Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  “Is there good news out of Thimish?” Bonn asked the guest with irony. It was an old Yoran proverb, Good news never came out of Thimish.

  The trader shook his head. “The news is bad. Scarce a ship has stirred from Harbourdown all month because of the godforsaken customs regulations. No one knows what’s going on. All they know is we can’t be allowed to make a living without doing more tricks for the Innings than a trained dog.”

  The Yorans exchanged looks. Harbourdown’s “traders” had been poor neighbours for a century. Twenty years ago the rest of the South Chain, fed up with piracy, had banded together to clean the brigands out of Thimish. Their success had been dearly bought and short-lived. Now the Innings were trying to succeed where the islanders had failed.

  “It’s hard to imagine a customs office on Thimish,” Gill observed mildly.

  “That’s what we all said,” Torr replied. “We didn’t think they could be serious. Then a shipful of Tiarch’s militia came and planted themselves in the old abandoned fortress above the town, and said they’d blow up any boat that tried to enter or leave the harbour without permission. They’ve got the guns and the idiocy to do it. Now we hear there’s three more ships on the way to make us all toe their line. Then you’ll find out what it’s like.”

  “They won’t do that here,” Gill said. “Yora’s not Thimish.”

  “Do you think they know that?” said Drum. He was known about Yorabay as a perpetual malcontent, but occasionally he voiced grievances that others just hadn’t yet realized they cared about. “What do you think that Inning is here for, anyway, decoration? Pretty soon you’ll have to be buying licenses from him yourself, Gill.”

  “I’m not a trader,” Gill said.

  “You don’t have to be,” said Torr. “They want you to have a license if you’re going to own a boat or a gun, or sell beer, or go fishing. You have to get a license to be born, or to get married, or to die, or move away. Don’t tell me you’re not planning on doing any of those things.”

  “That’s just crazy,” Gill said.

  “Welcome to the Inning empire.”

  As they were talking, Harg was thinking what idiots the Innings were. Everything he had told Talley not to do, they had done. Sent in the hated Northern Squadron to the very hotbed of discontent. Failed to promote Adaina officers. Then started to impose Inning law without any finesse or regard for older customs. It was almost as if they were trying to provoke rebellion.

  “You’re very quiet tonight, Harg,” Strobe said, pouring him another beer.

  “I’m listening,” Harg said.

  Torr had caught the name and now scanned Harg curiously. “You’re not the same Captain Harg that won the battle of Drumlin, are you?”

  Surprised that his reputation had traveled to Thimish, Harg said, “I didn’t win it alone, but yes.”

  “I’d like to shake your hand,” said Torr, genuinely impressed. “We’ve got a lot of men in Harbourdown who served in the Native Navy. They’ve come home now, and are mad as hornets to find they fought a war just to see their own people conquered. They keep saying, ‘If only Captain Harg were here, he’d show them a thing or two.’”

  The other Yorans were looking at Harg in bemusement. Strobe said, a little jokingly, “You’re sure it’s our Harg they mean?”

  “There’s only one of me,” Harg said, “thank the Mundua.”

  “Fancy your being here, and me coming to this house just now,” Torr said, appraising him.

  After that, his tone changed, and the information he started to give showed that Torr knew about some activities that would have made the captain of the ship at The Jetties sit up and take note. Listening, Harg began to realize that the pirates he had been hearing of were not just the old pack of criminals preying on the weak and defenceless. They were boldly hitting only ships owned by Torna merchants of the type who supported Tiarch’s regime; small Adaina shippers like Torr were safe. There was a low-level, slow-motion rebellion already under way.

  “Who’s behind all this?” Harg asked, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew what an Inning question it was. As if the Adaina needed a hierarchy to tell them what to do.

  “No one, really,” Torr said. “We—that is, they, the pirates—just decided to take this tack. Of course, we couldn’t be doing it without some people you may have heard of.”

  “Such as?”

  It went against the grain for Torr to mention names, but at last he brought himself to say, “Have you ever heard of Holby Dorn?”

  The Yorans stared. The name was almost a myth on Yora, the incarnation of the vicious foe of the Pirate Wars. Even now, twenty-three years later, Yoran mothers frightened their children by saying Holby Dorn would eat them if they misbehaved.

  “He is involved?” Gill asked, awestruck.

  “He must be sixty if he’s a day,” Harg mused.

  “And all sixty years he’s been growing craftier,” Torr said.

  “When he wasn’t busy stealing Yoran shipping,” Harg said. Holby Dorn might be a great man on Thimish, but there was no chance of him drawing support from other islands. And against the Native Navy, he wouldn’t last ten minutes.

  Harg said, “You pirates know, don’t you, that the Innings are sending the Native Navy from Fluminos to put you down? I’m not talking about Tiarch’s navy. I’m talking about the Southern Squadron that beat Rothur in the war. And they don’t have in mind just a crackdown; it’s to be a full-scale occupation, to make the outer chains safe for them to do business in. Admiral Talley himself is coming to the isles to direct the action. That’s how serious they are.”

  There was such complete silence that the sound of rain on the roof seemed loud. “How do you know this?” Torr said at last.

  Harg hesitated, fearing the truth would sound overblown. But seeing their eyes on him, he shrugged. “Because Admiral Talley offered me command of the operation,” he said. “I turned him down.”

  In the pause that followed, Harg could feel their opinions of him changing. Torr gave a low whistle. “Then it must be true. We’re knee-deep in shit.”

  “Not necessarily,” Harg said. “The Native Navy is something to be feared, but it has its weaknesses. It can be beat.”

  “By us?” Torr said.

  “Not by a bunch of free spirits acting alone, no. But by Adainas? Yes.”

  Watching him keenly, Torr said, “By you?”

  “By anyone who understands them, and how they think. But you’d need arms, organization, and support. The most important part is what happens before the fighting starts.”

  “What we need is an Ison,” said Torr.

  This comment made Harg pause. Now Torr was talking about something bigger, a unification of the isles to fight again the war they had lost fifty years ago. He frowned and said, “No, we don’t. Why should we have to wait for the Lashnura to pick someone to lead us? We’re capable of leading ourselves without their say-so.” He looked around the room. “Everyone here is capable of commanding a ship in battle. Tway included.”

  Strobe glanced up at his daughter, who was standing behind his chair, listening to their every word. “This talk scares me,” he said. “We tried fighting the Innings once before, and all we got was bloodshed and defeat. We can’t beat them.”

  “We don’t need to beat them,” Harg said. He was just talking off the top of his head now, but it came out as if he had been thinking about it all along. “That was our problem before, we thought it was all or nothing. What we really need to do is cause them enough trouble that they’re willing to negotiate and make concessions.”

  “Negotiate!” Drum said sceptically. “Can you see them sitting down at a treaty table with a bunch of Adainas?”

  Harg gave a sudden laugh of inspiration. “Well, if we wanted it, we’ve got the perfect hostage to get their
attention, right here on Yora.”

  They stared at him blankly. “Don’t you know who that Inning is? He’s the son of their Chief Justice, the most powerful man in their land.”

  It was Strobe’s turn to say, “Who told you that, Harg?”

  “Well, I guessed, but he admitted it.”

  “Is that what you were talking about the other day?” Tway asked.

  “Among other things.”

  “By the horns!” Torr said. “If you believed in coincidences, this would be one. It looks to me more like fate.”

  “Fate’s just seeing your opportunities,” said Harg.

  Torr gave him an earnest look. “Harg, come with me to Harbourdown. Our navy men are right; if you arrived there with all your ideas and your knowledge, everything would change. We wouldn’t have just a pack of pirates no one trusts; we could have us a real resistance.”

  Strobe was watching Harg with dread, the others with intense curiosity. Harg shook his head. “I don’t know, Torr. I don’t really want to get involved.”

  “It seems to me you’re already involved,” said Torr. “It’s your own damn country, man.”

  “You’re talking to someone who’s worn out with fighting.” And yet, being in his other persona had felt right. He had been Captain Harg again for a while, and liked it.

  “Don’t you see all the signs?” said Torr. “I was brought here for a reason. To set the balances straight again.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Strobe. “Right, Tway?”

  But Tway was watching Harg with a curious expression, as if she had realized something unexpected. “No, Dad,” she said, “I don’t agree with you. I think he should go.”

  Harg and Strobe both turned to her, dumbstruck.

  “I think Torr’s right, there’s more going on here than meets the eye,” she said. “The invasion we see now may be only the beginning. I’ve thought this ever since Spaeth told me the Innings want to outlaw dhota.”

  There were exclamations of consternation from all the Yorans, but Torr only nodded. “Yes,” he said, “it’s another way they want to save us from our savagery. They haven’t said yet how they’re going to enforce it.”

  “They didn’t do that in the Inner Chain,” Gill said.

  “They didn’t have to,” Torr said. “A lot of folks there, they just stopped believing in dhota. And about the same time, they stopped feeling the mora of their islands, and the circles of the Mundua and Ashwin stopped overlapping with ours. I tell you, where the Innings go, something dies. Something more important than just our right to go where we please without a licence.”

  “I think there’s a bigger battle coming on,” Tway said quietly. “These Innings aren’t just invaders; they’re a disease of the soul. And we’re going to be called on to defend more than our freedoms. We’re going to need to defend our world.”

  A glowing arch of coals settled into the grate and a plume of smoke rose from it into the silence. The patter of rain on the roof had almost stopped. Harg felt chilled to the bone by what Tway was saying. If it was true, there could be no compromise, and people would be called upon to make sacrifices greater than any of them could imagine.

  He reached for the poker to wake up the fire. Once the flames had scattered the shadows he said, “Well, I’ll think about your offer, Torr. I’m not saying yes or no tonight. Though I’ll tell you truly, tonight the answer would be no.”

  “Then sleep on it,” Torr said. “Who knows, maybe tomorrow will be different.”

  5

  The Whispering Stones

  The last drops of rain were still pattering down from the tree leaves when Spaeth went out to look at the sky. High above, the wind was hustling the clouds along, bullying them like a herd dog, so that already the stars showed through in patches. She could hear the dim heartbeat of the sea.

  It was the kind of night when she didn’t want to be hemmed in by walls. Lightly, she grasped the corner post of the porch and climbed up onto the edge of the cistern, then from there to the porch roof, where she lay down on the damp shingles, looking up. Her body shivered, partly from the cold, partly from delicious anticipation.

  She was thinking of Harg Ismol. Adaina men had always seemed familiar and uninteresting to her—pleasant, like the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves. Harg was different. He was taut as a set trap, and she felt a delicious compulsion to touch the trigger and spring him, though she knew she might be caught painfully in the jaws. The sense of danger was horribly tantalizing.

  When she had first seen him standing there in her house, she had mistaken him for Goth; and though a second glance showed that they looked nothing alike, she could still understand the first impression. There was the same complex knot of undigested pain inside them both, and she had felt the same hungry compulsion to cure that drew her back into Goth’s arms again and again, though by now she knew it was impossible to rid him of it.

  What an interesting place the world was, she thought, to have two such people in it.

  Above her, a torn curtain of cloud blew back to reveal the deep, crystalline sky beyond. Constellations hung there, each star a possibility that she could pluck down like fruit. Invisible beyond the stars, a thousand potential universes were stacked, the realms of the Ashwin, and below her a thousand more, where the Mundua dwelt. She lay balanced at the fulcrum. This precious world, always at the brink of unbeing, bloomed with the beauty of all doomed things. It was the pivot point, where any flaw in symmetry could bring the whole structure crashing down. She raised a finger high, and it seemed as if the whole sky spun like a platter on it.

  A step on the path below her made her sit up to look. A bent form carrying a lantern was approaching the cottage. When the visitor was almost underneath, Spaeth recognized her. “Mother Tish!”

  Tish looked up, confused to hear a voice from the roof. “Spaeth,” she said. “What are you doing up there?”

  “Looking at the stars.”

  “Well, come down here. We need you.”

  Dutifully, Spaeth climbed down. “What is it?”

  “The elders want to talk to you. Come with me.”

  The elders were gathered at Argen’s house. It was an old-fashioned hut that lay back in the woods, a little separate from the others. As Spaeth followed Tish up the woody path, she had to shrug off a feeling of misgiving.

  Inside, the walls were lined with bark, and in the orange firelight the room looked like the interior of some huge, hollow tree. The elders had gathered their chairs around the hearth; the faces that turned to her looked brown and seamed as wood. Lacking Goth, there were seven of them: five widows and two men. The sea claimed the men of Yora young, and left widows in their place.

  Mother Tish sat next to the only empty place. She patted the seat and said, “Sit down, Spaeth.”

  It was where Goth should have sat. If she took his seat, it would be like taking his place—and that was like admitting he was not going to return. She saw an old trunk against the wall, on the edge of the firelight, and said, “I’ll sit here.”

  Argen’s eyes followed her, frowning. He had not missed any of the symbolism. “You’re going to have to take his place some day, you know,” he said.

  Some of the women hushed him, but he only raised his voice. “Best she should be settling down with some bandhotai, instead of running wild and causing trouble.”

  “Oh, quit fussing, Argen,” Tish said. “It’s the way she was made.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Argen said. “Goth’s a saint in his way, but he never gave her modesty or shame. It didn’t suit his purposes. But he never thought we’d have strangers on the island who would be tempted by her.”

  “She’s Lashnura!” Mother Greer said indulgently. “You can’t stop them coupling, you know. Might as well try to stop the birds.”

  Argen was
n’t mollified. “I don’t care who she couples with, so long as it leads no farther. She’s our dhotamar, not Harg Ismol’s.”

  So that was what this was about. Spaeth forced down the indignant protest that rose in her throat. Argen made it sound as if they owned her.

  “Harg’s not exactly a stranger,” Tish pointed out.

  “No, we all know what he is, and for him to be hanging around her . . . well, it’s unseemly.”

  At last Mother Pilt spoke up. Her voice was thin and piping as a bird’s, but her air was one of authority. The others fell silent. “These are unsettled times. None of us quite know how to behave. First the Torna came, and while their wealth is welcome, it caused rivalry and dissent. Then that Inning started poking into people’s affairs. Then Harg and Jory came back, and we’ve had nothing but problems ever since.”

  She paused. “But there are things more worrisome than any of this. Goth is gone, we don’t know why. But there is reason to fear some grave imbalance in the world.”

  Seven wary faces turned to Spaeth.

  “Spaeth,” said Mother Tish, “let me see your hand.”

  An irrational reluctance seized her. She forced herself to hold out her hand. Tish motioned someone to give her an oil lamp, and she held it close to examine Spaeth’s nails. She gave a soft click of the tongue and the others gathered round to see. It was only then that Spaeth saw the dark half-circles at the base of her nails.

  “As I thought,” Tish said, sitting back. “The Black Mask.”

  Frowning, Spaeth crossed her arms, hiding her hands away. “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Has Goth never told you about this?”

  She shook her head. They all exchanged significant looks.

  Mother Tish leaned forward into the lamplight, her voice grave and urgent. “Spaeth, this is serious. You know that the world we live in is not a safe one. Since time began this circle has been a battlefield. The Mundua and the Ashwin have fought their shadowy war on our very shores, and mankind has survived only by tact and vigilance. We must maintain the balance of forces at all costs, or all we love will be destroyed.”