Ison of the Isles (13 page)

The tableau broke; they turned back to their guns. Too hesitantly, too slowly. The ships parted; not a gun went off.

“Come about!” Harg ordered. The sailors obeyed slowly; he felt it was only his will forcing them forward.

Gill was at his side. “Harg, stop and think a second.”

“Be quiet or I’ll arrest you, too,” Harg said.

Far to the west, the setting sun had broken free of the clouds and now it flooded the scene with a vivid red light. There were gasps from the crew, for the light had turned the water crimson. It looked like they were sailing across a sea of blood.

Harg saw it all with hallucinatory vividness. There was blood everywhere; it was dripping from the sails, it had soaked the deck. He felt it swimming like tears in his ruined eye, dripping from his chin. All the blood he had ever spilled, come back to drown him. Nature itself had mutinied against him.

Ahead on the Inning stern, Goth’s body glowed in the gory light. The Inning stood beside him, gesturing them to back off, to withdraw. There was a long, ugly knife in his hand. The threat was unmistakable.

Harg wanted to blast that scene from his mind, to burn it away forever. “Fire!” he shouted at the gunners. But they were afraid of something larger than him now. Harg seized a smouldering match from the hands of the gunner nearest him and pushed the man away, intending to fire the gun himself.

Then hands were pulling him back. The blood was choking him, darkness was closing in. It was too late; the nightmare had won.

There was a smell of rotting flesh. They had put him in the morgue with the corpses, Harg thought. Why had no one given him a decent burial? Did he have to tell them everything?

Goth was bending over him. There was a crow on his shoulder. There had been crows on the spars, he thought—why had he not noticed them? The bird’s eyes glittered with malicious intelligence.
I can have you
, it seemed to say.

“Will you let me cure you?” Goth said, reaching out a cool grey hand to touch Harg’s flaming face. But it wasn’t Goth; it was a strange dhotamar, his face suffused with longing. He wanted to enter Harg’s soul and possess him, to gently bend him to the Lashnura will.

“Get away!” Harg said. His voice was a hoarse croak, like a crow’s. “Don’t touch me.”

“Let me help you,” the Grey Man pleaded. “I can take away the pain.”

The thought made Harg want to weep in longing. Over the long days, the pain had ground him down to a nub. He had no strength left to bear it. But he knew the dhotamar would take away more than that. To be free of pain, Harg would have to surrender all the scar tissue that made him what he was. He wouldn’t be the same person afterwards. “Go blow smoke,” he said through clenched teeth.

The Grey Man drew back, his eyes filling with tears. “I can’t do anything unless he is willing. He must help to cure himself. It’s how dhota works.”

“
Now
will you listen to me?” another voice broke in. It was Joffrey’s. Harg knew he was hallucinating again.

“All right,” Gill said. “We’ll do it your way, then.”

*

An Inning bent over him, peering into his face.

“That eye will have to go,” the Inning said. “It’s poisoning his system.”

Panic brought Harg awake. Couldn’t they see? He only had one eye now; if they took it, he would be blind. He struggled to sit up.

“What’s going on?” he demanded. As he said it, he realized he had been asking that question for days now, and people had been answering it, and he couldn’t remember a word they had said.

Gill came forward. “We’ve got to get you well, Harg. The surgeon wants to operate.”

The thought gave Harg a horrible, queasy feeling. “An Inning?” he said. What were they trying to do to him?

“Listen, Harg,” Gill said in a low voice. “Try to understand this time. The surgeon is one of the Inning prisoners from Pont. We’ve offered him his freedom if he cures you. He’s already done you some good; your fever is way down. Joffrey says their doctors are bound by some sort of rules where they can’t harm patients, even their enemies. Maybe it’s one of their laws.”

Harg didn’t dare say a word, but there was a clammy terror in his guts at the thought of a surgeon’s knife cutting away his dead eye. All the bravery he had ever learned had been leached away; now he was down to a shivering core of cowardice.

As if he could see it all, Gill said, “Don’t worry, Harg. The surgeon’s got drugs; he says you’ll never feel a thing.”

Harg was almost ashamed of the relief he felt.

The surgeon had an air of dispassionate, military efficiency. Feeling faint-headed, Harg watched him set out an array of ghoulish instruments on white linen. Then the Inning produced a bottle of small, milky slivers. “Your arm, please,” he said.

Joffrey looked in the door just as the doctor pushed one of the slivers under Harg’s skin. Harg’s last clear thought was how indecipherable Joffrey’s expression was.

*

There were flashes of lucidity in his memory, like a trail of crumbs leading back. He tried to follow them. There had been sunlight, and another boat, and birds on the yard-arms. Flocks of birds gathered, watching him. There was an oil lamp swinging above him; he had watched it for hours, hypnotized. Then he had held a perfectly sensible conversation with someone he didn’t recognize, but who seemed to recognize him. And the guns were going off—no, the guns
weren’t
going off, and that was the problem. All the time there was a feeling of urgency that he get back in control. Things were out of control.

Finally the trail led, like a fuse, to the memory where it all started, the one that had repeated in his mind, agonizingly, for days. He held a long-bladed knife. It had been sharpened and resharpened till its blade was thin; he had used it so many times. He pushed the point through the skin of Goth’s chest; then, sawing back and forth, cut a long gash just under the ribs. He thrust his hand into the raw-edged hole, there among the warm organs, the blood running down his arm. He thrust upward through slippery things till he found the heart, beating, and squeezed it till Goth screamed.

“Blessed Ashte!” he gasped, sitting bolt upright, his own heart racing. “Did I kill him?”

Tway rose from a seat nearby. They weren’t in
Windemon
’s cabin; this place was much smaller. Tway’s face looked strained, as if she hadn’t slept in days. “Harg,” she said, “you didn’t kill anyone. You’ve got to stop talking about it.”

Harg knew she had told him this before, too. But the memory was there, so clear. “Is he alive, then?” Harg asked.

“As far as we know,” Tway said wearily.

An alternate version was trickling into Harg’s mind. He couldn’t reconcile them. It occurred to him that perhaps one was true, and one was
true
. He closed his eye, feeling overloaded, exhausted. No wonder they all wanted to gouge out his eyes. He put a hand up to feel his face; it was tightly bandaged.

“We didn’t capture Talley’s ship, did we?” he said dully.

“No.”

“The war would be over now if we had.”

“Maybe.”

“It would be, Tway. With Talley prisoner, we could have negotiated. Now a lot of people are going to die.” He looked up through a haze at her familiar face. She looked a little thinner, but still had that Yoran look, like someone who would always know where the land lay, no matter how far to sea life might blow her. He said, “It was like a riddle. If you could prevent terrible carnage and save your country by killing the person you love most, would you do it?”

Only it wasn’t that simple, or that noble. No, somewhere in him there was a part that had wanted to use that knife for years.

She was looking down at him with such an expression of compassion that it finally occurred to him that she was really there.

“Tway,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He tried to think when he had last seen her. In Tornabay, on that terrible night, and not since. “I was worried for you. Where have you been?”

She took his hand, and squeezed it. “In Lashnish. I came as soon as I heard you were in trouble. I’ll always come if you’re in trouble, Harg.”

Gripping her hand, he raised it to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. She was his oldest, most faithful friend. He lay back against the pillows, unable to let go of her hand. “Where are we?” he asked. The cabin looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

“We’re on the
Ripplewill
, heading for Lashnish.”

It was the last answer he had expected. “Lashnish?” he said. “What for?”

She sat down beside him. Her face was grave. She reached out to feel his forehead, then said, “If I tell you what’s happening, will you remember this time?”

“Yes,” he said.

“We had to get you away from the Navy, to some place where you couldn’t come to any harm. Or cause it.”

He sat up, certain now that something serious had happened. “Who’s in charge?” he demanded.

“Of the Navy? Joffrey.”

He gave an inarticulate sound of protest.

“Look, Harg, he may not be a great hero, but at least he’s prudent and sane.”

As opposed to me, Harg thought bitterly.

“And it’s a rotting lucky thing he came along when he did,” she said.

“Did he get to Vill in time to rescue the land party?” Harg asked.

Tway shook her head. “I’m sorry, Harg.”

“What happened?”

“They were captured. Probably even before your ships were attacked.”

There was a twisting feeling in Harg’s gut. “Barko?” he said.

“Executed,” Tway answered.

Harg looked away. He could see Barko’s face so clearly, hear his voice, his sense of humour. To think of him executed like a hundred others by people who didn’t even know him—it was unjust, unworthy of the world. Harg had relied on Barko for so much, trusted him so implicitly. It had almost been like having a brother.

In a tensely controlled voice, Harg said, “So what
has
Joffrey done?”

“Retreated. Pulled back to regroup.”

It was the opposite of what Harg would have done. He would have pressed on, hunted down Corbin Talley with a ferocious implacability. He would have done anything it took to catch the man, then killed him gladly with his own bare hands. For a moment, murderous fantasies flooded his brain. How would he do it? With a knife? A garrotte around that patrician throat? A pistol shot to the eye would be just. Or hang him from the yard of his own ship till the life was choked out of him, and the crows pecked at his eyes.

His mouth was dry. He realized that Tway was gazing at him in alarm. Something must have showed in his face. He took a long, shaky breath. “Why are we going to Lashnish?” he said. “Why not Harbourdown?”

Gently, she said, “We were at Harbourdown for a while. That’s where the Inning doctor treated you. But we had to leave. It wasn’t safe for you.”

“What do you mean?” Harbourdown was his haven, his adopted home, Barko’s home. The place on earth that loved him most.

Tway took his hand between both of hers, and pressed it. “Harg, you have no idea what trouble you’re in. The story of what happened aboard your ship has spread everywhere. There’s not a fishwife in all the Isles who hasn’t heard that you ordered your crew to kill the Heir of Gilgen. If Katri hadn’t disobeyed, your life wouldn’t be worth the air you’re breathing.”

It was all wrong, all backwards. The story was true on the surface, but deeply false underneath. He started to say, “But if I had—”

“Oh, there’s plenty of ifs,” Tway broke in. “If it hadn’t been Goth. If you’d just had a pint or two more blood in your brain at the time. It all would have been different,
if
. But that doesn’t matter to anyone else, you see. All they hear is, you tried to kill the Heir of Gilgen. And that means you’re doing the work of the Mundua and Ashwin.”

He couldn’t believe her. She was exaggerating to justify what they were doing—putting Joffrey in charge of the Navy, spiriting him away to a place where he could be put under the thumbs of the Lashnura. It was the Grey Folk behind this. They had sent his oldest friend to lure him back so they could correct the insult to their power.

He threw aside the covers and swung his legs out of the bed. Tway said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going up on deck,” he said grimly. “We’re not going to Lashnish.”

He tried to stand, and almost immediately had to sit again. His legs were weaker than they had ever been, his balance was gone. Fighting a wave of vertigo, he tried again, and failed. Tway just sat watching him as frustration and embarrassment at his helplessness took over. Even his own body was betraying him.

“The crew won’t take orders from you anyway, Harg,” she said at last. “No one will. Torr was the only captain in Harbourdown who would even consent to take you, and his crew are just as scared of you as everyone else. They didn’t want to have a tool of the Mundua on their boat.”

He stared at her, appalled that she would say such a thing of him. A human who collaborated with the Mundua and Ashwin was an object of loathing and fear, fit only to be destroyed without pity. “Tway,” he said seriously, “I’ve made no bargains with the Mundua and Ashwin. You know me. I’m telling the truth.”

Her expression softened, but her voice was still firm. “I don’t think you intend to work for them. You don’t even realize how the pain has built up over the years and given them a way to manipulate you. They’re sneaky, Harg. They creep into our hearts without our even knowing it, and start to control us. When it happens to ordinary people, they just make their families or villages miserable. But you’re not an ordinary person. When you start making decisions out of pain, it’s a danger to us all. The Mundua and Ashwin don’t need to do anything, you’re doing it all for them. You’re a force of disorder all by yourself.”

She was the person most loyal to him in all the world, and even she mistrusted him. It felt like nothing was solid underneath him. Not only was his strength gone, and his eye, and Barko; so was everyone’s belief in who he was.

It was only days ago, it seemed, that a whole fleet of ships would have followed him past the edge of this circle. And now, not even his best friend trusted him. The suddenness of the reversal made him realize, bitterly, that no one had been following
him
; they had all been following his shadow, cast larger than life by the light of his victories.

Tway reached out and put a hand on his arm as he sat motionless. She said, “It breaks my heart to see you like this, Harg. You’ve got to let your friends help you, don’t you see? You’ve got to admit you need it.”

All the weight of his past had settled on him at once. He couldn’t hold his head up any more. He sank back on the bed, staring wordlessly at the beams above him, wondering why they had bothered to save his life.

*

When they came in to Lashnish four days later, Harg was up on the foredeck to catch his first glimpse of the fabled Sleeping City. He had never been here before, and as the
Ripplewill
passed down the deep, pine-curtained inlet, it felt as if he were drifting backwards in time, to some moment isolated from change and the concerns of the world. When at last the city appeared before them, cascading down the mountainside, tiered like a frozen waterfall, he felt uplifted by its ancient grandeur. This was his heritage too, he thought, as surely as the humble Adaina villages of the South Chain. This place of soaring architecture was something his ancestors had done, and it was worth saving, worth fighting to defend. He looked over at Tway, standing beside him, but she wasn’t looking at the city; she was looking at him. He reached out and squeezed her hand.

He had woken that morning with some of his optimism revived along with his strength. He had decided not to write off his life until he had had a chance to talk to Tiarch, and hear her diagnosis of the situation. It was hard to believe that he couldn’t still salvage something.