Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  Bobby fumbled his way to consciousness through barbs of light throbbing behind his eyelids, and he tried to sit up. Fresh pain flared in his skull, and he sank back with a groan. Something was pillowed under his head.

  Carefully he explored the back of his skull, wincing as he found a large, wet bump. Plus, the cut on his hand was open again. He was surrounded by the sounds of dripping water. Everything leaked, both outside and in. Trickling through the gaps in his thoughts came memories – faces, voices, a painting? – which used to be his, or should have been, but they faded as awareness grew until he couldn’t even be sure that anything had been there in the first place. He was a perforated man. Ironically, his throat was ferociously dry.

  Allie sat nearby, arms hugging her knees, watching him. She made no move to help as he struggled up for a second time and finally made it.

  ‘If it’s not a stupid question, how do you feel?’ she asked.

  He grunted something by way of reply. Tried again. ‘Where are we?’

  The cell was circular, empty except for them, and about the same diameter as the length of the Tatterdemalion. It was open to the sky, blocked with a heavy iron grill. It looked like the day was nearing noon.

  ‘In jail. Which part of “Don’t do anything stupid” was unclear to you?’

  ‘The part that included letting you get abducted and raped and killed. Remember that part?’

  She hugged her knees tighter. ‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. It’s just – this was precisely, exactly what I did not want to happen. I’m the only one on Stray who can navigate the Flats. Whatever happens to me, they’re all going to starve. I should have known this would happen. Everything is screwed, now. Everything.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘But still. Thank you.’

  They were silent for a while, listening to the drip of water and watching the clouds pass by on the other side of the grill.

  ‘Where did you learn to fight like that?’ she asked.

  ‘The Bujinkan Ryuku Dojo on Pershore Road in Stirchley.’

  ‘Where?’

  He shrugged helplessly. ‘I have no idea what that means. It just popped in there. I think it’s all a bit of a moot point now, anyway.’

  The sound of their voices must have alerted those outside to the fact that Bobby was awake, because booted feet approached the grill, and they found themselves looking up at the figure of Serjeant Osk. He hunkered down by the edge and tapped the metal bars thoughtfully with the butt of his staff as he spoke.

  ‘If this were a bigger town with richer people breathing down my neck, you’d both be dead now. Leastways you would,’ he pointed at Bobby. ‘You,’ he directed at Allie, but he didn’t finish, just grimaced. ‘But I’m answerable to the look my wife gives me when I go home at night, and too many people saw your foreign friend throwing her weight around for me to ignore. Killings on my dock. On my dock.’ He sucked his teeth and spat through the grill. ‘If only it were that simple. So here it is: Miss Hooper wants her prisoner, and she may very well be a nasty piece of work, but she is a nasty political piece of work, and I will not put myself in the way of that. I’ve sent for the magistrate. They’re busy, there’s a lot of islands, could be a week, maybe two.’

  ‘Two weeks!’ Allie protested.

  ‘You hush yourself!’ he barked and slammed his staff-butt against the grill. ‘Hush yourself there! This is leniency you’re getting, Stray. Like I say, too many good people saw what happened for me to take the easiest option, but I will throw you to that woman if you make this worse, do you understand me?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Good. For what it’s worth, even a week is too long for my liking. I’d be shot of the whole goat-buggering pack of you if I could. In the meantime you’ll be fed and watered. Take this for what it is.’ He got up and walked away.

  The first thing Bobby did, when he could finally stand up without big flowers of light blooming dizzily in his head, was look for a way out. The ancient water cistern had numerous small pipes and gutters running into it and was drained by an evil-smelling waste pipe in the centre, but none of them was wide enough for anything bigger than a rat to climb through. In one place a ladder of metal rungs driven into the stone wall led up to a hinged hatch in the grill, but the hatch was secured with a huge padlock well out of arm’s reach. He pushed, pulled and twisted, but nothing moved. He went through his pockets so see if there was anything he could use, and found that anything remotely of value had been taken – his matches, the small penknife, and the iridescent porcupine quill bracelet. He cursed them for that last one; the idea of Allie’s present hanging off the wrist of Osk’s judgemental wife made him furious. But it gave him an idea. He hoped that they were simply corrupt and not especially imaginative with it. They’d gone through his pockets but had apparently dismissed the tatty bit of string around his neck with the bits and pieces of beachcomber junk threaded on it, and so had missed Joe’s good-luck pearl. He unthreaded it and waited.

  Presently a guard came with food and water. He ordered them to stand at the far side of the cell from the hatch while he opened it. Bobby and Allie obeyed. He was a young man, Bobby noticed with relief, with a late bloom of acne on his cheeks.

  Eyeing them warily, the guard set down a leather bucket of water and two cups, as well as a plate of bread and dried fruit, and was about to climb back up the ladder when Bobby said, ‘Hey, mate. Wait up. I’ve got a gift for you.’

  ‘Shut up,’ replied the guard curtly and continued to climb.

  ‘No, seriously. It’s just down there on the floor. By the bucket. You missed it. Check it out – I’m not moving.’ He hadn’t. He and Allie were both sitting down, doing everything they could to appear totally non-aggressive.

  Suspicious, the guard hesitated.

  He peered down, caught sight of the pearl, which he had in fact missed, even though it was lying in plain sight on the cell floor, and climbed back down to pick it up. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘Payment,’ answered Bobby.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Just thinking about it.’

  ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘Letting us out of here.’

  He laughed. ‘You must be crazy. You’re going nowhere, Stray. But thanks for this, all the same.’ He started to go.

  ‘I have another half a dozen just like that waiting for you,’ said Allie. ‘Where we come from they cover the bottom of the ocean like sand.’

  ‘Have you got a girl?’ Bobby added. ‘I bet you do. Someone you fancy, at least. So look, take that and buy her something nice. Get something for her mum too – that always works. I don’t know exactly what that’s worth in your country but it’s got to be at least a month’s wages. Then ask yourself how much more you could buy her with ten times that.’

  ‘More like this?’ Bobby could almost smell the greed oozing from him. He took a step towards them and raised his staff. ‘What’s to stop me taking them from you anyway?’

  Bobby’s return stare was unblinking. ‘You’re welcome to try,’ he said quietly, and the guard hesitated.

  ‘Look, there’s no need for this to get unpleasant,’ Allie added quickly. ‘Obviously we don’t have them with us, since you would have already found them. What’s her name – your girl?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, come on, now, you’re just being silly.’ Listening to her, Bobby could well imagine her as a doctor, coaxing cooperation out of awkward patients.

  ‘Calla,’ he said. ‘I’m Jono. I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a good man, Jono. I can tell. The kind of man who just wants the best for the people he loves.’

  ‘Plus you’ll be doing your Serjeant a favour; I can tell you that for nothing,’ added Bobby. ‘He wants that Hooper woman gone just as much as the rest of us. That Oraillean st
eamer’s a pretty piece of kit, isn’t she? I haven’t seen too much like her around here. So, what, they cruise by every six months or so to remind everybody who’s got the biggest stick?’

  Jono grunted. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Something exactly like that. They pay lip service to the local authorities and they look down their noses at you like they shit solid gold, don’t they?’ Bobby’s heart surged with hope when Jono smiled at that. ‘I bet they’ve even got some of their men in your guard room haven’t they?’

  ‘How’d you know that?’ Jono asked sharply.

  Bobby shrugged. ‘Lucky guess. It’s what people like them do. They don’t trust the little backwater places to do their jobs properly. And I’m sorry, but there’s just no way he’s going to keep us locked up here for a fortnight making things political for himself. Now that he’s been seen to have done the right thing, we’re going to have a little accident – I know it, you know it. A fall down the stairs, or maybe I’ll hang myself with my own belt. It’ll be one of you lads that has to do it, too.’

  ‘Calla wouldn’t want that,’ put in Allie.

  Bobby continued: ‘You can save everybody the hassle and skip town with enough to buy yourself a little taverna on another island, and I bet he’d be so grateful that we were gone he wouldn’t even come looking for you. He might even wave you off.’

  ‘I can’t…’

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ Allie interrupted gently. ‘You need to talk it over with her first and make arrangements. This is all a bit sudden, I know. Just please don’t take too long, that’s all. Your serjeant was looking pretty nervous when he left us just now. I don’t know what he might do.’ The note of fear she injected into her voice at the end there made Bobby want to nominate her for an Oscar.

  Jono dithered by the foot of the ladder, with one foot on a rung and another on the floor. His face was furrowed with worry, misgivings, and the unaccustomed burden of deep thought. ‘I might be back later,’ he muttered, and before either of them could reply he rushed up the ladder and locked the grill behind with him with a heavy clashing of metal.

  Bobby and Allie both collapsed with relief. He lay back on the stone floor and looked at her for a long moment, as if trying to decide something for himself. Eventually he shook his head. ‘No. I just don’t believe it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You. A doctor. Before Stray.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Based on that little performance you were either a master confidence trickster or a spy.’

  She laughed. ‘You Boris, me Natasha.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  2

  The remainder of that day was an agonising mixture of boredom and anxiety, which escalated as the sun inched its way across the sky. Allie tried to enlighten Bobby about the shifting tides of alliance and conflict between the dozens of island-states in the Tourmaline Archipelago – but she knew little herself, and that was gleaned only from overhearing market-place gossip every month or so. He gathered that Danae was one of the tiny islands sprinkled like freckles around the larger bulk of Drava, basking in its protective glow even though not technically a part of the Amity, since it was too small to support any warships. Elbaite’s historical attempts to crush the Amity had always failed because of the logistical difficulties of holding each of the hundreds of islands as it was captured, until they had changed tactics and gambled their vast resources on the construction of a great deep-water fleet designed not to fight island-by-island, but to cut across the open ocean and strike at Drava directly.

  And then Stray had appeared, surrounded by the Flats – a navigational dead zone where there was no wind strong enough to propel their warships, and where strange holes would appear at random in the ocean to swallow vessels into oblivion.

  ‘Holes?’ Bobby asked. ‘What do you mean holes in the ocean?’ Again there was that memory of surfacing, the earliest clear memory he had which he could confidently call his own.

  ‘If we get out of this alive I’ll show you on the way home,’ she promised. ‘Now shut up and listen.’

  The Elbaite admirals were not pleased. Committed militarily and economically to a strategy of expansion, they had no choice but to continue prosecuting the war by any possible means, and if they could not navigate their own ships through the Flats, then it was imperative that they find someone who could. Although exactly what an Oraillean steam-ship was doing in the area, thousands of miles from home, was anybody’s guess.

  ‘Things are definitely a lot more complicated than I thought,’ said Bobby. ‘I suppose it’s still a strategic asset, regardless of who’s got hold of it. So I imagine what they’re after is the secret of your little cracker compass.’

  She frowned. ‘Hmm, maybe. I don’t know, though. Something about that Hooper woman doesn’t sit right. Did you see her eyes?’

  ‘I can’t say I was paying all that much attention, what with one thing and another.’

  ‘She said her job was something about investigating unusual phenomena. And she just – she had a look about her, like one of those hellfire and damnation preachers, you know?’

  ‘Again, I’m not sure that I do.’

  ‘Well I’m from the States, honey, and we’ve got ’em in spades. Trust me. She’s dangerous. She’s not after anything strategic, and I don’t think she gives a damn about territories or alliances or anything like that. Plain and simple, I think she’s just after us.’

  3

  As afternoon wore into evening, they were brought more food and blankets against the cold, but never by Jono, and they debated helplessly whether this was a good sign or bad. At one point Hooper and her craggy-faced major domo turned up to peer down at them. They didn’t say anything to Bobby and Allie, just held a whispered conversation while staring at a device which the man carried in a bulky leather satchel, and then they went away again without explanation, all of which only served to fuel Allie’s paranoia that somehow this was personal.

  Bobby tried not to doze. He knew that it was not a wise thing to do after being whacked on the head, but it throbbed abominably and every time he tried to stand up, waves of dizziness threatened to pitch him over – he thought this must be what a concussion felt like.

  It was the last thought in his head before sleep took him.

  When he awoke again, it was with the end of a wooden staff nudging him in the ribs. Before he could rouse himself properly to do anything about it, the shaft was suddenly forced across his throat, choking him. He sputtered. Scrabbled. Fear and outrage at what might be happening to Allie didn’t help this time – he had a man’s whole weight bearing down on his throat.

  ‘I will let you up now,’ a voice whispered. Jono. ‘Do not cry out. You are safe.’

  The weight disappeared, and Bobby scrambled to his feet, coughing. ‘Safe? Christ! What the bloody hell was that for?’

  ‘After what you did to those other men, why do you think?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Bobby rubbed his neck. ‘I can’t help thinking there was an easier way to do that,’ he muttered.

  ‘Calla and I have talked. We’ve agreed to take your offer. Give me the rest of the pearls, and I’ll set you free.’

  ‘Give us our boat, and I’ll…’ but a terrible realisation dawned on Bobby as he looked for Allie.

  She wasn’t there.

  There was a brief, violent struggle and Bobby had Jono up against the cell wall with his staff pressed against his own throat.

  ‘What have you done with her?’

  ‘She…’ choked Jono, ‘…she is with Calla. Safe. If you keep your side.’

  ‘Stupid. Stupid!’ It was directed at himself, but he found himself with a sneaking admiration for young Jono. He’d have done much the same thing himself.

  ‘Wasting time,’ Jono gasped.

 
Bobby let him go. ‘Come on, then.’

  ‘Wait. You were right before – they’ve got one of their marines sitting outside the main gate.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about that? I have to tell you, I’m not in much of a state to go looking for another fight.’

  Jono grinned. ‘There’s another way around that we use when we want to go for a smoke without the serj seeing.’

  He led Bobby to a narrow break in the courtyard wall masked by ivy; they slipped through it and into the maze of cobbled alleys which ran behind and between tightly clustered buildings. In this manner they made it out of Timini and picked their careful way in the dark down the cliff path to the rocky cove where Tatters was moored, with Bobby blessing Allie for her paranoia and praying that nobody had interfered with their supplies. He saw with relief that the sacks and barrels were untouched and climbed to hunt around in the aft canopy for Allie’s belongings. It was there: the small pouch which she’d stashed here for fear of pickpockets. In the dark, it felt like there were four pearls left. Not as many as he’d promised. Maybe enough. He gave them to Jono. ‘It’s all we’ve got,’ he explained.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ the guard replied hastily. He was too wired with adrenaline to care, Bobby saw, anxious to finish this business and be gone. Amen to that, brother, he thought.

  ‘Allie,’ demanded Bobby. ‘Now.’

  But she was already there.

  Quick footsteps descended towards them down the cliff path: Allie and a young woman dressed in a long travelling cloak.

  ‘Calla!’ complained Jono. ‘What are you doing? I said to wait…’

  ‘You tied her up,’ his lover admonished. ‘That was wrong of you.’

  ‘Yeah, what she said,’ Allie added drily.

  ‘If you lot are done?’ asked Bobby. ‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’ He hopped aboard Tatters while Allie gave Calla a quick hug and then joined him. ‘That’s got to be the fastest case of Stockholm Syndrome on record,’ he commented, wrangling the boom into place.