Isles of the Forsaken (20 page)

Lorin had frozen, watching them, with the kettle in one hand. Then she banged it loudly down on its wrought-iron stand.

Anit and Calpe broke apart. Calpe squeezed his hand, then turned to leave. The old man’s gaze followed her longingly; when the door had closed behind her he turned to Spaeth. “My daughter’s a prude,” he said in a loud whisper.

“She preys on him,” Lorin said to Spaeth, as if her father weren’t in the room. “Every week, sometimes twice. He can’t deny her; he’s besotted. It will kill him one of these days.”

Lorin’s helpless rage was achingly attractive.

“We have one like that on Yora,” Tway said.

Lorin handed Spaeth a cup of tea with a look of yearning. “But now you are here,” she said. “If you stay, you can take some of the burden off him.”

“Oh, for shame, Lorin, to put such an obligation on a guest,” said Anit. “Pay no attention to her.”

To Spaeth’s relief, Lorin turned away then and began fetching blankets to make up beds for the guests. Spaeth sat wondering if there were any place where she could escape the desperate needs of humans.

*

After Calpe departed the Green Lantern with Spaeth and Tway, the men trooped up the stairs at the heels of the bartender, Noll. He showed them to a small room under the eaves, and left with the promise that their dinners would be up soon.

Torr said, “Holy crap, that’s some magic you’ve got, Harg. Calpe
never
gives away food.”

“I thought she was just the barmaid,” Harg said.

“No, she owns this place, and runs it like a Torna drill sergeant.”

Harg filed away that useful information in his head. It made him realize that, mentally, he was already recruiting. He frowned, trying to stop himself from thinking that way.

Barko said, “I’m sorry about Holby Dorn, Harg. I didn’t know you and he had a history.”

“Neither did I,” said Harg.

They settled down around the small table. Harg could see from their faces that they were wondering how angry he would be. He decided to dismiss what had happened and skip ahead. “Why don’t you tell me about your situation?” he said.

They crowded round to fill him in. It turned out there were already two of Tiarch’s ships in Harbourdown: a frigate guarding the harbour and an unarmed troop transport that had brought the soldiers and arms to re-man the fort on the hill. The three additional warships en route from the Inner Chain were due to arrive in about three days. The Thimishmen had good intelligence on them: the largest was a two-decker with forty guns, the others had twenty and sixteen. Once they arrived, the pirates would be outgunned more than two to one.

“Which route are they using?” Harg asked.

“The northern one,” Barko said significantly.

“So they’ll have to go through Rockmeet Straits.”

“Right. It’s the obvious place for an ambush, but some of the pirates think it’s too risky.”

“Fuck the pirates,” Harg said, momentarily revealing that he wasn’t as dispassionate as he seemed. “Who else do you have?”

The others started discussing names. At last Barko said, “We could probably put together two dozen navy guys from Thimish and Romm. But we don’t have ships or guns. That’s why we need the pirates.”

And even if the pirates were trustworthy, their boats would look like mosquitoes next to the warships. It seemed perfectly hopeless on the surface. But Harg was unwilling to let the problem go. “What about the fort? How many men in the garrison?”

“At the moment only forty, and at least ten of them are usually stationed around town. There will be twice as many once the ships arrive. But it doesn’t take many to defend the Redoubt. Wait until you see it, Harg. It’s impregnable. You couldn’t take it without siege weapons.”

“And what about the frigate?”

“We could take the frigate,” Barko said, “if it weren’t for the fort. They’ve got guns up there covering the harbour. They could blow us to smithereens.”

It was all an interlocked puzzle, and you just needed to find the key to make it fall apart. Harg couldn’t yet see the key, but he was sure it must be there. People were always fallible; they left some loose end hanging. There were only three days to find it. Once the ships were here, the military options would be even more limited.

He had fallen into an intense, focused silence that the men who had served with him recognized, and knew better than to interrupt. But before he could emerge from it, the food arrived, and all of them set to demolishing it.

They were still eating when Calpe came in to check on them. Harg said, “Everything okay?”

Calpe nodded. “She’s safe, don’t worry.”

When the food was just a remnant of its former self, Barko leaned back and said, “So what do you think, Harg? Are we screwed?”

“I don’t know yet,” Harg said. “I need to look it over myself, in the morning. But it depends some on what you want to accomplish.”

The man named Cobb said, “What do you mean?”

“Well, do you just want to get their attention? Do you want to turn the boats back? Or do you want to actually capture them?”

They all looked at each other. Finally Barko said, “I’d settle for any of those.”

“Okay,” Harg said. “Say the object is to get their attention—that’s most realistic. Then you’ve got to ask yourselves why we don’t have their attention already. Seems to me there’s two reasons, and only one is solvable by military means. First, they think we’ve got no power. Second, they think we don’t have anything to say. We’ve got to show them they’re wrong on both counts.”

Barko gave a slow grin. It made him look like a banshee. “You just stopped saying ‘you’ and started saying ‘we.’”

Irritated, Harg said, “It was a slip. I told you, I can’t get involved.” It was sounding less convincing every time he said it.

Barko poured him some more beer. “Okay, then just theoretically. If you
were
involved.”

“You need to pull together some demands—things the Innings could imagine themselves doing. Something short of ‘Get the hell out.’”

“Like what?” Cobb said.

“I don’t know. Giving us an Adaina governor with power equal to Tiarch’s. Appointing Adaina officers. Giving us full citizenship rights. Whatever you want.”

They were all frowning at the prospect of coexistence that Harg’s examples seemed to imply. “They wouldn’t do those things,” Torr said.

“How do you know unless you ask?”

There was a sceptical silence. This was the larger problem, Harg thought: they had gotten so used to being conquered that they couldn’t think any other way. The Adaina could only think as far as rebelling, not as far as ruling. They needed people who could plan, and talk, and organize. People who could communicate with Innings. What they needed was Torna help.

“Barko,” he asked, “are there any Tornas in Harbourdown who might support you?”

“Are you crazy, man?” Barko said. “They’re all for law and order. They support anyone who will control the pirates.”

“But we’re not pirates. We’re people sticking up for the rights of the South Chain.”

“I don’t want Tornas involved,” Cobb said. “They’d just take over. This is about us, the Adaina.” There was a murmur of assent from the others.

Harg stared off into the darkness beyond the candles on the table. Calpe was still sitting there, in the shadows by the wall, listening. He said slowly, “Didn’t you hear what Spaeth said down there? This
isn’t
just about us. It’s about mora, and the balances. That means we’ve got a duty not to lose.”

They were staring at him gravely, and he felt a qualm for having brought the Lashnura into it. He could feel the tangible power of reverence in the room, changing the whole tone.

Barko said, “There are some Torna navy men, discharged just like us, and not too happy with the way things are going.”

“I do shipping for some local Torna shopkeepers,” Torr said. “Some of them are saying the Innings are giving all the contracts to the big Tornabay merchants, Tiarch’s cronies, and leaving them out.”

“You ought to talk to them,” Harg said. “Sound them out.”

“
You
ought to talk to them,” Barko said seriously. “You’re the one who knows what the Grey Folk want.”

That remark gave Harg a feeling that he had gone too far. He said quickly, “I don’t know what they want. No more than you.”

The vehemence of his tone made them fall silent. Then Calpe spoke up out of the darkness. “You might not know what the Grey Folk want, Harg,” she said, “but it sure looks like they know what they want from you.”

“It might look like that,” he said. “It’s not true.”

He got up, so uncomfortable with this turn of the conversation that he couldn’t sit still. All evening he’d been thinking guiltily that he was leading Spaeth into danger, and now he realized it was the other way around. He wished he had never mentioned Spaeth, never gotten mixed up with her, never been seen in her presence.

They were all watching him, but no one said anything. To change the subject he said, “Calpe, do you have a room I could stay in? I can pay you—not tonight, but soon.”

“Sure,” said Calpe. “I’ll put it on a tab. You want to see the room now?”

“Yes.” He had to get away and think.

The tone changed back to normal as the party broke up and they all made plans for the next day. As Harg stepped out into the hall and heard the hum of conversation from downstairs, the feeling came back to him that he was straddling a crack—but this time it was a four-way crack. Torna, Lashnura, Adaina, Inning. He was going to have to dance fast to keep on his feet.

At a fundamental level of his being, Nathaway Talley had always believed that the universe was an orderly place. Despite the random cruelties and blunders of human beings there was a transcendent pattern of fairness and rationality underlying all of Nature.

Now, his faith had been uprooted.

He lay in his bunk on the ship, where he had spent most of the two days since the Tornas had fetched him back from the hillside. He stared at the wooden beams above his head through the cracked lens of his glasses, which made it look like there was a seam in the world.

His memories of the night at the Whispering Stones were jumbled and sore, like an unhealed bruise. He could not piece them together in sequence; it was as if the night had been more a succession of moods than events. He had considered dismissing the whole experience as a hallucination. It would have been easy to conclude that Spaeth had fed him a hypnotic drug. There were only two things wrong with this scenario. First, it meant that the horrors he had experienced had sprung from a buried level of his own mind and were still there. The second problem was that he didn’t believe it.

Deeply, instinctively, he felt that something real had been revealed to him that night. He had glimpsed a more fundamental layer of reality—a terrifying landscape that dwarfed him and all the artifice he had used to hide from it up to now. Everything that had seemed to make sense about the world—law, civilization, learning—was just a set of paper screens erected to hide what lay outside.

It made him feel empty, like a hollow bowl reamed out with an adze. All that had ever filled him was gone. He wanted to weep, or die, but he no longer felt any power to act. There was just no traction in the universe, no way to gain a purchase to pull himself out.

A knock on the cabin door made Nathaway realize that he had been hearing, and ignoring, activity out on the deck for some time. In a monotone he said, “Come in,” and a sailor leaned in with an envelope addressed in a firm, neat hand. “Mail for you,” the sailor said.

It was from Rachel. Nathaway sat up with a sharp ache of homesickness. The envelope seemed to come from another world, a world where everything made sense. He tore it open eagerly, but it was too dark to read in the cabin, so he pulled himself out of bed and mounted the companionway steps into the sunlight.

The letter was a chatty one, full of family news and political gossip.

The navy reforms have become hugely controversial, now that people begin to see their larger purpose. It has occurred to the Communitarians that the mass resignation of officers was exactly what Corbin was aiming for. Now that he is rid of the old officers, and replacing them with his own people, even some of our friends are growing alarmed at the prospect of a unified military, backing a single leader whose ambitions they are unsure of. To have a military genius off conquering new lands seems like a fine thing—but having an actual one underfoot, building a power base, is altogether different. Everyone but the public is beginning to wish he would go off to the Forsakens and be heroic somewhere else. The public still adore him. You should see the women throwing themselves at him—poor things, I wish them luck. Domestication is not on his agenda just now.

But the passage that struck Nathaway most strongly came near the end.

Your letters cheer us all, Nat, and make us confident that you will be sensible and not reckless. The only thing I’m still afraid of is that you will come back changed. Please don’t change, Nat—at least, not without my permission. It is very lonely here without you, and I long to talk and hear how things are really going.

He longed to talk to her, as well. He needed someone to confide in, to help him figure out what he was feeling. The Torna seamen who were even now glancing at him with suggestive grins were no help. They had made no secret of what they thought he had been doing alone in the hills with a lovely, ardent Lashnura woman; and his subsequent moodiness had only made the snickering innuendoes more unbearable.

He stood up, looking for someone in charge. The boatswain was the only one on deck, so he said to him, “I need to go ashore. Have someone bring round the boat.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, but looked hesitant. “Going into the village?”

“Yes.”

“Let me fetch someone to escort you.”

“No!” Nathaway said peremptorily. “I’m going alone.”

“Yes, sir.”

When his long strides had taken him into Yorabay, Nathaway began to understand why the boatswain had made the offer. There was a change in the atmosphere. People had regarded him with curiosity or indifference before; now he attracted glances of pure hostility. He didn’t feel unsafe, exactly—just unwelcome. He walked faster and avoided eye contact as he mounted the path to Spaeth’s cottage.