Ison of the Isles (4 page)

“No,” Spaeth said. “He made me, seven years ago. From his own flesh. For sex.”

Agave dropped Spaeth’s hands and stepped involuntarily back. “That is so like him,” she said. Her voice was pregnant with anger.

Defensively, Spaeth said, “You don’t know him. You can’t judge him.”

“Oh, but I do know him,” Agave said bitterly. “Too well.”

“You do?” Now Spaeth’s curiosity overcame her resentment. “How?”

Diplomatically, Auster interrupted, “Perhaps we should sit down for a chat. Let me put the kettle on for some tea.”

He ushered Spaeth and Nathaway into chairs, but Agave was still too disturbed to sit, and roamed the space between them and the window, her lean face restless with memories.

“I knew him years ago, in his youth,” she said. “Oh, he was a charming man then. Handsome, yes, but shallow as a pie pan, promiscuous as a cat. You should have seen him, flirting with the merchants’ daughters like some sort of Inning prince. For that’s what he was, you know: a weakling corrupted by the Innings.”

“No!” Spaeth interrupted. “He knew nothing of the Innings.”

Agave turned on her. “You’re wrong. He was raised in the Governor’s family at Tornabay, back when the Governor was still an Inning, before Tiarch arose. It was clever and cruel of them, to try and corrupt the child who was the very soul of the Isles. The rest of us could only watch, and feel our hearts ache.”

“But it didn’t work,” Spaeth said.

“Didn’t it? Then why, when they set him free, didn’t he come here to Lashnish, to take up his responsibilities? No, he went off somewhere to soak in his carnal pleasures, while the land cried out in need.”

Listening, Nathaway could easily reconstruct the situation in his mind: at the time Agave spoke of, after the battle of Sandhaven, Goth had been a political pawn, prisoner of the people who had killed his father. What could have been more natural than to mimic them? What better way to camouflage himself, than to appear feckless and irresponsible? But he had clearly alienated an orthodox faction of his own people.

“And now,” Agave said, “there he is, back in Tornabay, collaborating with the Innings again.”

“He is not collaborating,” Spaeth said hotly. “He is their prisoner, and it is nearly killing him. I know nothing about what happened years ago, but you are wrong about what is happening now.”

“And what do you know about it?” Agave said, her demanding gaze on Spaeth.

“I saw him ten days ago,” Spaeth said. “It was when he told us to come here, because he could not.”

Agave paused at this, arrested by some thought. She looked at Auster; his eyebrows rose quizzically. “He told you that?” Agave said.

“Yes,” Spaeth said. “We were to find the Isonstone.”

“Tell me,” Agave said slowly, “did he give you anything? Some sort of talisman?”

Spaeth shook her head. “No, nothing.”

“What kind of talisman?” Nathaway said suddenly.

Agave seemed to notice him for the first time. “Something ancient,” she said. “A token.”

“Something like this?” Nathaway pulled at the string around his neck, and brought out the green stone pendant Goth had given him.

The effect on the two Lashnurai was electric. They both gave involuntary exclamations and started toward it. Auster reached out, but pulled back without touching the stone. He looked at Agave, and there was strain in his voice. “Is it the real thing?”

“Bring me a lamp,” she said, and he hurried to fetch one. She bent close then, but looked to Nathaway. “May I touch it?”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

She took it reverently in her hands as Auster held the lamp close. She examined first one side, then the other, then sighed, returning it to Nathaway. She straightened, looking at Auster.

“What is it?” Nathaway asked.

The Grey Lady’s voice was tensely controlled. “It is called the Emerald Tablet,” she said. “An ancient artefact of Alta.”

He looked at it. “Is it really emerald?”

“That is what the records say.” She seemed about to go on, but stopped herself. “Only the Heir of Gilgen may possess it. It has been passed down for generations from one Heir to the next.”

Auster’s eyes on him were grave. “Son, are you sure he meant to give it to you?”

Self-consciously, Nathaway glanced at Spaeth; she was watching curiously. “I asked him if it was for Spaeth,” he said. “He said no, I shouldn’t give it away to anyone.”

“And you had no idea what it meant?” Auster said.

“No,” Nathaway said. “I still don’t. Why would he give it to me? Obviously, I’m no Heir of Gilgen.”

Once again, Auster and Agave exchanged a look. It seemed as if far more were going on between them than Nathaway could catch. Agave’s face was stern with anger. “That fool,” she said in a low voice. “The irresponsible fool.”

“Now, Agave,” Auster said to calm her. “Consider that he may have known something we don’t.”

“It was a message to us,” she said. “One last bit of defiance.” She turned her desperate, angry eyes on Nathaway. “What did he know of you?”

“Really, nothing,” he said. “We’d barely met.”

“And so he gave you this precious thing solely because this girl of his had given dhota for you?”

Nathaway hesitated, not wanting her to misunderstand, but not wanting to set her straight, either. But before he could think of something to say, Spaeth interrupted, “I never gave him dhota.”

Auster and Agave both turned to her. “You said you were bandhotai,” Auster said.

“Oh, we are,” she said, reaching out to take Nathaway’s hand. “He gave dhota for me. I would have died otherwise.”

A flush of terrible embarrassment heated Nathaway’s face. He couldn’t meet their eyes. He started to say, “It wasn’t really me, Spaeth. It was Goth—”

“Are you denying the bandhota bond?” she said, as if it cut her to the heart.

“No,” he said desperately. “Of course not.”

Turning to the listening Lashnurai, Spaeth said, “Do you think I couldn’t tell who was curing me? Just look at his arm.”

Nathaway sat staring at the floor, cooking in his discomfort. Quietly, Auster said, “May we see your arm?”

He was no longer wearing the bandage, but the scar was still ugly and inflamed. When he pushed back his sleeve, he heard Agave suck in her breath.

There was a short silence. Then Auster said, “There is something going on here that we don’t understand.”

Agave pulled a chair forward and sat down for the first time, facing Nathaway, close enough to touch him. “We need to get to the bottom of this—what’s your name?”

“Nathaway Talley,” he said.

For once in his life, there was no sign of recognition at the name. “Are you willing to help us, Nathaway?”

“Look,” he said weakly, “I really don’t care about the Emerald Tablet. If it’s so important, you can have it.”

She shook her head. “No. The artefact itself is not important. Or at least, not as important as the act of giving it, which is what holds all the meaning.”

“Then I’ll give it to you.”

“Not in your present state of ignorance. That would be no better than throwing it away. Goran gave it to you for a reason, and I have to know what that reason was.”

“Well, you can’t find out from me.”

“Yes, I can,” she said. She reached into a leather pouch at her belt, and brought out a stone knife.

“No!” Spaeth cried out, springing from her chair and clutching Nathaway’s arm. “He’s mine!”

“Don’t worry, girl,” Agave said, “I’m not going to give dhota. I simply have to see inside him. I promise you, I won’t change a thing. There will be no bond.”

Spaeth seemed unreconciled by this. “You can’t go inside him,” she pleaded. “He is private, my own.”

Auster moved to her side and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. “We cannot keep our bandhotai to ourselves, my dear,” he said gently. “We all have to share them with the world.”

“But I’ve only had him for a week!” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

“And you will have him still,” Auster said. “This will change nothing between you.” He drew her away to her chair. She looked desolate.

“Sit with her, Auster,” Agave said.

He sat on the broad arm of her chair, his arm around her shoulder. “Now, you must not touch him while Agave is working,” he said.

Nathaway’s heart was floundering, caught between his sharp sympathy for Spaeth’s pain, and nervous agitation for himself. He looked to Agave, who was watching him closely.

“You will need to help me,” she said seriously.

“What—” he started to ask. His mind was swarming with questions, conditions, scenarios, as if he were drafting a contract, seeking certainty. That was what the law gave you, certainty.

“You will have to trust me,” Agave said. “You will have to give yourself up, and surrender all your doubts.”

She was holding out the knife to him. He took the handle in unsteady hands. “Go ahead,” she said. “Just a drop, it’s all we need.”

He had to exhale twice before his hands were steady enough. Then he turned up his wrist and pricked it with the knife tip till a drop of dark blood flowed out onto the skin. He dipped his finger into it. Then, as he had seen Goth do, he touched it to Agave’s forehead, and to his own.

She took both of his hands in hers, holding on strongly. It felt as if she were supporting him. “Don’t be concerned,” she said softly. “No harm will come to you.”

Calmness seemed to flow into him then, and he relaxed, closing his eyes. He felt like the surface of a pool, agitated at first, but gradually becoming smooth and clear. Agave entered him delicately, like a drop of dye dissolving in the water of his mind, suffusing every inch of him, sinking deeper and deeper. He had accepted her presence completely when, deep inside him, he felt her move, reaching out. It triggered a flash of buried emotional memory, and he instinctively clamped down, struggling against her. For a moment he was back in his body, and she was stroking his face, saying “Shhh,” to calm him. He realized that he had cried out.

Under her control his heart slowed again, and she carried him back into the pool, sinking, wrapped around him, into the deepest parts of his mind. The next time a memory exploded into his consciousness he was better prepared, though he was still dimly aware of flinching and groaning. After that they came fast, a jolting cascade of experiences he had long forgotten, vomiting out into the open.

They were all the ugly memories, the ones that carried the sharpest emotions—shame, terror, hatred, rage. All the times he had failed to act right, or had allowed his emotions to act for him. Everything he was ashamed of paraded before his eyes, as vivid as the first time he had experienced them. The portrait of himself sickened him, and he longed for her to stop probing, stop exposing him for what he didn’t want to be.

But she didn’t stop. On and on she went, right through his life, till the pool of his mind had turned dark and turbid with pollution. It felt unclean on his skin.

Long after it had become unendurable, it finally ceased. He was floating again, but far deeper now, so deep there was no surface, and a lucid glow was all around him. The water was crystal clear now, and the light seemed to penetrate every crevice of his being. He floated on it, weightless, unencumbered, and free. All the impurities had washed away, leaving him transparent, more naked than he had ever been. He was nothing but a flow of sensation without any taint of self to block it. He was utterly clear, and all the world showed through him.

When he came back to the room in Lashnish, Agave was still holding his hands, but her head was bowed in exhaustion. He felt battered, and his face was wet with tears. She finally looked up at him, and their eyes met. They said nothing; no words were adequate.

When she let go of his hands and sat back, he knew that she had not been entirely honest about the lack of a dhota-bond. It was not the sharp and sensual bond he felt for Spaeth; but Agave had seen parts of him that no one else had witnessed, and there was an intimacy in that. She rose and kissed him tenderly on the forehead. Her hand rested on his hair for a moment with a maternal warmth. “I am sorry to have made you endure that,” she said. “It was very hard for you. It is always harder for a good person than for a bad one. It is impossible to tell beforehand.”

She walked away then, and Spaeth came over to Nathaway’s side, putting her arms around him. “Oh Nat,” she said, “I didn’t know she was going to hurt you.”

He still felt too drained to talk, but he squeezed her hand.

Auster had gone over to Agave’s side, and they were talking softly together. Nathaway couldn’t hear their words, only the murmur of their voices. He leaned against Spaeth, feeling secure in her warmth. He wanted to sleep.

Presently Auster and Agave seemed to come to some resolution, and Auster went back to stir up the fire under the teakettle. He was soon pressing a cup of hot tea into Nathaway’s hands. “Drink it, my boy,” he said. “We need you back with us. We have some decisions to make.”

It was strong and stimulating, and Nathaway soon felt alertness tingling back into him. He realized that the windows were completely dark. “How long has it been?” he asked.

“Just a couple of hours,” Auster said lightly. “Come with me, I’ll show you the lavatory.”

It felt good to stand; his muscles were stiff. Auster said nothing of consequence to him while they were alone, but when they returned to Agave’s office, the two women were deep in a conversation that broke off when they entered. Spaeth looked reluctant and disturbed.

When they were all seated again, Agave took a long draught of tea and pushed the hair back from her forehead. She looked exhausted; there were dark circles under her eyes. “First,” she said, “I must tell you a little more about this talisman you have, the Emerald Tablet.

“Long ago, in the days before history, the Altans were the greatest civilization the world has ever known. They discovered all the underlying geometry of the world. They knew the crystals and the chords of music, and why they are alike. They even knew the harmonies that drive the stars and compose the soul.

“But in the strange last days of Alta, the forces of disorder—those the Adaina call the Mundua and Ashwin—became unbalanced, and nothing the Altans could do would put them right. So they encoded all their knowledge in a single crystal, and created the Lashnura to carry it down through future generations, bit by bit working to restore the ancient harmony that had been disturbed. We are like single notes in a song they composed long ago. The world as it once was is locked in the Tablet, all its parts forming a chord we cannot yet hear.”