The War of the Four Isles

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘Dow! How did you get here?’

  He looked back to Nell. It seemed she would not be content until he answered.

  His own voice was as far away as everything else. ‘I walked,’ he said. Then he smiled. How ridiculous it sounded, spoken out loud.

  ‘Walked from where?’

  Was she dense? ‘From the ship.’

  ‘What ship? There’s no ship out there.’

  ‘You can’t see it,’ he explained, as if she was a child. ‘It’s thirty miles away. And hard aground.’ Then he remembered; the tide was back. Of course. It had drowned him. But had it been high enough to float the Snout off the bank? Well, so what if it had? Captain Fletcher would only have sailed for home as he’d vowed. There would be no rescue either way. And Dow didn’t care.

  Nell was incredulous. ‘You walked for thirty miles? Across the Banks? Alone?’

  He almost laughed, but the urge brought a stab of pain to his raw throat, and he remembered the way the salt water had burned in his lungs . . . and no, it was nothing to laugh about at all.

  Nor indeed was his current plight; after all, he was now trapped in a Ship Kings prison. And yet . . . that prison was not what he’d expected. His gaze roamed about the room, with all its comfort and warmth, and the lovely rain murmuring outside. Then he remembered something else, and fixed Nell with an abruptly serious stare. ‘But what are you doing here? When did they let you out?’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Out of your cell!’

  She shook her head at him in puzzlement. ‘There aren’t any cells on Banishment.’

  Dow peered at her across what felt like a great distance. No cells at all? No cruel dungeons that flooded with the tide? How odd. Cassandra had it very wrong then – or her superiors did. Or maybe Cassandra had lied. But why would she do that? And yet there was no doubt about it, Nell did not appear starved or half-drowned or brutalised; she looked in perfect health.

  It came to Dow then in a rush, the room and everything in it crystallising into sharp focus for the first time since he’d woken; this was all real, this was Nell, after so long, she was here.

  He went to sit up, but only fell back gasping – he was so feeble! – and when he struggled up again, Nell gave an impatient sigh and leaned forward to press him back down. ‘Stop!’ she ordered. ‘You’re in no condition.’ He gave way finally: it was enough for a few moments just to stare up at her face as she bent over the bed.

  Had she changed in three years? Her hair, while still short, was longer than it had been. And her face had lost a little of its narrowness, giving her an older, more womanly air. She seemed tired, too, her manner more careworn than he remembered. Only her scars were the same as ever, twined about her cheeks and down her neck, where they vanished beneath the fur-edged robe she wore.

  A vast sheepishness began to creep over him. A prisoner she might be, but she didn’t look at all like a woman who needed rescuing.

  Still staring down at him, she said, ‘It’s important that you rest. Don’t think that you can just walk away from a drowning with no harm done. You were underwater much too long before we reached you – you were ice cold to the touch, blue in the face and hands, and your heart stopped twice on the way back in the boat. So go gently!’

  He nodded, too weak to argue.

  She relaxed back in her chair. ‘Still, the doctor said that if you woke, then you should be kept awake for a while if possible. So it’s fine if we talk. And I have to ask again. What are you doing here?’

  But the dream indifference had suffused Dow again and he yawned, not terribly interested in the details of how it had happened. ‘We were coming to rescue you. But it won’t happen now. We got swept away by a flood and the ship was wrecked.’

  She considered him in grave astonishment. ‘A rescue? But your ship – it’s a Twin Isles vessel?’

  His nod was sleepy.

  ‘Then I don’t understand. Whose idea was it to come here? Who sent you?’

  ‘It was my idea,’ Dow roused himself to say, hurt that she might think otherwise. ‘But it was the War Master who gave permission . . .’

  ‘The War Master!’ She had stiffened distrustfully. ‘He sent you here?’

  Her hostility penetrated even through Dow’s fatigue. ‘What’s wrong? I thought your peace faction were in negotiations with him once . . .’

  ‘We were,’ she said coldly. ‘But not anymore.’ She studied Dow askance a moment. ‘So you and Damien Tender are friends then?’

  ‘No. I don’t know him at all. I’ve only met him once.’ Dow was so tired he could hardly focus on the question, but she seemed to be accusing him of something. ‘It was nothing to do with him. I was the one who wanted to come. For you . . .’

  Confusion swam behind her eyes, and the suspicion there softened. ‘I’m sorry, Dow. It’s just . . . there are so many rumours about you. There have been ever since this war started. It’s hard to know which ones to believe sometimes.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘Oh . . . nothing. We can talk about it later.’ She looked shamefaced. ‘And I’m sorry if I sounded ungrateful. If you were truly coming to help us, then you have my thanks. It was an extraordinary thing to attempt. And now your ship is lost. Are you the only survivor then from the wreck?’

  Ah, she thought everyone else was dead, and that he had walked here only to save his own life! Dow laboured to explain. ‘The ship is aground, not lost. They’ll float it off sooner or later. But then they’re going home. They won’t come here. Captain Fletcher refuses to.’

  She stared in disbelief. ‘You mean you could have stayed on board and sailed away? You left a perfectly seaworthy ship to come here?’

  Dow nodded innocently. ‘It was the only way to find you. It’s alright,’ he hastened to add, noting a sudden emotion in her eyes and mistaking it for concern. ‘I made it here in the end, didn’t I?’

  But it wasn’t concern, it was outrage. ‘Alright?’ she exploded. ‘Are you insane? How could you be so stupid! Thirty miles across the Banks on foot! You should have been killed! You would have been, if we hadn’t seen you and launched the boat!’

  Dow blinked mildly; in his current state, even this outburst could elicit no more reaction. Indeed, she had reminded him of something he’d forgotten about. ‘Where did you even get a boat from?’ he asked, very curious to know. ‘You’re prisoners.’

  She fumed at the distraction. ‘We made it ourselves. But we can’t use it to escape, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’ll see why for yourself soon enough, now that you’re stuck here.’ She brooded a moment more. ‘And that’s another thing that makes it unforgivably stupid, what you’ve done. After all the lives lost keeping you out of Ship Kings prisons, you walk straight into the worst one of all, of your own free will! What were you thinking!?’

  But a wise suspicion was beginning to glow in Dow’s mind. Oh, her anger was genuine, even justified. But beneath it lay something else . . .

  He was smiling, which only made her angrier.

  ‘It’s not a joke, Dow! We have no idea what to do with you, you know. We’ll have to keep you secret, for one thing. The guards leave us alone here most of the time – but that won’t apply to you. They’d carry you off for execution in an instant, if they found out, along with anyone harbouring you. You’re a danger to everyone here! I even had to give up my room because of you!’

  ‘This is your room?’

  She was suddenly embarrassed, her rage tumbling away as she blushed. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘Well, we had to put you somewhere, didn’t we? It could hardly be the dormitories, and only a few of us have our own rooms . . .’

  Dow was grinning at her. ‘I’m sorry I cost you your bed. I’ll go if you want.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  She sat back – fighting, Dow saw, to hold onto her indignation, but failing. The rain whispered loudly in the quiet, and Dow could not stop smiling. The grim reality – that he was confined here now, maybe for as long as the war l
asted – threatened somewhere at the back of his blurred thoughts. But he still couldn’t make himself care. It was impossible to look beyond the present, and the present was warm and comfortable, and Nell was with him. The rest was for tomorrow.

  Finally she shook her head disgustedly, then sat forward again. ‘Give me your hand. I’m supposed to check your pulse every hour.’

  Dow obediently extended his arm, and watched as she felt expertly for his vein.

  ‘We have a doctor, as I said,’ she remarked, ‘but he’s asleep right now. He was with you all day. And anyway, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been studying medicine with him. It’s something to keep me occupied.’

  Her touch was firm on his wrist, and he could feel his blood pulsing there.

  ‘High,’ she said, ‘but better than before. And your fingertips have some colour again. But that doesn’t mean you’re out of danger. Salt water inflicts great damage upon the lungs when inhaled, and it’s not merely a matter of spitting it out. You’ve been vomiting up blood.’ She fixed him with a prim look. ‘I have to examine your chest as well. It’ll hurt. We think you may have broken a rib or two; it happens when the body is convulsing for lack of air.’ And with that, she pulled back his sheet.

  Dow was dimly astonished to find that he was naked. In another time and place he might have been self-conscious – but now, in his convalescent lethargy, he felt no more than an idle bemusement. ‘Where are my clothes?’

  ‘Drying,’ said Nell, not meeting his eyes.

  She was feeling at his ribs – his skin there had an ugly bluish hue – pressing down experimentally. Pain came at him in waves, but only dully.

  ‘No, not broken,’ was her opinion. ‘Just bruised, I think. Now, breathe as deep as you can.’ She lowered her ear to his chest and listened as he drew in a few wheezing gasps. His entire torso seemed to throb, and dizziness threatened a moment. But he was far more aware of her head resting against his heart.

  ‘Better,’ she declared. Now she folded the sheet back from his legs, and slid a hand down his shin, then rolled his toes between her fingers. ‘Colour is improved at the lower extremities, too.’ Her tone could not have been more professional or detached. And yet so acutely alive to her touch was Dow’s skin, he could feel – as he had once before, three years ago, in the Ice – the upraised lines of the scars on her thumb.

  ‘Looking at you now, I’d hardly know how close to death you came today,’ she observed, less clinically, ‘if I hadn’t seen the state of your body myself when it came from the water. I was sure it was too late to revive you. Of course, I didn’t realise it was you, until you started breathing again.’ Her hand had returned to rest upon his chest, and she gazed at it as if faintly surprised to find it there. ‘I’m glad you’re alive, Dow. But I could kill you for coming to Banishment. What use are you to anyone here?’

  Her anger was back, but Dow could see through it completely now. Blood warmed in him, and the last of his indifference and lassitude faded away – although not his dreamlike certainty. He lifted himself to rest on one elbow, while she watched with widened eyes, but without rebuking him. Gently, he took her hand from his chest, and returned it to her side.

  He said, ‘Now you.’

  She regarded him levelly a moment, without expression. And perhaps she was in a state of dislocation herself, having so unexpectedly found him dead and then brought him back to life; a state where nothing was normal and no rules applied. Or perhaps it was just because the rain was falling, and because the world around them had shrunk down to something small and safe, with everyone else locked outside, just for now.

  Either way, she understood.

  She nodded just once, and rose, her gaze calm. The furred robe slipped from her shoulders; underneath she wore only a simple nightgown. With a shrug that too dropped to the floor, and then there was only Nell, letting him see, but her eyes defiant, challenging him to look at what the Ribbon Cave had done to her.

  He did look. His first thought, strangely, was that he had been lied to again, for he’d been told that she had been shot, but there was no sign of any musket wounds upon her. But otherwise . . .

  Scars. Scars were everywhere. The greatest of them curved in white whorls about her breasts and her belly and her hips, and a multitude of others twined around her shoulders and arms, and circled her thighs and shins. But there was, as it turned out, one place where the scars faded away to thinner lines and then to nothing; one place at the centre of her that the blades of the cave floor had not reached, leaving a small locus of flesh unblemished.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dow. And he shifted aside to make room for her in the bed.

  Nell considered him a moment longer, ceding nothing. Then she climbed in. Their bodies met like a line drawn of fire, but she whispered a last thing to him in a fierce tone of warning. ‘If any of it’s true, don’t tell me yet. Not tonight. I don’t want to know.’ He would have asked what she meant, but then their lips were together, and there was no point anymore in words.

  And yet maybe it was only a dream.

  Because the next morning, when Dow woke to daylight and to a clear mind again, his drowning torpor banished at last, she was gone.

  11. BANISHMENT

  But his clothes, at least, had reappeared, folded neatly over the chair. Dow lay still for a time, staring at them, contemplating memories that were almost too recent and precious yet to inspect. No, it had not been a dream. There was a warm place upon the sheets beside him; she must have left only moments before he woke . . .

  He rolled over and stretched, feeling sore and stiff, but himself again, and buoyant, no matter the gravity of his situation, marooned as he was on Banishment. His curiosity was awake, too. What was it like, the prison isle, beyond this room? But the window that had been open the night before was shuttered now, and until he knew more, he thought it unwise to open it or show his face there.

  He rose and began to dress, realising as he did so how hungry he was. Just then there came a knock at the door, and King Benito entered.

  ‘Breakfast,’ declared the monarch, holding up a tray laden with food.

  ‘Your Majesty!’ Dow said in surprise.

  Benito laughed. ‘No need for that, son. A king serving breakfast is hardly a king. Benito will do fine for the moment. How are you feeling? Are you up to eating yet? It’ll do you good.’

  Dow was nodding, eyeing the tray as Benito set it down. There was toasted bread and boiled eggs and cheese and fruit – more than ample for prison fare.

  ‘I won’t get in your way then,’ Benito added, already retreating towards the door. ‘I’ll come back in half an hour or so, then we can talk. There are decisions to be made. But for now, sit, eat.’

  Dow obeyed willingly, sitting down to the food. Then he hesitated, looking up. ‘Um . . . is Nell about somewhere, do you know?’

  The king paused on the threshold. ‘Oh, yes, somewhere.’ He seemed to debate with himself a moment, then stepped back into the room and closed the door, addressing Dow confidentially. ‘It’s not my place to speak for her, of course, but I’ve come to know Ignella well these last years. I gave her asylum in my kingdom, after she escaped from the Castille and Valdez forces. Did you know that? And I admire her greatly; she has been a brave voice against continuing this futile war.

  ‘Still, it’s been a lonely life. Her name is held in contempt by her many enemies, and even her allies regard her with a certain awe. After all, she is the scapegoat who travelled to the Ice with the famous Dow Amber, and who stood with him before the puppet Sea Lords in defiance. Now she has become scapegoat not merely for a ship, but for an entire cause, and folk are either daunted by her or venerate her almost as a queen-in-exile – both of which keep her apart. Even before she was sent here with the rest of us, she had no close friends that I know of; and she has none here on Banishment. Not of her own age, anyway. It’s mostly just old men like me.’

  Dow, holding a piece of toast forgotten in one hand, listened to this in silence, no
t knowing what to say in return, but feeling an obscure guilt, even though he had nothing, surely, to be guilty about.

  But Benito’s bluff friendliness held a caution now. ‘That loneliness makes her vulnerable, no doubt – and I know you two shared a connection once. But if I ever learn that you are taking advantage of that connection, or her loneliness, for whatever purpose – be warned: I won’t stand for it.’

  Reddening, Dow said, ‘What makes you think I’d ever do something like that?’

  Benito frowned. ‘Well, we’ll speak of this soon enough, and get to the truth of it. Rumours are seldom to be taken at face worth, especially those from afar. But even so, the reports we’ve had of you during this war do not speak in your favour, lad. And whatever emotions may have got the better of her last night, no one has been more disappointed in you than our Nell.’

  Then he was gone, leaving Dow to a breakfast for which he suddenly had less appetite.

  *

  Half an hour later the king returned as promised, and found Dow fed, fully dressed and mostly fit – other than the tightness of his bruised ribs – but impatient to discuss the matter of the rumours to which Benito had referred. Also, Nell had not reappeared, and all sorts of doubts had begun to assail Dow. Had he done something wrong last night? It hadn’t seemed so at the time, but then he had hardly been himself either . . .

  ‘Now just a moment,’ Benito said immediately to Dow’s interrogative look. ‘As I said, we will discuss your situation soon. I’ve summoned a meeting of our Heretic council for that very purpose. But we’ve a short while before everyone finishes breakfast, and I thought you should first be given a tour of Banishment. It won’t take long, there’s not much to see; only the barracks, and then the outside.’