The War of the Four Isles

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘If that’s so, then if I tell you that I have never seen you before, but that the time is noon and that my name is Daniel, what do you say?’

  The laundress seemed to ponder a moment. ‘I say that my name is Kim, and that I have been here sixty-four times already.’ And then, in less obscure tones, she added, ‘It’s an emergency, Pilot. We have urgent news for the War Master.’

  The man squinted at her unhappily for an instant longer, but the code (for so Dow assumed their strange exchange had been) must have been correct, for at length he sighed, and motioned to his companion to row the boat to the boarding ladder.

  After that, it was only a few moments before he stood on the high deck. Up close he was stocky and short, and older than he looked from a distance, his tanned skin deeply lined. He wore no uniform, only light clothes bleached white by salt and sun, yet he radiated authority as if he was an admiral in full regalia. Dow was particularly fascinated to see that around his neck he wore a small vial of thick glass, suspended by a metal chain.

  So it was true! According to rumour, all pilots wore such a vial, containing a poison that could kill a man in moments; a pilot’s last defence, if captured, against being forced to reveal his secrets.

  And what secrets they were! The Labyrinth pilots were the only ones in all the world who knew the path that led through the inner maze to the Great Atoll. As precaution against capture, they never set foot beyond the Corridors. But even should the Ship Kings come to Pilot Reef undetected and take the fortress, it would still avail them nothing, for all they would win would be the corpses of the men inside, dead by poison at their own hands.

  ‘Captain,’ the man said, lifting a finger to his brow in offhand salute as he came to the wheel. ‘The name’s Emmet Bone, senior pilot.’

  ‘Fletcher,’ was the terse reply.

  The pilot cast an eye about the high deck. ‘You, I haven’t met before, but I remember this ship; I myself was its pilot when it was first brought out from the maze, at war’s beginning. But I seldom look for such vessels ever to return here.’ His gaze fell upon Cassandra. ‘What emergency is it, girl, so urgent that you’ve ignored all proper channels?’

  She considered him coolly. ‘Of that I will speak only to the War Master and my mistresses. All that concerns you is getting us to Black Sands.’

  Emmet Bone absorbed this rebuke with apparent indifference. Then, to no one in particular, he observed, ‘There’s a rumour I’ve heard about the Snout: that the famous Dow Amber is listed among its crew. Is there truth to that, Captain?’

  Fletcher hesitated. It was not supposed to be common knowledge even throughout the Twin Isles which exact ship Dow served on. ‘It’s true,’ he said, with a gesture to Dow. ‘There he stands.’

  The pilot studied Dow mildly. ‘So that’s him,’ was all he said. Then he clapped his hands together, and turned to the wheel. ‘Captain, you are hereby relieved of the helm, until such time as you pass by this station once more. Till then, I command. Understood?’

  Fletcher bit a lip – for what captain could ever be happy in ceding command of his ship to another? But he nodded all the same.

  Emmet Bone nodded back. ‘You’re welcome, of course, to stay on deck and observe. Are we ready then? If this breeze holds, we should gain the Atoll by noon three days from now.’

  Again, the captain could only assent. There was no arguing with Labyrinth pilots. They were famed as fearless men, and peerless sailors. Some of them – perhaps even Emmet Bone here, he looked old enough – were the very same men who as youths had first explored the inner Corridors in small boats, and so made the amazing discovery that had changed the world, some forty years ago.

  The pilot stepped to the wheel. ‘Raise anchor!’ he called, and to the helmsmen added, ‘Steer dead west for now until I say different – and turn lively when I tell you, or I’ll have your heads for it.’

  And so into the Labyrinth they went.

  *

  For the initial few hours the rails were crowded with off-duty sailors, eager to see first hand waters so prohibited and mysterious. Yet in truth there was little to observe that whole afternoon. The inner Corridors appeared much the same as the outer Corridors. The reefs were no more numerous, and the Snout wound its way between them with relative ease under Emmet Bone’s instruction, although he did make several turns to the left or right when to Dow there seemed no obvious reason to do so.

  That evening they anchored in a sandy-floored basin between two reefs, and waited through the hours of darkness. During his watch Dow gazed at the night sky, empty and heat hazed – how he longed for some honest rain, or a storm – and all the while rehearsed his unspoken plans to himself. He was growing anxious. The problem of breaching Banishment’s defences remained unsolved, and he must find a solution before they reached Black Sands, if he was ever to convince the Twin Islanders to give him a ship. But it would not come.

  The next morning they set off again in warm breezes under a milky blue sky. And now the way did grow narrower. Reefs crowded all about; some slightly awash in the calm water, but most merely darker shadows in the turquoise sea. Time and again it appeared that a solid wall confronted them, but always Emmet Bone steered the Snout through a gap that seemed to magically present itself at the last moment, and from such gaps slim channels would lead off through more reefs yet.

  They had reached the Labyrinth proper. And it was, Dow soon decided, every bit as bewildering as legend made it out to be. Channels intersected with other channels and ran away in all directions; the possible paths were limitless, and those without a knowing guide would indeed be doomed to eternal wandering, or to shipwreck.

  But one thing he hadn’t been led to expect was that the Labyrinth would be so beautiful. He’d imagined, from the descriptions, a purely hostile place of black stony reefs and murky water, over which a blistering sun blazed, while the air droned with biting insects.

  But instead the heat was almost mild; there were no insects; and the water was limpid glass, made luminous by the white sand of the shallow sea floor. And the reefs! The Snout at times ran within a cable’s length of the structures, and close up Dow saw that they weren’t at all like the rocky shoals he’d known in the northern oceans – rather they were organic things, grown from corals of a hundred different shapes and sizes, all heaped upon one another into spires and castles and canyons, blazing with a multitude of colours, and swarming with fish.

  Had it all been a deception then, he wondered, the dire tales of the Labyrinth? Were they simply stories told to scare away intruders? It was the first officer, Agatha Harp, who disabused Dow of the notion. She interrupted him as he gazed down in wonder at an underwater palace of purple, pink and blue; fish darting for safety amid its battlements as the Snout slid by.

  ‘You think it a pretty sight, I see,’ she said drily. ‘Pretty enough to ignore your duties. You are reprimanded for negligence, Mr Amber.’ Her grey eyes gave no indication if she was serious or not. ‘But don’t mistake these reefs. I’ve travelled these waters before and I know – the coral here is as sharp as it is colourful, and can rip through a hull as easily as a knife through bread.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Dow.

  ‘And don’t be deceived by a day as balmy as this – it’s a rare thing in these parts. Half the year there are dry gales blowing, and the other half it’s dead calm and swarming with mosquitoes bearing deadly fevers. It takes more skill than you know to navigate these channels. And many is the ship that never made it through.’

  The truth of her words was evident soon enough, when the first of the wrecks appeared, a battleship by the look, lodged high on a coral reef, its back broken, its masts collapsed. Others followed throughout the day, some of them decaying hulks decades old, others seemingly as recent as a year or two ago. Emmet Bone nodded at them all as if they were old friends, and intoned their names to himself, in solemn memorial.

  ‘But that one’s name we do not know,’ he said to Captain Fletcher, as they passed by
a ribcage of timbers that stuck up brokenly from a reef. ‘For it was here already when we first penetrated this far into the maze. A Ship Kings vessel it is, from the Age of Exploration perhaps. There are indeed other ancient Ship Kings wrecks to be found in the outer passages, north and west. But this is as far as they ever made it along the true passage, and obviously no word of this wreck ever made it home to the Kingdoms, for there is no sign of the Ship Kings further in.’

  And so they sailed on, all that day and then, after another night at anchor, into the next. Their route twisted to the north and south at times, and once even back to the east, but bore ever westwards overall. Dow found his respect for the pilot growing with every hour. The Corridors were fiendishly subtle in their windings, and to Dow’s eye quite without landmarks, other than the wrecks, which were visible only when they were close. How Emmet Bone always knew which of the myriad passages to take, without reference to a chart of any kind, was a mystery.

  Their third nightfall in the maze found them hove to in a small circle of clear water, while foam muttered softly over reefs all about them. At dinner, Captain Fletcher swigged heavily from the rum bottle, massaging his jaw as if it ached; all these last days he’d stood doggedly at Emmet Bone’s side, his teeth clenched. The pilot himself however had not joined the officers for the meal, eating alone in his assigned cabin, and in his absence there was much discussion of pilots and their inexplicable abilities.

  Dow ventured a question from his end of the table. ‘How did they first do it? How did they first find their way through the Labyrinth?’

  It was Johannes who answered. ‘The pilots themselves reveal nothing; they pass their knowledge only from father to son. But there are many stories; in only forty years it has already become a matter of myth. Some say that it was a whale boat crew who first found the way in. A whale they’d harpooned escaped them and fled into the maze, and so they gave chase, day after day through the channels – until all unsuspecting they came upon the Atoll.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ proclaimed the captain, swigging yet more rum. ‘It was a lost boat, that’s what I’ve always heard, and they found their way in by accident, nothing else. And since then they’ve stayed nice and safe here in the Labyrinth, while the rest of us fight the war.’

  ‘True enough,’ observed Jake Tooth, picking his teeth with a fishbone. ‘They know little of the deep sea, or of battle. But this I’ll say for the pilots; amid shallows and reefs they are the most subtle of all sailors, able to read the least current and follow it to its source, able to detect the smallest ripple of a hidden reef and steer around it, able to sniff a breeze an hour before it blows, and to see the glimmer of land long before it rears above the horizon. They could find their way home even on a starless night in a fog.’

  The captain harrumphed at this, yet said no more, and the conversation moved on to other topics – but Dow was no longer listening. The harpooner’s words were ringing in his mind . . . they could find their way home even on a starless night in a fog.

  If that was so, then maybe he had his answer to Banishment’s riddle after all!

  Excitement growing, he waited until dinner was done then took Cassandra aside and led her up to the high deck and to the rail, well beyond earshot of the officer on duty. The night was heavy and warm, a haze blurring the stars, but brighter stars swam in the water; the reefs all about were aglow with points of luminescence, some affixed to the coral, some moving languidly in the shallows.

  ‘Well?’ asked Cassandra.

  Dow got straight to the point. ‘I want your high commanders to give me a ship of my own, and I need your help to convince them to do it.’

  The laundress stared at him in astonishment. ‘A ship? But what for?’

  ‘So I can sail for Banishment.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  She laughed, not in mockery, but in simple disbelief. ‘But . . . but even with a ship you could never get within a hundred miles of Banishment! In the end, you’d have to cross either the Millpond or the Banks – and either would be suicidal. The high command would never throw away a ship on something so impossible.’ She grew sombre. ‘I know how disturbing it’s been for you to hear of Nell’s fate, and that you’d like to be the hero and run to her aid. But you’re not thinking straight.’

  Dow wasn’t daunted. ‘It’s not Nell I’m after – at least, not just Nell. It’s everyone at Banishment. Everyone. You said it yourself. Five kings, and a hundred nobles and princes.’

  ‘You want to rescue all of them?’

  ‘I want to send them home. Think! What would happen if we were to liberate all those at Banishment, and return them to the Kingdoms?’

  Cassandra opened her mouth as if to protest, but nothing came out.

  Dow pressed on. ‘You told me that Castille and Valdez can barely maintain order in the Kingdoms even with the Heretic Kings in prison. Imagine the uprising that would take place if those kings came back to lead it! At the very least the Ship Kings would have another civil war on their hands, which could only benefit the Twin Islands. But at best the Heretics might win, and if that happened, your high command could make peace and end the war!’

  Cassandra’s mouth had shut.

  ‘The Ship Kings have actually made it easier for us,’ Dow added. ‘They’ve put all their enemies – all our friends, in other words – in the one place. Where a single ship could gather them up!’

  ‘You haven’t said how that ship is supposed to reach the prison,’ she said, still unconvinced. ‘The Banks or the Millpond; both are impassable.’

  ‘I think there’s a way. The solution is right here in the Labyrinth. All I need you to do is get me into a meeting with your superiors.’

  She ruminated a moment. ‘It would have to be a meeting with the War Master himself, if such an expedition was ever to be permitted.’

  ‘Then get me to the War Master!’

  Cassandra laughed, gave Dow an almost puzzled look. ‘You’re serious?’

  He nodded earnestly. ‘Tomorrow, as soon as we dock, report what I’ve said to your mistresses, and demand the War Master hear me. He will, when he sees the worth in it for the Twin Isles.’

  Now there was a kind of wonder in her eyes. ‘He might at that.’ She hesitated. ‘But listen, even should the War Master approve the attempt, he would never let you go along on it. He’ll say it’s far too dangerous to risk Dow Amber on anything so foolhardy.’

  Dow smiled grimly. ‘I can convince him. Just arrange the meeting, and you’ll see.’

  The laundress bowed her head briefly. ‘I’ll do my best.’ But then she considered him with wry amusement. ‘Even so, for all you protest that this is not for your Ignella’s sake, I can’t help but think that were she not on Banishment, you would not be so eager to rescue the Heretic Kings.’ Her smile held a wisp of sadness. ‘She must be quite a girl, this scapegoat.’

  To which Dow, troubled by too many obscure guilts, gave no reply.

  *

  They sighted the Great Atoll at mid-morning next day. And it was not what Dow had expected.

  There was a mystery he’d pondered since joining with the Twin Islanders: throughout their forty years of secret shipbuilding, where had they found the timber they needed? The slender trunks of pine to make masts, the solid oak to build hulls? There was little such wood upon the Twin Isles themselves. Red Island was stony and bare, and the jungle swamps of Whale Island were a morass of grasses and flowering vines, with few tall trees.

  So how did they supply their shipyards?

  It was not talked about openly, but Dow was sure the answer must lie on the Great Atoll. As unlikely as it seemed in a climate so hot and barren, vast forests must grow there in the Labyrinth’s heart.

  But the Atoll confounded him.

  It was heralded by a final wall of coral that curved away for many miles to either side – the last inner ring of the Labyrinth – pierced by a single gap. Beyond, miraculously, lay open ocean, shallow and sandy-
floored, but wide; an inner sea within the maze. Impelled by a parched breeze, the Snout set out across this emptiness, and after an hour’s sail a dark line appeared on the horizon – so low and featureless that for some time Dow took it to be merely a border of deeper water amid the shallows.

  But it was land.

  The ship came on, and Dow stared searchingly from the high deck. The shore stretched far to the north and south, but he could see no sign of life anywhere, no forests, no grass, not a hint of green. Everything was ashen. Even the long curve of the beach, he realised, was of black sand, and nowhere did the land rise more than a few feet above the level of the sea. Heat shimmers quivered and twisted in the air, as they would above a desert.

  Ah . . . but there.

  Some distance to the south, slender shapes were rising through the heat haze. Not trees; masts. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. And as the Snout duly turned south to run along the shore, the hulls of ships rose into view beneath the masts, and beyond them docks and cranes, and chimneys too, and high factory walls and black rooflines. It was a city, the great shipyard, port and armoury that formed the Twin Islands war capital; a city whose name Dow had often heard but never understood before now.

  Black Sands.

  The town grew closer, as ashen as the rest of the Atoll. It was like no other port Dow had ever seen. There was no sheltering headland, no harbour opening; the docks rose straight out of the ocean. And the city behind was a veneer only, a thin strip of sheds, workshops and barracks that reached no further than a few buildings back from the water, a town of length alone, and no depth.

  But of course it could be no other way, for the Great Atoll was, after all, an atoll.

  Dow now slipped away from the high deck and climbed the mizzenmast shrouds. From this new height he could see clear across the town and behold the fact; the Great Atoll was no solid mass of land, but rather a ring, a narrow sandy strip that described an enormous circle around an interior lagoon.

  That lagoon was strangely dark in colour and so wide that its far side was lost in haze, its enfolding arms curving away to meet somewhere beyond the horizon. But for all the Atoll’s immense fetch – it might be fully a hundred miles around to a man following along the black beach – the ring itself was so narrow that if compressed into one solid clump it would form but a small island, only a few miles square. And there was still not a tree to be seen.