Ison of the Isles (31 page)

Two biweekly newspapers had sprung up to advocate different policies, and Nathaway could easily have made his views known. But Bartelso coached him not to let slip any comment that could be construed as opposition. “It may be your right, but Corbin is still dictator, and could close down these rags and clap you back in jail any time he took a notion to do it,” he warned.

“I think his opposition would love that,” Nathaway was forced to observe.

“Maybe so, but we can make our point without it,” Bartelso said. He had a fine-tuned talent for implication and innuendo, and made sure that Nathaway’s gaunt and pallid condition became a matter of public record. Nathaway often felt like Exhibit A in Corbin’s ongoing trial by public opinion. If the journalists realized that they were being manipulated, they seemed eager to cooperate.

One day he and Bartelso sat eating lunch together at a suitably conspicuous table in a restaurant where expatriates could stare at them in scandalized sympathy. Or rather, Nathaway sat pushing some food around a plate while Bartelso sipped a cup of the black concoction that kept him moving sixteen hours a day, not always in pursuit of truth and justice, but in that direction a sufficient portion of the time.

“You will need to put some of that food in your mouth if you want to stop looking like a walking cadaver,” Bartelso said.

Nathaway gave up and pushed the plate away. The fact was, nothing Inning seemed appetizing to him any more. Inning boots chafed his feet now, and Inning manners chafed his patience. It all felt alien and artificial.

Everyone around him seemed to be forgetting something: this wasn’t all about Inning, it was about the islanders, too. It was about the people he had left in the refugee camp in Lashnish, and the prisoners crammed into the hold of the warships, and the ghosts that now populated Yora. It was about the people even now imprisoned in the dank cells of the palace.

“Wabin,” he said hesitantly, “would you consider taking on another case?”

“Mmm,” said Bartelso, watching him speculatively. “Whose case do you have in mind?”

“Two of them, actually,” Nathaway said, looking at him seriously. “Spaeth Dobrin and Harg Ismol.”

Bartelso’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “You must think I love lost causes.”

“No,
just
causes.”

The lawyer waved at a waiter to bring him another elixir of caffeine. He then settled back, eyeing Nathaway keenly. “I had anticipated your asking about the lady. The other one perplexes me. You realize, we have no reason to thank this young fellow for causing such a ruckus. At the end of the Rothur campaign there was considerable support for disbanding major portions of the Navy. When things flared up in the Forsakens, that died. The court could have made some headway but for this man.”

“Not everything that happens is about Inning,” Nathaway said in some frustration. “These people just wanted what we all want, some autonomy and self-control. You would have fought, too, if that was all you knew how to do.”

“Perhaps. But for our purposes, the best thing might be to let your brother and his cronies kill the poor bastard in some suitably gruesome way, in order to shock the waverers back home.”

Nathaway sat forward, staring at Bartelso’s fatherly face. “You can’t mean that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s
unjust
.”

“No, dear boy, it’s only politics.”

The waiter arrived with his coffee, and he paused to tip the man. When he turned back to find Nathaway still staring at him in deep disillusion, he grumbled, “You and your brother are two of a kind, you know that? Both of you amateur ethicists. I swear, the two of you could turn the world over, if you could just heave on the same side.”

“So you won’t do it?” Nathaway said.

“I didn’t say that. I’ll look into it if it would give you pleasure, Nat. But I cannot hold out much hope. I must say, it perplexes me why you should wish the man well. If I’m not mistaken, he was your rival for the affections of the young lady, true?”

First, Nathaway sat thinking of how to explain the difference between lover and bandhota; then he sat wondering when he had started to understand the difference himself. At last he shook his head. “It’s complicated,” he said.

“Evidently.” Bartelso paused to spoon sugar into his coffee until the sight made Nathaway queasy. “The young lady, now. I am ahead of you there. I have been checking into her status, and—” he gave Nathaway a furtive glance—“well, what I found may influence your decision whether to go ahead.”

Unable to imagine anything that could induce him to change his mind, Nathaway said, “Go on.”

“Well, to begin with, she hasn’t yet been charged with any crime, and it’s a little difficult to imagine what crime they
would
charge her with. We stopped prosecuting people for witchcraft quite some time ago, and sleeping with the enemy is not illegal. Since your brother has apparently decided not to charge her for attempted assassination, we—”

“Assassination?” Nathaway interrupted.

“Yes. The story is, she broke into the Admiral’s room at night; the guards found her standing over him with a razor. But the only blood shed was her own. She had—what is it, my boy? You know something?”

Nathaway felt as if his stomach had dropped through the floor. “Oh, my god,” he said. “She tried to give him dhota.”

“That’s bad, is it?” Bartelso said.

“It’s terrible.” The thought was like a hot poker twisting in his vitals. How could she have done it? Corbin, of all people. “Do you know any more?” he said urgently. He had to know how far it had gotten.

“Well, they concluded that it was some sort of native sorcery. But, unlikely as it sounds, it appears to have worked. Among the inner staff, the whisper is that he is quite besotted with her. She is lodged, along with the old man, in the chambers adjoining the Admiral’s, where he can visit her at all hours. The officers say he is distracted and impatient with details, generally quite unlike himself. They all assume she has seduced him.”

Nathaway was in torment. Had they made love? Had he fed her the psychic poison of his mind? Was she suffering for him as she had done for Harg? Or did she love that repellent man with all the helpless instinct of the dhotamar? “Wabin,” he said, “you’ve got to find some way I can get in to see her.”

“Don’t push your luck, son,” the lawyer said. “This is no time to inject a quarrel about a woman into all the other problems you’re facing.”

“That’s not what I want,” he said desperately. “I want to marry her.”

*

If only it had been as simple as seduction.

It was true, Spaeth and Goth were luxuriously housed in a suite of rooms adjoining the Admiral’s in Tornabay Palace, with a private door connecting them. It was a lovely setting—tall, airy windows opening onto a garden just budding out with spring, thick carpeting, furniture inlaid with tropical woods. It was lodging fit for the sovereign’s consort, perhaps even designed for that purpose. And he came to see her frequently, at least once a day. Lately, he had started eating dinner with her every night when he didn’t have a social engagement. Sometimes Goth joined them; more often they were alone. But despite what was universally assumed, they had touched one another only in rare, charged moments.

It had been going on ever since that night in Harbourdown. His orders exiling her from his presence had lasted less than a day. Then he had come to see her, restless as a maddened animal, demanding to know what she had done to him. At first he didn’t believe her. Over the following days he probed and questioned, argued, gathered evidence, discarded several alternative theories, and at last was convinced that what she claimed to have done was real.

For a while then he was deeply angry, to have had his innermost soul violated as she had done, against his will. During this stage he had shunned her and thrown himself into his work. It was not until after the surrender of Lashnish that he had returned, and then it was as if something had changed. The idea that another person had shared his secrets had started to have a hold on his mind. It was terrifying and abhorrent to him—and yet it fascinated him, drew him to her. Gradually she had begun to see in furtive moments the pleasure he got from the thought. For the first time in his life, he entertained the notion that someone knew him, truly knew him, without any barriers of self-interest or delusion, and still did not recoil, still wanted to touch him, still would give him as much of her as he would take, and take as much of himself as he would give.

By the time they came to Tornabay, he was so explosive with pent-up desire that even the Innings around him could see it. They all assumed it was sexual, and they were right; but it was far more than that. He was preoccupied by the strange temptation to see himself as he never had before, as the sort of man who could inspire love.

Still, he fought it. One night, as they were dining together, he said abruptly, “You know, some men take native concubines. I’ve never thought of myself as the type.”

“Is that what you think is going on?” she said.

He hesitated, and she realized he was trying to classify what was going on into some category he knew. “That’s what the world would think,” he said.

“The world would be wrong.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Fuck the world.”

And yet, that night he returned to his own room and locked the door between them.

That locked door became a symbol of the contest of wills that was going on. Every night she tried the door to see if he had finally left it open for her. He knew she tried it. Sometimes she could feel him standing on the other side of it, inches away, debating whether to let her in, forcing himself not to.

It was testing every fibre of Spaeth’s self-discipline. If it had only been sexual, it would have been simpler; they both desired it more with every passing day. The thing he feared was what sexual abandon might lead to, the chance that in a vulnerable moment she would take from him something he was not yet ready to surrender. Until he was prepared to put himself at risk, there was nothing she could do but wait.

In the end, the only person who could really seduce him was himself.

The thing that cinched the bond between them was Goth. Together they watched him decline till he could barely move from his bed, and his mind was absent most of the time. It seemed almost impossible that he could still be hanging tenaciously to a thread of life. Their shared grief over Goth brought Spaeth and Corbin together in a way that even dhota couldn’t. It was a simple comfort to both of them not to have to watch him die alone.

Gradually, Corbin began to confide in her some of what was on his mind, so she heard about the political firestorms his victory had set off.

“Now that I have done exactly what they asked me to do, they have decided perhaps it wasn’t what they wanted, or they don’t like the way I did it,” he told her. “When we were at war, no severity was too harsh. Now that I’ve secured peace for them, everyone is racked with conscience. To hell with them all. How did they expect me to fight an
ethical
war?”

He was at the pinnacle of power. No one in the Forsakens could oppose him, and yet he felt more isolated and embattled every day. “It’s just as well that I didn’t take it seriously when they were all idolizing me,” he said with a cynical, dismissive humour. “At least now that they’re demonizing me it’s not such a shock.” And yet, whatever he said, she knew that he
had
taken the adulation seriously, or at least enjoyed it enough that its sudden withdrawal felt like a galling injustice.

“I don’t need to put up with this,” he told her more than once. “I’m going to resign. All I have to do is hang on long enough to finish what I started here, so I don’t leave things worse off than when I arrived.”

“Then what will you do?” she asked. He only sat staring ahead of him, unable to answer.

At last one evening he came in with a stern and rigid face. He sat down on a settee, and she sat down next to him, curling her bare feet under her. When he didn’t tell her at once what was wrong, she cautiously took his hand in hers.

“My mother’s lawyer has filed a writ of habeas corpus on your behalf,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means my family is going to mount a legal battle to get me to turn you over.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’m not sure I can win it. I cannot defy the law outright. I am supposed to be upholding it.” He stared stonily ahead, hiding from her. “The attorney is demanding to be allowed to see you. I have very few grounds to refuse him.”

“All right,” she said.

He turned to look at her then, his eyes challenging. “Is that what you prefer? To get away from here, and go back to my brother?”

She saw then what this was about. She drew back a little; his jealousy was radiating hot enough to scorch her. “Nathaway is my bandhota,” she said. “You could be, but you won’t. It’s what you’ve chosen.”

His jaw clenched. He said, “I hope Nathaway rots in hell.”

She still had hold of his hand, and now she tightened her grip. “No, you don’t,” she said. “The only reason you resent him is because he was allowed to have the life you wanted to live.”

His eyes on her widened for a moment; then he stood up and turned away. “I have to dress for dinner,” he said, his voice harshly controlled. “I have an important meeting tonight.” He left then, through the door into his own room. But whether from oversight or intention, he didn’t lock it after him.

Spaeth waited a while, listening. At last she heard him moving around in the next room, and went silently to the door. When she let herself in, he was standing before the mirror in a silk dressing-gown. His hair was still damp from his bath. He saw her in the mirror and stiffened, but didn’t turn. Then she knew the unlocked door had been an invitation.

Slowly she came forward till she could see his face in the mirror. His mood had changed; he wasn’t angry any more. “What are you thinking?” she said.

He gave a slight, remorseful smile. “I was thinking that I’m not entirely decrepit. There are still parts of me reasonably intact.”