criminals by the Ald, but in many cases that would be all they had in common.

In one corner he saw several people praying to the seven Fade gods, changing position, prayers and tone for each deity. Bon felt what he always felt when confronted with such a scene – a faintly painful nostalgia for his childhood years when his parents had made him pray, and a vague sense of disgust. He knew things that, if proven, would expose the Fade for the lie it was.
Many
people knew. His crime was in believing them.

He glanced again at the Fade priest, hunkered beneath dark robes and staring down at the deck between his knees. The man was quite young, handsome, but his face was etched with bitterness.
One side of it was bruised, his lips split and scabbed. He rested his hands on his bent knees, and the finger on his right hand that should have borne a priest’s Fade ring was missing. The stump was roughly bandaged. The wound was recent.

Bon crawled across closer to the priest. Even as he moved he berated himself, because he had no wish to become involved with anyone down here.
Except Leki
, he thought.

‘Fuck off,’ the priest said. Bon paused and sat back against a heavy timber brace.

‘Not a typical greeting from a priest,’ Bon said. He sighed and leaned his head back against the bracing. He could feel the impact of sea against hull transmitted through his skull, and each shiver or thud brought Skythe close.

‘I used to believe,’ Bon said, softly, quietly. The priest did not respond, and Bon felt that he was talking to himself. ‘It’s traditional. You’re brought up that way, and my parents never gave me any cause to doubt. Seven gods of the Fade, each of them watching over us, demanding prayer and fealty in return for wellbeing … it sounds so attractive. So comforting. I had no reason
not
to believe.’ He snorted. ‘How stupid. I’m so glad I saw the light.’

‘And in that light, darkness,’ the priest said. His voice was gravelly, older than his years.

‘No,’ Bon said. ‘Enlightenment.’

‘The Fade provides,’ the priest said, intoning a familiar prayer. ‘From before time, the Fade has watched the world for us, and now watches over us. All hail the seven gods.’ He lifted his hand and kissed the space between fingers where the missing digit had once resided, his eyes closed and his face almost serene.

‘But you’re here,’ Bon said.

‘You think because I’m a priest I must have been banished for betraying
my faith. Which means you’re as much a fool as anyone else on this damned vessel.’

‘Then why are you—?’

‘Every moment, I pray to the Fade to send a deep pirate to take us down and consume us all,’ the priest said.

‘You must have done something terrible,’ Bon whispered, staring at the man’s mutilated hand.

‘Fuck off,’ the priest said again. ‘Take your heathen heart away from me.’

Bon wanted to protest, and argue, and tell the priest what a fool he must be for still believing in a religion that had done nothing to save him. But the priest closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, praying and finding comfort. Alone, Bon crawled away and sat in the shadows. He had only his own company for the rest of that night, and as usual he found it wanting.

They were not let out for another exercise session that evening. They could hear some pained crying from far away, and Bon guessed that some of the crew or guards had been injured in the spineback attack. It was said that the creatures were infected with poisonous, fist-sized parasites, which were known to infect some of those vessels they came into contact with. As darkness fell outside, occasional shouts, running footsteps, and the sound of crossbows firing seemed to bear out that tale.

Bon bedded down. All but one candle was blown out, and in the darkness he heard the sound of a couple rutting, and someone else muttering insane words as the Forsaken Sea rocked them into sleep.

The silent priest was comforted by his gods.

Bon was already leaning on the starboard railing and silently observing the damage to the ship when Leki’s hold was opened the
following morning. Crew members worked to fix several shattered lengths of the port railing, and two of the smallest sailors were being lowered down against the ship’s hull to effect repairs. There was hammering and shouting, but none of the singing of the previous afternoon. There were now six lookouts in the skynests, and two extra harpoons had been rigged alongside the four already there.

The ship’s sails were full, and the rolling sea seemed for once to be accommodating their direction. North was grey and obscured by mist, and somewhere beyond that mist lay the forbidding island of Skythe.

The guards unbolted the second hold, and Leki was the fifth person out. She squinted against the dazzling light, looking around the ship until she saw Bon. Then she smiled.

At me
, Bon thought as she walked slowly towards him. The prisoners already knew that sudden movements were ill-advised. Escape was impossible, and the guards might appear relaxed, but they were always ready for an attack.

‘I’m famished,’ he said.

‘Good. A woman in my hold has been stinking the place out all night. Bad flatfish. She might survive, but …’ Leki shrugged. It set her hair moving, and Bon found that he liked that. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, stretched, pulling her clothing tight across her wide shoulders.

‘I’ve heard about spinebacks, but never thought I’d see one. Never thought we’d be
attacked
by one.’

‘The Forsaken Sea is full of monsters,’ Leki said. ‘They made it that way.’ She leaned on the railing beside Bon looking out, and he turned so that they faced the same way.

‘You mean the Skythians?’ he asked softly. ‘Do you really believe they corrupted their own sea?’

‘Don’t you?’ Leki glanced sidelong at him, smiling. This was heretical talk.

‘It’s what
we’re told,’ he said, uncertain how much he could trust her. It could be that, like the priest, she was a devout Fader, sent here for crimes completely different from his. Discussing his beliefs less than a day after meeting her might not be the best start to a friendship. Wearing his own beliefs on his sleeve, blasphemous and seditious as they were, might get him killed. And though there was a time when he would not have minded that, it was, ironically, since boarding this ship and meeting this woman that his mind had begun to change.

‘Whoever did it, it was a long time ago,’ she said, dismissing questions of gods and beliefs, tradition and society, with one wave of her webbed hand. ‘There are whirlpools that have lasted for centuries, mists that melt flesh from bone, flying fish with two mouths and no brains. The bone sharks are just that – sharks made of bone and cartilage – and they shouldn’t live and swim, but do. Knowing who did all that wouldn’t change the fact that this sea
is
corrupted. And Venthia hasn’t made it her home for centuries.’ She shrugged, smiled at him, then turned and walked across the deck towards where a breakfast of bread and smoked fish was being handed out.

She believes in Venthia?
Bon wondered. But not only was he unsure, he also didn’t think it mattered. Many of his best friends had been devout, believing in things he found bemusing. While he had kept his own frowned-upon beliefs quiet, some of them had sensed his doubts, but their friendships had mostly remained. Mostly.

He followed her and they ate breakfast together. Though sentenced by their homeland to a life of banishment upon a dying island, for that short time they were content in each other’s company. The constant rolling sea had settled in Bon’s guts, and he was sure it would take many days of shore time for it to settle. But he was no longer throwing up everything he ate. He was already adapting to life beyond Alderia.

Bon and Leki
found a spot by the railing where they sat and talked as other prisoners were allowed to stroll around the deck. They exercised their minds while others exercised their limbs and bodies, and when the time came for them to be locked up again, the guards did not seem to notice that they descended into the same hold.

There they sat, talking quietly in the subdued lighting, their voices a murmur against the constant pounding of waves against the hull, other prisoners’ talk and sometimes shouts, and the footsteps of their guards overhead. Destined to deportation, locked away, Bon thought it was some time since he had felt so free. He told Leki about his beautiful wife falling from a tower to her death, and how her passing had seemed to darken his skies and blur his horizons. He told her about his son, Venden, and the boy’s fascination with Skythe – its history, the old war, and what had become of that once-proud island state afterwards – and how Bon’s own studies of Skythe had become an obsession following Venden’s death.

‘He was taken and murdered,’ Bon said.

‘The Ald deport, they don’t murder.’

‘I didn’t say it was the Ald.’ Bon sighed. He frequently relived his losses – staring into an unknown distance whilst awake, and trying to catch his falling wife and rescue his vanished son as he slept.

‘Then who?’ Leki asked.

‘Venden was a … genius, I suppose. Our only child. He developed very quickly, could read by the time he was four. My wife wanted to send him south to Lakeside for schooling, but I wanted him home with us, and he went to dayschool in Gakota. I walked him there every morning, and collected him every evening.’ Bon drifted for a while, remembering those walks out from their village of Sefton Breaks along the Ton River,
Venden asking questions all the time and stopping to examine plants and insects, always delicate, careful not to hurt them. Then on the way home he would relate what he had learned that day, and it wasn’t long past his sixth birthday that he would start questioning some of the things he had been taught. Bon had been surprised at first, and then calmly approving.
A priest came in today
, Venden said once, skimming stones across the river. Bon had nodded, letting his son find his own time to continue.
He said that there are gods in the water and the air, and in fire, and in rock and the mind. But … what about in my hair? And in river mud? And the clouds in the air, and a bird’s feathers? There can’t be a god in
everything
, can there, Daddy?

The seven gods of the Fade
, Bon had replied, and fear drove a spike into him, because he was simply repeating all the things he had been taught. It was a painful sensation, answering his own unspoken doubt. Venden had stared at him expecting more, and Bon could identify that moment as when he knew that his son was different.
He’ll find his own way
, he thought.
Whatever I tell him, whatever I say now or later, his mind is his own to make up.
That had made him proud, and a little afraid.

‘He was marked for special schooling very early on, and at first I was resistant. I didn’t want to hold him back, but I was also … mistrustful of some of those wanting to school him. I know what sometimes happens to people like him, and I was afraid. Of course I was. I’m his father.’

‘What sometimes happens?’ Leki asked, and she sounded so innocent.

Bon looked at her in the faint light, but it was difficult to make out her expression. Besides, he did not know her at all, and doubted he could read her. ‘Have you never been to New Kotrugam?’

Leki laughed,
and a few pale faces turned her way. There was not much laughter in the holds.

‘Only for my sentencing,’ she said. ‘And then I was blindfolded and carried inside a prison wagon. No windows, no air. I saw nothing but the inside of a prison and a courtroom.’