The Tale of Oriel (8 page)

Griff did no more than turn his face in surprise when the seventh Damall lifted the stubby mast out of its blocks and laid it, with its sail pulled close and wrapped secure, flat within the length of the boat. It wasn't the time for asking questions. Rain dripped down their faces and saturated their cloaks.

Climbing out into the seawater, they lifted the boat and carried it clumsily up onto the stony beach, then up onto a low flat rock where it was hidden behind boulders. They set it on its side, and the mast clattered down. The tilted boat made a lean-to shelter.

Before they crawled under it, the seventh Damall led Griff back across the beach to pick up the shattered shell of another small boat, which he had found after days of patient searching. This they lifted more easily, to carry down to the sea. They stood in the rain and watched the waves carry the wreck away, out to sea.

From the narrow cove where they stood, no other island was visible, but there were many islands, scattered alongside the mainland. It was likely that someone on these islands, somehow, would come across the wrecked boat, and tell a tale about it in the market town. It was likely that, should the tale be told, Nikol would hear it, and be satisfied.

The wrecked boat floated into the rainy distance. They turned back to their own boat and crawled under its shelter.

It had been long days and long nights and little time for sleep. The seventh Damall gathered his knees up to his chest. Now he could sleep. All was now done, accomplished. Griff was already asleep, hunched up under the bow, his mouth hanging slack, his whole body collapsed into exhaustion. The seventh Damall waited impatiently but although his body ached with tiredness, his mind pulled restlessly, like a fish fighting on the end of a line.

He stretched his legs out and that didn't ease the aching.

He curled over onto his side like a little boy, and sleep didn't come to him.

The seventh Damall had made the plan and executed it—what was there now to keep him awake?

He rolled over. Small jags of rock cut into his back, through the thick cloak, and he lifted himself to sit again, shivering. He wrapped his arms around his legs, drawing them in close again so that he might warm himself.

If he warmed himself, he was his own fire. Was there danger in the fire-way of consuming itself? The sixth Damall had lain by the fire until death took him. And now there was an eighth Damall.

The seventh Damall existed only in the past, now, like the Great Damall and those five who had succeeded him. There was no longer any seventh Damall. He could no longer be the seventh Damall.

He fell into sleep then, as a body weighted with stones and wrapped in winding sheets falls into deep water.

HE AWOKE TO THE SOUND
of rain and the sight of Griff, also awake. In sleep, new concerns had come to him. “We can't build a fire,” he said, and Griff nodded, understanding. “There's food here—bread, carrots, onions—but it may all be soaked, ruined.” Griff nodded, accepting.

He had wrapped the food in cloth and tucked it behind sheltering rocks, but the bread turned to dark mush in their fingers as they scooped it out of its thick crust, like porridge. The carrots were unharmed, the onions slightly mildewed. They ate to blunt the teeth of hunger. When that was accomplished they ceased eating. Water they could lick up out of the hollows in the rocks. Water was plentiful, under the steady rain. Bellies no longer pinched, they slept again and woke to the last light of day, and an end of rain.

It was a pleasure to crawl out from under shelter, and stand in the evening breeze—fresh and cleansing as a snowfall. In this solitary cove on the barren island, where the rock cliffs rose at their backs and descended at their sides to the sea like enclosing arms, they were, he judged, safe. All they could see was the empty water, stretching eastward, stretching southward.

He stood, looking eastward and southward. Griff came to stand beside him. “You kept your word,” Griff said, “for which I thank you. I never believed you'd be able to do it.”

Surprised, he asked, “What word?”

“You promised me I'd never be sold in the slave market, even when I grew old enough.”

“I don't remember.”

“The third winter,” Griff said.

“But I was a child, a little boy, just— How could you even think—? You shouldn't believe a little child.”

“Why not?” Griff asked.

He laughed, and the sound sailed out over the darkening water. “Because a child can't—”

“But you kept your promise.”

“I have. I did, didn't I?”

He bent down, to pick up a small rock and throw it high out over the water, then bent to pick up another. Griff did the same and they stood there, pelting rocks into the approaching darkness. “We're free of the island,” he said, hurling a fist-sized rock so high it almost could have been mistaken for a bird.

“Free of the Damall,” Griff said.

“No, because that's me, that's who—”

“No, I mean free of the fear, fear of the Damall, and fear of the other boys. You're not a Damall to be feared, you'd never be.”

“First my name was lost to me,” he said.

“You never were such,” Griff said.

“Now the title, too, a title is almost a name.”

“What will you do?” Griff asked.

He considered. “Take a name,” he decided.

Griff didn't ask
What name?

He wished Griff would ask, in case he held an answer on his tongue to answer that summons. He waited, but Griff didn't ask that question. Instead, “I'm hungry,” Griff said.

“Tomorrow. In the morning, we'll eat again.” He didn't mind hunger. Griff didn't protest.

EVEN THOUGH THE RAIN HAD
ceased, they slept that night under shelter. They awoke to a low, receding tide, and pale sunlight, and a breeze that blew lightly from the south. They divided the carrots equally between them and passed the one onion back and forth.

“I thought of taking one of the kitchen knives,” he said.

“Nikol would have seen you. He was watching everything, those last days,” Griff said. “Watching. Waiting.”

“The Damall shouldn't have given me the dagger that second time,” he said. “But I wonder why he didn't teach us how to fight.”

“Maybe he thought he didn't need to, because those who knew by nature how to fight would take what they wanted. Would you have taught your boys?”

“I think so,” he said. “If pirates were to attack me, I wouldn't know how to defend myself or what was mine.”

“It was the fifth Damall the pirates killed, and that was long ago,” Griff said. “Pirates haven't been seen since.”

“Because he wouldn't show them the treasure.”

“Is there a real treasure, then?” Griff asked.

But he was thinking, for the first time really thinking, of that event—which he had always known of but never thought about. “But he'd have told them, Griff. The fifth Damall. He would have. Any man would. When they hold your hand in fire to make you tell, and if the hand burns away and so they hold your arm—he died in the fever of burns and the pain had burned away his mind—that's what they said, isn't it? So he must have told them.”

“Under such compulsion, I'd speak,” Griff said. “But I don't think you would.”

“It's only gold. Silver. One beryl. It's only wealth. It isn't life.”

“Would you give the island's treasure to pirates?”

“I would, and I should,” he answered. “But afterwards, unless there was urgent need not to, I would chase after them, track them down, come upon them when they suspected nothing and—take back what was my own. I think the fifth Damall must have told them where the treasure lay hidden. Under torture. Under the pain.”

“Then the pirates would have taken it. Was there any treasure on the island?”

“There was. Gold, silver, one beryl.”

“So,” Griff said, “the pirates didn't take it. The fifth Damall didn't tell. Neither would you.”

“Unless,” he answered Griff, “the treasure wasn't where the fifth Damall thought it was. Unless he told them where it was and when they went to find it, it wasn't there.”

They sat on a long flat rock, watching the sea. They were on guard, although neither had spoken of it. If Nikol were following them, this was a day he would use.

“Who else knew where the treasure was hidden?” Griff asked. He answered himself, “No one. Except the heir, if he'd been named. And he—” Griff didn't want to finish the sentence. Griff had never wondered; he had only feared. “What about the others,” Griff said then. “Not Nikol but—what about the other boys?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, because they're still there on the island, under the new Damall.” Griff looked out over the water, his eyes dark. “With Nikol,” Griff said.

He tried to separate his thoughts. “I couldn't do anything. Because of the way they were. What they expected,” he said. “I could have been Damall, I don't mean that. But—I have to make my own way, choose for myself and make my own way.”

“What about me, then?” Griff asked.

“You taught me to swim,” he said, which seemed to him enough. Then, “It seems so far away, doesn't it? And long ago? Even though this is only the second morning, and we aren't even safely away.”

They sat on the sun-warmed rock, with sea birds wheeling above. He wondered if Griff was also remembering fear, and helplessness, and—

He rose to his feet. “I wasn't powerless.”

But he had chosen to be. In the circle around the whipping box, each boy was alone. But each boy shared the shame, his heart shriveling up like a leaf on the fire, like his shriveled-up man-part, everything that might have been strong about any of them shriveled up and useless, like the discarded skin of a snake.

“You couldn't have done anything. What could you have done?” Griff asked.

“I could have attacked him, and I thought of it. With a log. Or the whip.”

“He'd have set the others on you.”

“You'd have stood by me.”

“But I am only one.” Griff thought, and then spoke the truth, because Griff would always speak truly, if he could. “Some of the others, too, they might have.”

“And I never tried. Because I was afraid. I never have to be afraid again.” He realized it.

Griff turned to smile at him. “Maybe you don't. Who can tell? But the sixth Damall never will be.”

It took him a time to understand Griff's meaning, while waves washed up at the base of the rock, a time of staring down at the back of Griff's head, where the brown hair hung down over the shoulders of the dark cloak.

It took him a time to understand, again, what it was not to have any name.

It took another time, more waves rolling up, to understand that he had no idea what it would be like to live without fear at his elbow, warning him, keeping him safe, keeping him frightened. Fear was stones in his mouth, their grey dry gritty taste, and stones a weight in his stomach, and stones pressing down on his heart so he couldn't breathe. In a world where everything changed, the sky and the sea and even sometimes the land, and especially the mood of the sixth Damall, and even the faces of the boys changed as the older boys were tied at hands and ankles and taken to be sold—

In that world, only fear was the same one day as it had been the day before, and would be the next day. It was fear of seeing sails on the water, sails that drew closer and became recognizable as the Damall's boats, that governed him now, even though he had made an escape from the island.

He couldn't watch patiently, as Griff did. If they were to be pursued, and captured, and taken back—

He couldn't sit and wait. He walked off the rock and down along the water's edge. Stones cut at the soles of his boots. He looked up at the stone cliffs. He looked across to where Griff sat watching the water. He looked out over the empty sea.