The War of the Four Isles

by Andrew McGahan

  She made it, though. ‘And more ably than your first time,’ she laughed when she came down again, breathless. ‘I was watching that day. Do you remember? Your face was bright green up there!’

  Dow nodded austerely. ‘But you didn’t have an albatross to contend with . . .’

  The respite, however, was all too brief.

  After the voyage was eight or nine weeks old, reality began to intrude on their idyll. New Island was drawing near, and that meant the war, and the resumption of worry and care. Dow was aware of a cooling within Nell at the prospect. Yes, in this time at sea she had begun the slow process of healing after the horror of the massacre – but she was by no means whole. Nor, having lost the Heretic cause, had she yet found what her purpose was now to be – and she doubted, Dow knew, that the answer lay on New Island, a foreign land to her.

  Dow too had doubts. His fears for his family had not left him, nor had his shame at having neglected them – and all his countrymen – for so long. But greater than any doubt, excitement was growing as his homeland beckoned closer. And expectation. To think he would soon smell New Island air again!

  With Captain Harp, he began to make plans for what they would do when they arrived. Much of the island, its entire east coast indeed, they knew to be in Ship Kings hands, so they could not land anywhere there. But nor could they land openly in those parts of New Island that were in Twin Islander hands.

  ‘For we are, in fact, a renegade ship,’ said Agatha Harp, ‘belonging properly to neither side. The Ship Kings remain the enemy, as ever. But the Twin Islander forces on New Island are those most loyal to the War Master, and hence will be suspicious of us, if we appear unannounced, with our captain dead, and both Cassandra and Oliver too. And, of course, your presence, Dow, is strictly forbidden anywhere near your homeland. So we’ll have to keep hidden from our own folk too, at least for now.’

  At length, they decided that they would land on the island’s wild north-west coast, somewhere near the small port of Clover Gap. The port was in Twin Islands hands, but being small would only be lightly garrisoned, and otherwise it was a nearly uninhabited shore. From there, Dow would strike east overland towards the highlands and his home. The hope was that he would find his family safe in Yellow Bank, and be able to bring them back to the ship; a combined journey of perhaps two weeks.

  The Snout in that time would not be idle. Captain Harp would continue down the west coast, avoiding the main Twin Islander base of Port Tyler, but making cautious landings elsewhere to resupply with sorely needed fresh foods and water, and to gather intelligence on the true state of the war on New Island. The ship would then return north to rendezvous with Dow and his family.

  ‘And after that,’ said the captain, at a meeting with all the officers, ‘we’ll have to decide our final course. My thought is that we should then sail for the Twin Isles, where we have supporters, and where the tale of the War Master’s duplicity should be told. Of course, I don’t speak for Dow,’ she added, with a glance his way. ‘His place rightly lies with his own folk, and I assume he will have his own ideas by then about how they are to be liberated. But I don’t know that the Snout has any part to play in that.’

  Dow said nothing. He had not looked so far ahead yet as the liberation of all New Island; his priority for now was only to get his family to safety. But he did intend to use his journey to gauge the plight of his countrymen under their rival conquerors, Twin Islanders and Ship Kings both, and to see if any resistance was already afoot, or whether it would be up to him to start it.

  As for what part the Snout would play? Well . . . if he needed the ship, Dow had no doubt – with the new steel inside him – that he could take it. Throughout this northern voyage he had done nothing to gainsay Agatha Harp’s authority, but there was no mistaking the way the crew regarded him now, or to who they were truly loyal; it was as if, after all they had been through together, they had earned a kind of possession over him, and that they belonged to him in turn. The captain might command the ship, but their fortune, their fate, the crew now saw as linked with Dow’s own. If the crux came, and a choice had to be made, they would follow him, not Agatha.

  *

  At the end of the eleventh week, the Snout finally turned away from the icy climes. New Island, by best reckoning, now lay directly south.

  A double watch was set, and eyes turned ever more expectantly to the southern horizon. Dow’s anticipation rose to such a pitch he could scarcely stand to be below decks, in case he should miss the moment of landfall. It seemed only harder to believe in, the closer it came. More than three and a half years had passed since he’d sailed away with the Ship Kings on the Chloe, and over four since he’d bid goodbye to his family. The entire world had changed since then, and he with it; but somewhere just over the horizon now, home lay.

  And yet the moment, when it did arrive, was as much agonising as it was exalting.

  Dow was snatching a moment’s sleep in his cabin, at the end of a long, storm-racked night, when the lookout’s cry woke him. ‘Land! Land hard ahead!’ He tumbled instantly out of bed and went stumbling up to the foredeck – Nell following along more sleepily – to find a clearing wind abroad, and grey sheets of rain sweeping away in the first pre-dawn light.

  And there! Emerging from the rain and gloom close ahead, rising dark and sheer from the sea, was an immense, upthrust tableland, its ramparts receding east and west beyond sight, feet wraped in white foam.

  It was the Great Plateau. The recognition was so shocking it started tears in Dow’s eyes, for he had not known where they would strike the coast, and had never dreamed that it would be here, at the very foot of the plateau’s great northern headland, frowning down over the Snout from a mile in height.

  A strange double vision possessed him. Gazing up to the headland’s out-thrust point he could see against the dim sky a few tufts of grass, and he knew them; for it was exactly there that he had once crouched as a youth, his heart aflame, gazing down upon the heaving sea far below, and upon the sight of two ships beating against a storm. Exactly where the Snout rode now.

  How circular was the world! He’d travelled so far in the years since, and seen so much, and had even learned of those two ships, and of where and why they were sailing that day – and yet he’d never imagined he would sail himself upon the same stretch of ocean.

  Nell was at his side. She shuddered. ‘What cliffs! They remind me of the Ice Wall.’

  Dow nodded, but he was lost in memory, for now he could see the tiny figures of gulls circling about the heights and, was reliving another scene from his past; a different, earlier visit to the headland, when he had first beheld the strange birds and heard their cry. He’d asked his father what they were.

  Gulls, his father had replied, and one of the other men there had said, They fly to each of the Four Isles, without ever having to land.

  How far is that? Dow had asked.

  Far, and beyond far, the man had answered. Only the Ship Kings know, had said the fourth. To which his father added, And they don’t tell. . .

  Dow almost gasped, so overwhelming was the rush of longing and fulfilment, too acute to bear. He knew so many answers now to the questions he’d asked then; things his father could never know. Oh, but to see him again, and his mother, and his brother and twin sisters, and to tell them of all he had done. The thought of delay was suddenly unendurable, they were so close now; merely up and over those cliffs and through the dark forest of the plateau, and then down into the valley; his little cottage would be there, and they would be waiting.

  Ah . . . but there was no way to climb the cliffs, and nowhere to land at their feet, or anywhere along this tenantless northern shore.

  Dow must first sail further away, before he could come back.

  *

  The Snout now turned west, and on the second morning after making landfall – the first day of summer, as it happened – they rounded New Island’s north-western cape, and began to track south along the west coast.
By evening of the same day they were approaching the port of Clover Gap.

  It was time to put Dow ashore.

  They did so by night, the ship coming in close to the coast in the darkest hours before dawn. The land here was a black shadow beneath the stars, rising to hulking mountains inland. Not a light shone out anywhere – Clover Gap, less than ten miles south, was hidden by an intervening headland – but a pale line of surf marked the beach. On the main deck, the landing party gathered at the rail as a skiff was readied to launch.

  Dow had intended at first to go alone, for stealth’s sake. New Island was his home, but it was also an occupied land, and the roads would be watched. If he could not avoid the guard posts, at least he spoke with the proper accent and could pretend to be a common New Islander. Nell, however, had insisted he take company. She would have come herself, but Dow had raised the obvious objection; with her scars, she would be noticed wherever she went, and it would not be long before someone connected the scars with her name. And so he’d turned instead to the faithful crew of his attack boat: Nicky would go with him, and young May too, both able to pass well enough for New Islanders, as long as Dow did the talking for them.

  Captain Harp came down from the high deck. ‘Good luck to you, Dow. Go carefully.’

  Dow nodded. ‘And you, Captain. Beware as you sail south. Do not be seen.’

  She shrugged. ‘From a distance we look much like any other Twin Islands ship. As long as no one comes too close to investigate, we should be fine . . . providing of course that we don’t run into the whole fleet. Or into Damien Tender himself.’

  It was said lightly enough, but they both knew it was no idle risk; the entire Twin Islands fleet would indeed be somewhere nearby now – most likely at Port Tyler, not even a hundred miles away. For hadn’t the War Master promised that he and all his ships would be in New Island waters by the start of summer? Likewise, the Ship Kings armada, having come the shorter southern route from the Kingdoms – a seven or eight week voyage, compared to the twelve it had taken the Snout – should easily have reached Broken Harbour on the east coast by now. All might be quiet here at Clover Gap, but elsewhere about New Island immense forces were massing, and battle loomed.

  With a last nod, Dow turned away and went to where Nell was waiting at the rail, having come to see him off. She was staring at the beach.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said.

  She turned to him with a tight smile. ‘What a strange smell this land of yours has from offshore. But no doubt it’s the air of home to you.’

  Dow truly could smell home on the night breeze – or, at least, the scent of pine trees – but he detected in her words an underlying regret for her own lost homeland, and its own smells.

  He nodded solemnly. ‘Some other time, when the war is over, I’ll take you to the highlands and to Yellow Bank. And after that we’ll go to the Kingdoms and you can show me Othrace.’

  She laughed softly. ‘Will there ever be a time, I wonder, when folk can travel so freely?’

  ‘We have to hope so.’

  Nell only frowned doubtfully. It was cruel to be leaving her behind, he knew. She needed activity and purpose to thrive, and she was struggling ever more each day to discern what her usefulness could be among the Twin Islanders. And for the next two weeks she would be alone in their midst.

  He said, ‘Things will be clearer when I come back. I’ll know the truth by then.’

  She looked at him. ‘I only hope it’s a truth that you can live with.’

  They kissed once lightly, and then Dow was in the boat with Nicky and May, and together they were being lowered to the sea.

  *

  They landed by pre-dawn light, coming in through the surf to run up on the sand. Dow and Nicky and May leapt from the skiff’s bow, then shoved it off again, and watched until the crew had rowed safely out through the waves towards the waiting ship.

  Turning away from the sea then, Dow looked up at the hills and took a moment to relish the fact; he stood on home soil once more! True, this was a landscape as unknown to him as any other, for he had never travelled to the west coast in his childhood days. Still, it was New Island air he was breathing, and New Island sand beneath his feet.

  ‘Remember,’ he told his companions, ‘if we meet anyone, leave all the talking to me.’

  They shouldered their packs – they had food enough for a week, and a small store of coins to buy further supplies – and set off east through the scrub, the land already climbing as they went. The day dawned, though the sun would not lift over the mountains ahead for some time yet. A mile or so inland they came to a track running parallel to the shore. This was the main road; it ran north from the port of Clover Gap until it turned east to cross over the mountain pass of the same name.

  They followed it now, and for some hours made good progress, even though the trail grew rougher as it climbed. They met nobody, and passed no houses. This was an empty corner of New Island even compared to Dow’s highlands, for the hills were hard, bearing only tough grasses and stunted pines, and offering scant livelihood.

  Nevertheless, around noon they came to a village high on the slopes, a dozen or so huts clustered about a small Barrel House, the sight of which filled Dow with a pang of nostalgia. He almost suggested they go in, and receive the traditional hospitality given to passing strangers – a dram of whisky at the very least. But then he noticed soldiers in Twin Islander uniforms lounging on benches at the Barrel House door. With sinking heart, he realised that the place had been commandeered as a barracks for the occupying garrison.

  Eyes downcast, he and Nicky and May could only hope to pass by, but the sergeant on duty rose as they approached. ‘All right, halt and let’s have a look at you,’ he ordered in a bored voice. ‘What are your names and what is your business here?’

  They paused obediently, and Dow – with forced calm, and a deliberately weary tone – answered with the story he had ready: that they were two brothers and a sister, farmers, their parents dead and themselves made homeless by the fighting down in the lowlands. Now they were making their way to a highland village where they had their last living kinfolk, in search of a new home.

  The sergeant listened indifferently as he rummaged through their bags, manhandling their food supplies but not, luckily, discovering their main cache of coins, for the pieces had been cunningly baked into a loaf of bread by the ship’s cooks.

  ‘More than likely you’re all deserters running away from the press gangs,’ he said, when Dow was done. ‘I’d arrest you, but what do I care, abandoned up here in this civilisation-forsaken hole?’ Finding no contraband of interest, he straightened and added, ‘There’s a tax for crossing the pass. What money are you carrying?’

  Dow, who had a few extra coins in his pockets for show, dug them out and held them up. ‘This is all we have left, having come so far.’

  The sergeant frowned at the amount, but shrugged and plucked the pieces from Dow’s palm. ‘On you go then. And look on the bright side; beyond the pass is only lawlessness and Ship Kings raiders. They’d have stolen this from you anyway.’

  Dismissed, they moved on. At the edge of the settlement a few of the villagers were tending a meagre garden. They were old men and women – Dow could see no younger folk anywhere – and looked up with wary stares as the travellers passed by. These were the first of his countrymen Dow had beheld since going away, but he was quietly stricken by a servility he sensed in them, an air of fearfulness, even of passers-by. Was this something new, he wondered; or had New Islanders always had this aspect about them, and he’d just never noticed?

  Beyond, the road began a steep switchback climb up a rocky slope, and after an hour’s labour Dow and the others had reached Clover Gap itself. It was a high saddle of land slung between two towering peaks, sentinels of the great range that ran north to south here, dividing the highlands from the coast. The crags above still bore thinning cloaks of winter snow, but down in the saddle the air was warm and the early summer’s
day was bright.

  From here, a wide view opened to the east, and Dow gazed out eagerly, his first sighting of his native highlands in four years. It seemed that they were displayed for him all at a glance; a jumbled maze of ridges and ranges and narrow valleys already lost in shadow. To the east and south these hills dwindled as they approached the blue-hazed horizon, but to the north they heaped higher upon one another, until they made a continuous range. Beyond that range, through gaps between its peaks, could be glimpsed the distant rim of the Great Plateau. And between the range and the plateau rose the headwaters, Dow knew, of the Long River, along the banks of which resided the village of his birth, Yellow Bank.

  But it was still all far away, and moreover, there was no direct road that led from Clover Gap over the mountains to the upper reaches of the river. They would have to travel eastwards first, then north.

  Having lunched in the pass, Dow and his friends heaved their packs once more to their shoulders, and so descended into the wilderness.

  *

  For Dow, the journey over the next four days was one of increasing sadness and dismay.

  As the garrison sergeant had hinted, the villages of the highlands were clearly not thought worth occupying by either side in the conflict. The only living to be made in most of these valleys was sheep rearing, and what settlements existed were tiny huddles of huts hidden away in dark glens, accessible only by narrow tracks over the endless mountain passes.

  Even so, it was obvious that soldiers from both armies had made incursions here during the three years of war. Everywhere Dow’s party went, they found ruin. Houses and barns burned, yards and Barrel Houses razed, fences uprooted, sheep run off, bridges demolished. And in every village, they found living only a fearful, remnant population, mostly old men and old women; the bulk of the younger folk having been carted away in raids by either the Ship Kings or the Twin Islanders.