Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  “Calm down,” Harg said.

  Nathaway realized that there had been a hysterical edge in his voice. He forced himself to sit down on the bed and seem collected. “I’m just worried you don’t realize how serious rebellion is, or how futile.”

  With a faint, ironic smile, Harg said, “Thanks for the lecture, but I do realize.”

  “Then what did you do it for?” Nathaway pleaded.

  Harg didn’t answer at once. He stared at the floor through a haze of weariness. When he spoke, it was as if to himself. “Honestly? I never thought it would get this far. I thought someone, or something, would stop us halfway. The soldiers would be more competent, or the timing would go wrong, or the weather would turn bad, or people wouldn’t do what they were supposed to. I’ve never been in a battle where everything went right, or nearly right, like it did today.”

  He looked around the little room like a man struck on the head, half stunned. “This morning we were shit disturbers trying to get attention. Tonight, four warships and all of Harbourdown have fallen in my lap. I haven’t thought it through yet. I don’t know where we’re going, or where we’ll end up. It’s like I set down a beer mug and it caused an earthquake.”

  It struck Nathaway that he had been right about Harg the first time. He wasn’t vicious, or a fanatic. He did realize his position—both how serious and how futile it was. And in that fact, there was hope—not just for Nathaway, but for the whole situation.

  “My father calls it the piled-up wardrobe phenomenon,” Nathaway said.

  “What?”

  “You know how you keep stuffing things into a wardrobe till they’re all piled up, then you go to take one thing out and it all comes crashing down. What he means is, in public affairs things can get away from you. Political situations are so complex and unpredictable you can set off cascades of consequences you can’t foresee. We’re always just one wrong move away from chaos.”

  “I’m glad to know he feels that way.” Harg seemed to find some sort of wry humour in the thought.

  “But this is the point, Harg: that’s why we have laws. The law prevents us from accidentally setting off disorder. It gives us guidance to regulate our actions. It will always tell you what to do.”

  Harg shook his head slowly. “Your Inning laws have nothing to say to me.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong there,” Nathaway protested earnestly. “They have something to say to everyone. The law is universal. It doesn’t ask whether you’re Adaina or Torna or Inning. It doesn’t ask if you’re a Yoran or a Thimishman. It only asks if you’re a human being.”

  “Odd then, how Adainas always end up getting pissed on by the law.”

  “That’s just because you don’t understand it,” Nathaway said. He searched in his inner coat pocket, and brought out a slim, leather-bound volume. “Have you ever seen the law? This is it.”

  “You carry it around with you?” Harg said, mildly incredulous.

  “Sure.” Nathaway held out the volume. “Here, take it. It’s very simple, a set of codes handed down to us from ancient times. There are less than a hundred laws. They give us a framework and guidance. Then the courts make them relevant to the present by reinterpreting them. So it’s an organic, living system that can be adapted to any people, any place. Today we read it differently than we did a hundred years ago. Your own courts, when you have them, will probably read it differently than ours. That’s what makes it work.”

  Harg was paging through the little volume, glancing at the closely printed pages. He closed it and held it out.

  “No, keep it,” Nathaway said. “You might need it. I can get another copy.”

  “Read me a few of them,” Harg suggested.

  After a moment of hesitation, Nathaway took the book back and opened it to the beginning. As he started to read aloud the words he had known by heart since childhood, he felt himself relaxing into their familiar spell. The rhythmic poetry of the ancient phrases, their simplicity, their truth, touched him with the certainty of another realm where order and justice prevailed. All his life he had wanted to enter that realm. It hovered somewhere, unreachable, above the disappointing world he lived in, and these words were the closest link he had ever found. He loved them, and revered them, and believed in them.

  When he finally looked up, Harg’s head was laid back against the chair and his eyes were closed. He looked asleep. But when Nathaway’s voice fell silent he opened his eyes and said, “I’m listening.”

  “Do you want me to go on?”

  Harg sighed and said, “No. I’ve got to go. I’ll come back to hear the rest some other time.”

  As Harg stood to leave, Nathaway realized he hadn’t said any of the thousand things he had intended, or needed, to say. “I didn’t ask—I should have been pleading for my life or something,” he said.

  Smiling quizzically, Harg said, “I’d begun to think you didn’t realize you were in danger.”

  Nathaway hadn’t wanted his fears confirmed quite so openly. He looked down at the book in his hands and found his throat constricting so that he couldn’t talk. Then Harg put a hand on his shoulder—a simple gesture that anchored Nathaway to hope in human goodness.

  Looking up, Nathaway said, “Could I have paper and pen to write my family? I want to let them know I’m . . .” He had been about to say “I’m all right,” but in fact he didn’t know if it was true.

  “Sure,” said Harg. “I’ll leave word.” He paused. “Don’t worry,” he said, and left.

  Nathaway felt much more balanced, more in touch with what was true and permanent. Looking around his prison room, he thought to himself that this was all temporary. It didn’t touch what was really important. With that thought, he was able to lie back on his bed, the book pressed to his heart, and accept his situation.

  *

  Harg hadn’t really wanted to talk to Nathaway Talley. He had come upstairs solely to get away from the crowd and their incessant demands on his attention. But the conversation had been enlightening, if decidedly odd. He hadn’t expected to find his prisoner quite so . . . evangelical. Stress and head injuries brought out strange things in people.

  He paused at the head of the stairs, where there was a guard posted, as much to keep people out as the prisoner in. “Find him a pen and paper, will you?” he said. “But bring me anything he writes.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the man said.

  Harg paused, thinking. “Let’s not move him up to the fort tomorrow. I don’t want him talking to the other Innings.” It was just a hunch, or perhaps curiosity to see what effect isolation and indoctrination might have on such an impressionable mind. At any rate, he wanted to continue the experiment.

  As he descended the stairs, the hubbub in the tavern below rose up to engulf him. The instant he stepped into the taproom, he was surrounded by people who had been waiting impatiently for his return, needing answers, decisions, and orders.

  There was a host of problems relating to the prisoners. The acquisition of over three hundred captives who needed to be incarcerated and fed had put a severe strain on resources. Then there was the security of the sacks of gold they had found in the aft cabin of the Industry, a discovery Harg wanted wrapped in the strictest secrecy. But worst was the combustible state of the town itself. Holby Dorn’s pirate fleet had looted the two warships they had captured—Harg had given up thought of ever getting all the guns back—and returned to town, brazen with their victory and all too aware that civil authority had collapsed.

  Now, three Torna merchants from the prosperous wharf-side neighbourhood were facing him as if he were the only thing standing between them and ruin. “There are pirates roaming the streets in bands out there,” said their spokesperson, a middle-aged woman named Majlis Callow. “We have warehouses, shops, homes. The Innings at least protected us from looters and riot. You have to control these lawle
ss men.”

  Harg felt a sense of despair at how instinctively they turned to him for authority. He didn’t have a police force. He hardly had anything; the forces he had commanded that day were either guarding prisoners or stinking drunk by now. There was no discipline, no organization—it had all been cobbled together, spur of the moment.

  “Barko!” he shouted over the din of the crowd. Barko came over, looking flushed with drink. Harg envied him; he hadn’t had a chance to eat, much less drink, since coming back to town. “Where the fuck is Holby Dorn?” he asked.

  “Up in the Redoubt,” Barko said.

  “What’s he doing up there?”

  Barko only shrugged.

  “Well, send somebody up there and tell him to get his ass down here to control his men,” Harg said angrily.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Barko said. He was looking at Harg in incredulity at the thought that Holby Dorn could, or would, stop anyone from looting.

  The Tornas looked panic-stricken at Barko’s response. Majlis turned to Harg. “Captain Ismol, you’ve got to do something. We’re begging you.”

  He needed the Torna. If the pirates started a riot, it would turn racial, and then the Mundua alone knew what would happen. Harg thought of the piled-up wardrobe. By morning, he could be standing in wreckage and smouldering ruins.

  He put a reassuring hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll do something.” What, he had no idea. “Barko, do you know the situation out there?”

  Barko turned and beckoned over some new arrivals. “You guys see what was going on?” he yelled.

  “They’ve built a big bonfire down in the Market Square, and they’re shooting off guns and stuff,” one man said.

  “Any disorder?” Harg asked.

  They laughed. “Sure, they’re breaking some windows. I heard that some Torna shopkeeper shot a guy in the leg.”

  Harg didn’t find it humourous. There was a window of opportunity to stop this before it got out of control. He couldn’t use force, so it had to be persuasion, bribery, or flimflam, possibly all three. He said to Barko, “We need a distraction. Go get a couple of kegs from Calpe’s basement, but for Mundua’s sake water it down. Then bring it along to Market Square. I’ll try to get the pirates there.”

  He looked around for Tway. Before he had gone upstairs she had been tending bar while Calpe tended prisoners up in the Redoubt. He spotted her, and pushed through the crowd, leaning across the bar to talk privately. “Go get Spaeth,” he said. “Bring her down to Market Square.”

  “Are you sure?” Tway said seriously.

  “No. But do it anyway.” He needed the insurance.

  He climbed up on a table then, and waved his arms for silence. When the din had sunk to an uproar, he shouted, “I’m buying a round!” There was a deafening cheer; he held up his hands for silence. “Not here! Come on down to the bonfire at Market Square, and the first hundred people that show up get a drink on me. Go out and make sure all the pirates know. Bring them along, and we’ll have a real party.”

  He jumped down and headed for the door then, with a high-spirited mob pressing behind him. It was a risk, putting more people into the streets. Witnesses might be a deterrent, or just more fuel for the fire. As they passed through the streets of Harbourdown, Harg hailed everyone he saw, inviting them to the Market Square.

  The bonfire turned out to be built from the contents of the half-renovated customs house, which had been stripped clean. There was already a crowd there, and a street fiddler entertaining them for tips. When Harg joined them, he saw that they were feeding the fire with all the licenses, passports, certificates, and registrations that the Innings had imposed on them. A fierce old woman came forward with a fistful of permits to toss contemptuously on the fire, and Harg laughed aloud to see the paper shackles of the invaders go up in flames.

  It took some time for everyone to assemble, and Harg spent it going through the crowd shaking hands and congratulating people, telling them not to leave. He could tell when the pirates started arriving, because the tone became more rowdy and rough, the crowd laced with belligerent young men looking for trouble. When Barko finally rode into the square with a cartful of liquor, there was no time to lose. Harg sprinted to the top of the customs house steps and held up his arms. The fiddle fell silent, and so did the crowd.

  “Did anyone ever say that Thimishmen didn’t know how to stand up for their rights?” Harg shouted out over the square.

  “No!” the people in the front of the crowd roared back.

  “Well, if they ever did, you’ve proved them wrong today.”

  There were cheers and raucous shouts.

  “Do you remember how those Innings were lording it over you yesterday?”

  “Yes!” the crowd responded.

  “Well, where are they now?”

  There were catcalls and a few obscenities.

  “I love you guys,” Harg shouted.

  There were cries of “We love you too.”

  “Today you’ve proved what islanders can do.” He paused for the cheering to die down. “Pretty soon they’ll be talking about you in Tornabay, saying, ‘We’d better not mess with Thimish.’ But they’ll also be talking about you on Ekra and Pont and Romm. And you know what they’ll be saying? ‘Those Thimishmen stood up for me, too. We weren’t able to do it ourselves, but Thimish did what we should have done, and we owe them.’ Your names are going to travel all over the South Chain, because you had the courage to do what was right. Your names are going to travel to the Inner Chain, and even the Tornas are going to say, ‘They stood up for us, too.’ Because it’s true.”

  There were a few hoots at this, but most of the crowd was listening, arrested by this new view of themselves. Looking out over their faces, Harg could feel a presence, a power, in their collective mood. It was like music; the square throbbed with energy, an invisible force that had sprung into being from their synchronized attention, and he suddenly knew he could shape it into something beautiful, or something deadly.

  “What you did today is bigger than just Thimish,” he said, his voice echoing from the buildings in the silence. “It’s bigger than Adaina or Torna. It’s bigger than all the South Chain. You stood up for regular people everywhere. Tonight, Harbourdown is your town, your home, but it’s more than that, because everyone will be looking at you and saying, ‘I wish I could be a Thimishman, too.’ We’re all in this together, rich and poor, man and woman, elder and child. Let’s celebrate together, and show the world we’re just ordinary, peaceful folks who aren’t going to let empires shove us around.”

  They erupted in applause, and Harg felt the volume and force of their emotion lifting him, washing over him. They had a radiance, a greatness, that made him love them; he wanted to embrace them, to become their instrument, till he glowed with their invisible power.

  The fiddler came up onto the steps beside him, and waved for silence. “I’ve got a song,” he shouted out. “It’s called the Ballad of the Battle of Thimish.”

  He struck some notes on his fiddle, and before long he had the whole crowd singing the chorus. Harg watched in wonder. The mood had completely changed. Good will and fellowship were flowing through the town in irresistible waves. By the time Barko broke out the booze, it was almost unnecessary; everyone was drunk on good feeling.

  As he started down the steps, he caught the sight, over to his right, of silver hair and pearly grey skin. Spaeth was standing there watching him, fully visible to the rest of the crowd, and he hadn’t even seen her. For a moment he froze, feeling a qualm at the implications. No wonder they had all listened to him. They had seen her, and thought her presence meant more than it did.

  He went over to her. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have involved you in this. I thought—”

  She didn’t le
t him finish. “Harg, I haven’t seen mora so powerful, or someone who worked it so well, since . . .” She stopped, as if warned by instinct not to compare him to Goth.

  Her eyes were the colour of moonlight, and they were looking at him with an expression that made his heart skip a beat. He had never thought that anyone would look at him that way. He put a hand on her cheek; she looked intoxicated with his closeness.

  “You’re in pain,” she said, and reached up to touch his hair where it was matted with blood from the scalp wound the Inning had given him.

  “I deserve it,” he said. “I did something really stupid, trying to be a hero.”

  She ran light fingers across his forehead, down his cheek. Her touch felt cool and soothing, like wintergreen. Before he had time to think, his own fingers were running through her hair. It looked like moonlit water flowing over his hands.

  “Let me help you,” she whispered. “I want to. I need to.”

  “You don’t want to be my bandhota,” he said softly.

  “I have to be someone’s.”

  She was almost pleading. This was his chance, he thought. He could have her, body and soul. How ardent she looked, half mad with compassion. They could spend a night like he had never dreamed of having.

  And in the morning she would wake with all her freedom gone. She would be

  his slave, and he would be her master forever.

  With a pang of thwarted desire, he realized he couldn’t do it. No matter how his body yearned for it. He took her hands in his, and kissed them softly. “I can’t let you waste yourself on me,” he said. “Save your dhota for someone who deserves it.”

  He turned away then. Behind him, she drew in a breath that was nearly a sob. Sternly he forced himself on. As he descended the steps, he wondered if he had gone insane. Any other man would have done it.

  No one spoke to him as he crossed the square, engrossed in his thoughts. When he came up to Barko, the pirate raised a speculative eyebrow, and Harg knew then that everyone had been watching.