Ison of the Isles (11 page)

His eyes were bright now. “Inexorably. Like a law of nature. That is justice.”

Goth turned away from the sight. “I want to go back to my cabin,” he said.

“Can’t face what you have brought about?”

“This is not my doing.”

“You could stop it. Just call on them all to lay down their arms. Publicly repudiate Harg Ismol, and this would be over.”

So that was what Talley wanted. Goth found himself looking into the icy depths of the Admiral’s eyes. Ice so cold it burned. “Betrayal,” Goth said, almost under his breath.

In a neutral tone, Talley said, “Sometimes it is necessary to betray a man, in order to save a nation.”

With a deep anger, Goth said, “You cannot put your guilt off on me.”

“That wasn’t my intention. I intend only to give you the choice to stop me.”

Goth pointed a wavering hand at the spike-lined hill. “That is
your
choice, not mine.
You
chose to do that.”

With a faint, remote smile, Talley said, “It was what the laws of war demanded. My nation wishes me to conquer the Forsakens, and I do as my nation asks. Do you still think your rebels can win this war?”

Goth had not known before, but now he was sure of it. He was about to say so when he realized that what he and Talley meant by “the war” were probably two different things.

“If you mean the war of guns and ships and armies,” he said, “they probably cannot.”

“Is there another one?”

“Yes, of course. The inner war, the war of balances.”

“Of ideologies, you mean? Whoever wins the war of force will win that one as well. History is written by the victors.”

It was not what Goth had meant. He gazed at the hillside, tried to count the spikes, lost count. The thought of so much pain made him lightheaded. The world blurred into unreality.

“Those people there,” he said, “they are winning the war. They will enter your soul, and all your people’s souls. They will always be with you now. The more you hurt them, the closer you will be bound. Some day you will not be able to look at yourselves without seeing them.”

Talley gazed across the harbour with a fierce detachment. “Can’t you get it through your head that I don’t believe in your balances, or your atonement? They have no power over me. And you have no power, either.”

Goth laughed. He would not have done it, except he felt the drug leaving his system; he stood at the edge of the blank madness of desire, and it made him reckless. “But I do,” he said. “I am your victim. Every person becomes his victim.”

“I have merely given you your heart’s desire,” Talley said. His voice was light; but the drug had made Goth’s senses unnaturally keen, and he heard the provocation underneath. For some reason Talley wanted Goth to break down and condemn him, to stand on high moral ground.

“May I go now?” Goth said.

Talley looked at Goth as if they were the only ones in the world. The edges of Goth’s vision were blanking out; he could see only Talley’s face, at once very near and very far away.

“You are escaping me, aren’t you?” Talley said.

“More every day,” Goth said. “Whatever you want from me, you had better get it soon.”

“Damn you!” Talley said, very quietly. “I want you not to be a good man.”

Abruptly, he turned to the marine captain who stood nearby and ordered, “Take him back below. Tonight, give him no achra. I want him to survive long enough to see me break the back of this rebellion.”

Goth nearly cried out in agony at the thought of no achra; but his throat had gone dry, and no sound would come out. He began to tremble as they led him back to prison.

In a secluded inlet on the north coast of Vill, a silent army was coming ashore. Harg watched the ant-swarm of activity from the deck of the
Windemon
. It was a scene of controlled chaos. Four ships lay at anchor in the bay, disgorging their loads of men and equipment in a calculated rush. The water was crowded with rowboats, the beach a milling mass. Nearby, there were tense, hushed orders from the shiphands controlling the ropes of a cannon swaying in a hammock from the improvised crane of the
Windemon
’s main yard. Ropes and muscles taut, they slowly lowered the iron barrel into the cutter waiting below.

Barko appeared at his side. “Everything ready?” Harg asked.

“As ready as it can be,” Barko said. He grinned in exhilaration, looking even nastier than usual.

Harg clasped his friend’s hand. “Good luck.” Then, on an impulse, he hugged Barko close. “Be careful,” he said.

“I will. See you in Villamish.” Barko turned toward the waiting gig.

Harg wished he were going, too—or that he were sending someone less valuable to him. Barko’s party would have the riskiest, and most important, job. But the plans were long since settled, and he owed Barko the opportunity. Even so, he watched the gig leave with a feeling of misgiving. The knowledge of battle ahead waited like an ulcer in his stomach that could only be cured by living through it.

So far, the plan was going like clockwork. The day before, they had been miles away at Bindlequay, waiting for the wind to change. At sunset a dark wall of cloud had appeared on the western horizon and the wind had shifted strongly to the northwest. They had set out under cover of darkness. All night and all day they had sailed south, well away from land, trying to avoid being sighted.

They had made landfall at Dohr, and met there with the scouts from Vill, who had the information they needed. The Inning fleet was still at anchor in Villamish Bay, resting after the hard labour of bombarding and burning the defenceless town. The local resistance knew the number of troops and armaments Talley had stationed in the fort. They provided a map of the island. Everything Harg had wanted. All they needed now was for an avenging fleet to swoop down on the Innings and trap them in harbour.

And then news had arrived that almost stopped the attack cold. An express boat from Lashnish caught up with them, carrying the news that Vice-Admiral Joffrey was on the way with ten more ships. If they could wait till he arrived, the two fleets would be more equally matched, the risk less weighted in the Innings’ favour. But if they waited, the chance to trap Talley in port might slip away. He might sail off to another isle, to level another town, and the next time they met the circumstances might not be so favourable. Harg had assembled the captains to ask their opinions, but they had deferred to him. In the end, he had decided to go ahead.

Leaving most of his fleet hidden at Dohr under Jearl, Harg had taken four ships and crept stealthily over to the Innings’ very back door on Vill. The force they landed would travel overland, hidden by night. By dawn their cannons would be positioned on the ridge north of Villamish harbour, in easy range of the ships sheltered there. Meanwhile, Harg and Jearl would rendezvous and sail round to blockade the Inning fleet in the harbour. With his ships trapped, Corbin Talley would have no choice but to surrender to a force less than half his size. By this time tomorrow, the war might be over.

Gill was coming back on board from his reconnaissance ashore. “Well?” Harg asked him. “Have we been seen?”

“Of course,” Gill said. “In a couple of hours, half the Adaina on the island will know we’re here. But I don’t think they’ll give us away. They’re hailing us as saviours, especially now word has spread that you’re here. After what the Innings did to Villamish, the islanders want revenge. They’ve heard about Pont, too.”

“Any news about Talley’s fleet?”

“They say it’s still in harbour, just as it has been. In this weather, they won’t leave unless they get wind of us.” Gill frowned up at the lowering sky.

Night had fallen by the time they landed the last cannon. Signalling by lantern, the ships drew offshore and began to beat north again, away from danger of discovery. Now for a while all they had to do was wait. While Barko’s troops spent a hard night hauling cannons over the hills, the officers on ship could eat a leisurely dinner and catch some sleep.

The officers gathered in the after cabin for the evening meal. Harg wore a uniform, in deference to the Torna present; but around his waist he wrapped a scarlet sash with a dirk thrust into it. Katri presided as captain of the
Windemon
, promoted again by Harg after Jonci’s death. Everyone present was either a veteran of the Rothur war or had been through the battles at Harbourdown and Pont.

The conversation took a turn toward grisly humour as they reminisced about other battles—ears shot off, ships afire, a man who contrived to strangle himself in the rigging. Listening, Harg could hear the awareness of death in all their voices.

“You think
you’ve
seen it all,” said the gunner’s mate, a thickset man with bushy eyebrows. “In Rothur, I had a gun crew that figured out how to skip a ball off the deck of an enemy ship, like a flat stone on water. I was on top of them to quit and aim at the target, till they bounced a ball twice down the deck of a Rothur warship and right into a crowd of officers. The rotting lubbers were so dumbcracked to see a cannonball bounce, they stood staring at it till it knocked them down like ninepins.”

The first time Harg had heard the story, the fact that the gun crew was Adaina had been a big part of it. Now everything had shifted. The dividing line was no longer Torna and Adaina, but veteran and non-veteran. They had had to depend on each other, and save each other, too many times now to make fine distinctions. In the end, life and death were the only distinctions that mattered.

When the air was dense with pipe smoke, Katri called for some music, and a fiddler came in, followed by a boy who played the tin whistle. They started out with wild jigs, but soon fell back on the mournful music of the Isles, and everyone sang the words in a growing effusion of sentimentality. Half a dozen lost causes of the past were made noble by music.

It was not yet midnight when Harg felt the rhythm of the ship’s motion shift, and he pushed back his chair to go up on deck. Gill and Katri followed to escape the smoke, leaving the rest to sing down their nerves.

“Why do all those songs talk about losing?” Harg said as they closed the cabin door behind them.

“Because up to now the Adaina have never won,” Katri said. “It’s hard to get used to the feeling.”

For the hundredth time Harg was wondering if he should have waited for Joffrey to arrive. He gave a regretful laugh. “Serves us right, for thinking our leaders ought to be good people,” he said.
A good man wouldn’t lead all these ships into battle
, he thought. He couldn’t act with such calculated cruelty, knowing how people were going to die.

When they emerged into the air, a spate of rain was hammering on the deck. The night was pitch black. The dim binnacle lamp seemed like the only light in all the world. “If the Mundua are trying to help, I wish they’d stay out of it,” Harg said to Katri.

“The weather won’t matter so much once we’re in the lee of the island,” she said.

“I’m thinking of Barko.”

“Oh, right.”

There was no way to know if the land force was running into problems, no way to come to their aid, no way to rescue them easily in this weather. He peered south, toward the island, but saw nothing.

“I think we should set out early,” Katri said. “It may take us a while to find Jearl in this weather, and there’s no danger of our being seen. It’s black as Ashte’s ass out here.”

“Fine. Give the signal.” Harg would be just as happy to be moving.

It did not, in fact, take them long to find Jearl; by some happy coincidence they spotted the signal lanterns on the
Smoke
’s mizzen peak barely half an hour later. By then the wind had them all tossing under reefed sails, so Harg decided to run the chance of taking the ships round early to the island’s lee side where the town lay. On a normal night, they might have been spotted from Villamish Fort; tonight he guessed there was little chance of it.

Harg had expected to be able to see some lights from the town as they drew down the coast, but all was dark, bombed into oblivion. When they had come even with the spot where he guessed the harbour entrance lay, he gave the signal for the ships to take up their positions in a broad arc about a mile from shore.

“We’ll wait for dawn or Barko’s signal, whichever comes first,” he said. “Then we’ll close in.”

The waiting frayed his nerves; he couldn’t go below despite the cold wind and the spurts of rain. They were caught between risks. If they came within blockade range early, the ships would be exposed to the guns from the fortress. But if the alarm went up before they were in position, the Inning fleet might slip from the harbour. He couldn’t let either thing happen.

“Who’s there?” one of Katri’s officers demanded in a tense, hushed tone. He was staring out into the blackness of the sea, one of the watchmen beside him. When Harg came up he turned back, shaking his head. “I thought I saw a ship,” he said.

Everyone was jumpy, Harg thought. He longed for the boom of Barko’s cannon.

In the end, it was the dawn that came first. One moment all was pitchy, the next there was a faint greyness in the eastern sky. Gill emerged onto the main deck, yawning. “Signal the ships to make ready, Gill,” Harg said. “We’ll move the instant we can see where we are.”

He glanced east, then swore softly, for he could see the outline of a ship’s rigging already moving against the sky. “Ashes! Who’s broken position?” he said.

He was answered by a fiery flash. The air exploded, suddenly alive with hot lead. As if in echo, broadside after broadside went off, all down the line of his ships.

The
Windemon
’s crew was erupting onto deck in a panicky chaos. “To your quarters! Man the guns!” Katri was shouting. The gun crews had barely assembled when a second broadside ripped into them.

“Close up! Form line of battle!” Harg bellowed from the taffrail, desperately hoping the next ship in line would hear and pass it on. He couldn’t even see how close his ships were, or where the enemy was. All he could tell was that the fire was coming from the offshore side. The attacking ships weren’t acting like some patrol that had blundered into them and decided to open fire. They were sure, coordinated, guided by a ruthlessly efficient plan. Was it possible that the full Inning fleet had sneaked out of the harbour under cover of night, and had come on the rebels from behind?

Two hundred yards away, the orange light from another broadside momentarily lit up the scene, and he glimpsed the
Lark
’s decks milling with confusion. Not one of his ships had yet managed to return fire.

He was swearing a long string of nonsense words. At his side, Gill said, “What do you want us to do?”

Harg forced himself to shut his mouth and think. Think. That was his job. “Count their ships for me as they fire,” he said. “I’ve got to know where they are.”

The crash of splintered wood sounded. He glimpsed the masts of a ship passing across their stern, guns smoking. “Rot them!” he said. There were too many of them. It had to be the full fleet.

Katri was looking to him. “You still want us to hold the line?” she asked.

“Do I look crazy?” Harg said. Somehow, Corbin Talley must have been warned. It was the only way he could have known.

“Gill, signal to withdraw,” Harg said.

“Withdraw?” Gill looked as though he hadn’t thought the word was in Harg’s vocabulary.

“It’s an old pirate trick,” Harg said.

A cannon boomed, and the bulwarks near them exploded in a shower of splinters. Something hit Harg’s face with the force of a boxer’s fist and sent him careening back onto the deck.

For a few seconds, every nerve in Harg’s body seemed to be rerouted; he was aware of nothing but excruciating agony in his right eye. Each time he tried to blink or jerk away from it, the pain skewered him again, drove deeper.

He was on his back, lying on the deck. Gill was at his side, trying to pry his hand away from his face. Harg fought him, crazed with pain. At last Gill won. “Blessed Ashte!” he said. “You men—come here quick! Take him down to the aft cabin.”

It occurred to Harg that he had been killed. No, this hurt too much for death. He gripped Gill’s hand. It was the nearest thing. “Don’t worry, Harg, you’ll be all right,” Gill said in his ear.

Harg wanted to laugh, to say it was a lie, but his throat wasn’t working. Then someone was picking him up; he was floating through the air, downward. He was supposed to pass out now, he thought; but tonight nothing was going the way it was supposed to. All around him people were shouting, moving furniture. Then he was laid on a cot. He couldn’t open his eyes, or the pain came back.

They pried his hand away again; it was sticky with blood. “Gods, that’s awful,” someone said. Harg tried to raise his hand again, to feel what was wrong, but someone stopped him.

At last he managed to get some words out. “Just patch me up so I can go back on deck,” he said hoarsely. “Just make me last till we’re out of here. After that, it doesn’t matter.”

Someone pressed a pipe stem to his mouth, and he smelled the dreamweed. “Here, smoke this,” Gill said. Then, to someone else, “We have to get that splinter out.”

There followed what seemed like an endless round of consultations. The dreamweed was making Harg relaxed and dizzy. The room seemed terribly cold; he was shivering. Someone was knocking on the door. A cannon ball, he thought, and laughed silently. A whole crowd of cannon balls at the door, waiting to tumble in on him if he answered. It was no more than he deserved. How had Talley found out?

“He’s unconscious now,” someone said.

“No, I’m not,” Harg answered. His face felt like someone was ramming a bayonet into it. “What’s happening? Who’s giving orders?”

“Keep smoking,” Gill said.