The War of the Four Isles

by Andrew McGahan

  Dow advanced still. ‘I’ve been to Yellow Bank,’ he declared flatly, the wrath cold in him again. ‘I’ve seen the message you left for me there.’

  Diego had backed up against the binnacle and could retreat no further. But at the mention of Yellow Bank he seemed to take strength, and straightened. ‘It was not I that burned your family, New Islander,’ he said disdainfully. ‘Yes, I was there. But the fire started from within the building, not without.’

  ‘Liar!’ Dow returned.

  Diego shrugged, holding his sword more expertly than at first, now that his shock had passed. ‘Think what you will. But I wanted them alive. I wanted to display them to the world, the family of the great Dow Amber, abandoned by him to their fate! The fire cheated me of my prize, and I had no part in it.’

  Doubt bit at Dow, but he pressed it down ruthlessly. Lie or the truth, it didn’t matter. His family would be alive if not for Diego. ‘You’re a murderer of children, and a coward,’ he pronounced. The two were only a few feet apart now, each in a fighting stance, Dow with his bayonet pointed at Diego’s heart, seeking for a line of attack around the sword.

  ‘You would know of cowardice, New Islander!’ scorned Diego, matching Dow’s movements. ‘In all the great battles of this war, where have you been? Hiding away with your laundress whore! What would Ignella think of you now, I wonder!’

  ‘You could ask yourself,’ Dow smiled. ‘She’s on the other ship.’

  Something appalled bloomed in Diego’s eyes, and the sword wavered. ‘She’s here? But—’

  Dow took the opening and lunged with the musket – but even then, Diego’s was the better training, and reflexively he caught the bayonet on the guard of his sword and thrust it aside; then with a cry he shoved forward brutally at Dow with the advantage of his greater weight and height.

  Dow, to his own horror, found himself thrown back upon the deck – and for an awful instant Diego loomed over him, sword uplifted.

  Then something ripped at Diego’s shoulder, whirling him about; a musket ball. He clutched at the wound, turned in outrage, and there at the top of the forward stairs stood Jake Tooth, musket raised and aimed, the barrel smoking. Behind him, a mass of Twin Islanders crowded the stairs, fallen Ship Kings lying at their feet.

  Diego stared a moment, his face twisted in vast frustration; his ship lost; his foe helpless at his feet, but no time to finish it! Abruptly, he spun and dashed to the rail. He threw his sword into the sea, mounted the rail to leap from it himself, then glanced back in contempt. ‘We’re not finished, New Islander! This is but one ship. I’ll have another soon enough, and I will hunt you to the ends of the world.’

  With that, even as Dow scrambled forward despairingly to prevent it, Diego jumped. And by the time Dow reached the rail and stared down, his enemy had already surfaced below, and was swimming away towards one of the waiting boats.

  ‘Shoot him!’ Dow shrieked to anyone who might be nearby with a loaded musket. ‘Shoot him!’ And when no one responded, he climbed madly onto the rail, ready to dive himself—

  Then a hand clutched his shoulder and pulled him down, and Dow found himself staring at a face so unexpected that it stopped him short; a face he’d been sure he would never see again; long and narrow, weathered, compassionate and studious.

  It was Commander Fidel.

  ‘Let him go, Dow.’

  Dow could only gape in confusion. He was aware of silence everywhere, from the stairs, from the Great Cabin below. The fighting was done, the ship was taken. Bewildered, he gazed at Fidel. He’d thought the commander to be dead, or locked away in a Ship Kings prison – what was he doing back on the Chloe, serving under Diego? And how could he be standing here calmly amid the slaughter, untouched? Why had no one shot him?

  It was only then Dow noticed that Fidel was not wearing a uniform. He was dressed in a long white apron, stained down the front with blood.

  A doctor’s apron.

  ‘Let it be, Dow. You have won the ship. Diego must wait for another day.’

  No. . .

  But Dow could feel an awful emptiness opening inside him; the rage draining out, no matter how he tried to hold on to it. He had failed. He had come so close, he’d come within a single bayonet thrust . . . but at the final test he had been bested by his enemy. And now it was too late. Diego was gone.

  ‘I must see to the wounded,’ said Fidel, his gentle eyes still intent on Dow. ‘Enough, please. Let the killing end for the day.’

  Yes, it was enough. Enough. A sick weariness took hold of Dow. He lifted his gaze to look out across the ocean. Somehow it had become evening, the sky clear and a deepening blue; but all across the sea smoke drifted in tired rags, the wind faded near to nothing. Everywhere ships were burning or sinking or lying disabled.

  The great battle was over. Away to the south, the surviving Twin Isles vessels were fleeing in slow disorder towards the open ocean, while in much greater numbers the Ship Kings were in pursuit, but only as a formality, it seemed, and with little cannon fire. Nightfall would put an end to it all anyway. But there was no mistaking the result, as indeed there hadn’t been since the wind turned; the day belonged to the Ship Kings.

  Did Dow even care? Neither side was his. He had no side anymore. He’d had only one purpose in all the world, and had failed at it, and his family was still dead, still burned and buried and lost . . .

  Fidel, satisfied, was turning away. ‘Your men have stopped the fire, I think.’

  What? Yes, Dow remembered then. The Chloe had been on fire. Strange that he had forgotten. His very thoughts felt thick and slow.

  He saw that a Twin Isles sailor had climbed up from the main deck and was reporting to Jake Tooth. The harpooner grew sombre as he listened. He glanced at Dow in thought a moment, before coming over.

  ‘Success,’ he announced. ‘There is much damage forward, and the magazine was threatened, but Johannes and his men managed to run hoses from the Snout, and the fire is quenched.’ And yet there was no victory in him; the harpooner’s blood-smeared face was grim. ‘But there’s bad news too. There was an explosion near the magazine, before the fire was controlled. Johannes is dead.’

  Dow nearly staggered, as if from a physical blow. Nausea gripped his gut. Oh no . . . not that. That was too high a price to pay. Far too high. For a single ship. For a single failed attempt to kill someone as worthless as Diego.

  He reeled away, unutterably sickened now, wanting to throw himself into the ocean; anything to blot out the terrible knowledge – and the guilt. They needn’t have done this, they could have let the Chloe burn, and Johannes would still be alive – but Dow had made them come . . . he had insisted. . .

  From behind him came another burst of urgent discussion; Jake, and a woman’s voice. It was Nell, he realised, turning to look at them from across the deck, too numbed now even to be surprised at her presence, though she should not be here, she should be on the Snout with the wounded.

  She was telling Jake something, her face strained, her clothes black with other people’s blood. The harpooner reared back at her news. When Nell only nodded at him, he spun to Dow. ‘Can you take charge here? There’s no one else, and I’m needed on the Snout. The captain is shot and incapacitated.’

  Dow stared in hollow disbelief. Agatha Harp? Shot? Was she going to die too – another payment to be extracted for his recklessness?

  He shook his head at Jake, wretched. No, he wasn’t fit to be in charge of anything. Let the Chloe go adrift, let it catch fire again, let it burn to the waterline. It hadn’t been worth it . . .

  But the harpooner advanced in fury, clutched him by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me! There will be time later to take the blame for all this. And I may well kill you myself if Agatha is badly hurt! But for now you are a commissioned lieutenant and the senior officer here other than me. You wanted this ship! Now for the sake of the deeps, do your damn duty and command it.’

  It was the word duty as much as anything that brought Dow back to himself. W
hatever horrors of shame lay ahead, to surrender to them now would make it all even worse; he was indeed an officer, with a crew depending on him. They had risked their lives, and Johannes had given his, to capture this vessel. They deserved better from him.

  He pulled himself free of Jake’s grip, straightened formally, and looked the harpooner at last in the eye. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘That’s better. When you get underway, stay close and follow the Snout.’

  ‘What course do we set?’

  ‘What course . . .?’

  Now it was the harpooner’s turn to falter; he hadn’t considered it. Jake stared blankly about at the battlefield, and Dow could almost read his thoughts. Where were the two ships to sail? Neither was seaworthy for lengthy voyage anymore, they must seek a friendly port – but what friendly port was left to them? Who were their friends?

  For the first time in as long as Dow had known him, Jake Tooth was utterly at a loss.

  So it was Dow who decided. Only a few miles away now, the heights of East and West Heads rose bluntly from the sea, their stony brows glowing red in the last light of the day; the battle had carried the warring fleets almost to the mouth of the Claw.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘We can go to Stone Port, at least for tonight.’

  Jake stared at the headlands. Atop West Head, where once the great Stone Port keep had risen, rose only black and ruined walls now; the fortress, Dow knew, had been burned by the Twin Islanders in the early fighting of the war, and never rebuilt. As for the town, it had of course been destroyed by fire even earlier. And the great sea wall too, by rumour, had since been thrown down.

  ‘It’s abandoned,’ said Jake. ‘There’s nothing for us there. No people, nothing.’

  ‘Except a harbour, and refuge.’

  The harpooner hesitated, then glanced in anxiety at the Snout, as if there was no time left for arguments. ‘We will meet you there,’ he sighed, and strode off.

  Leaving only Nell.

  Dow didn’t know what to say. She had been right about everything. He opened his mouth, but where in all these sorrows to begin?

  She shook her head. ‘See to your ship for now. Tomorrow, we can talk.’

  Then she too was gone, and Dow was alone and in command of his empty prize.

  17. INHERITANCE

  Two days later, on an afternoon grey with rain, Dow and Nell climbed to the peak of West Head.

  Their path first took them through the ruins of Stone Port town. Fire and siege had left nothing of any size standing there. The weedy streets were lined only with ashen humps and grassy mounds, and on the waterfront only bare poles poked from the harbour where once the wharves and warehouses had stood.

  Then it was on up through the fortress, rising in great tiers set against the hill. The keep had not been so thoroughly levelled during its overthrow as had the town – many of the immense stone walls still stood tall – but the inner halls had all been gutted and looted, and bushes now grew thick in what once had been the splendid apartments of the Ship Kings governor and his court.

  Not a soul dwelt there any longer, and all was quiet as they climbed the naked stairways. Nell occasionally pointed out rooms that she remembered from her stay here long ago, while the Chloe had been in Stone Port, and Dow could only note the irony of it; in those same days he had stood at the fortress gates, an anonymous youth and fisherman, and wondered futilely what lay beyond. And yet now that he was here it meant nothing to him at all. It was just another place destroyed by war.

  They came to the foot of the uppermost tower; it was burnt-out inside, but around the inner walls a stone stairway still clung, and ascending these steps carefully they emerged at last to an open platform at the tower’s top. It was here that great bonfires had once been set every night, before the war, to light the way for the Ship Kings fleets, come to collect their tribute.

  Dow and Nell looked out. The view from this height was almost limitless, broken only by wispy curtains of rain to the west, and Dow turned searchingly from horizon to horizon, as if he might find some sign or solace in such a vast expanse of land and sea.

  But the world was empty. To the south the ocean stretched sad and grey, forsaken now by the hundreds of ships that had battled so fervently there just two days ago. Even the wrack and flotsam of the great engagement had since been swept away by the currents. To the east and west, the long, sandy arms of the Claw curved away to the edge of vision, but nothing moved in their dunes, or along their endless beaches. And although Dow could just make out the point thirty miles north across the bay, where the peninsulas joined at the city of Lonsmouth, he knew that only more mountain ash and deserted ruins waited there.

  All of it was wasteland. The war had scraped the Claw clean of its inhabitants.

  Even down to the least village.

  Dow dropped his gaze to study the heights of East Head across the channel, and then sought briefly at the inner shore for Stromner.

  In fact, the village that had once been his adopted home was hidden from this angle by the rise of the hill, but that was no matter; he knew there was nothing there to see. He had visited Stromner yesterday, rowing across the channel, in the hope simply of finding someone – anyone – that he’d known from the past. But when he’d reached the inner beach, he’d discovered that even poor, worthless Stromner had not been spared the ravages of war. It was burned, looted and abandoned. The inn was no more, and even Nathaniel Shear’s little hut was an ashen heap in the sand. As for the villagers, there was no sight of them, nor sign as to where they had gone.

  Dow’s restless gaze shifted again, now to the foot of the tower on which he and Nell stood. There, rocky cliffs fell away to the mile-wide maw between the headlands; the Rip. Currents were swirling in the waters as the tide flowed in. He studied the patterns for a time, lost in memory, but it was not of his own adventures in the Rip that he was thinking, or his riding of the maelstrom. He was remembering more recent scenes.

  Yesterday, it was there that they had consigned Johannes to the deep, Dow and Nicky rowing out in a boat bearing the blacksmith. Nicky had wept over his uncle’s shrouded corpse before letting it slide into the sea, but Dow had only sat dry-eyed, beyond tears, recalling the far-off days when Johannes had first befriended him, friendless among the Ship Kings, and how the blacksmith had watched over him ever since, always hopeful, forever cheerful and willing . . .

  And then, just this morning, Jake Tooth had rowed out alone to the Rip, bearing the body of Agatha Harp, and likewise consigned her to a watery grave. The captain had survived only a night and a day after the battle before succumbing to her injuries; a sniper high on the Chloe’s musket decks had cut her down, even as Dow and Jake were storming over the rails.

  The harpooner had been grim-faced when he returned from the Rip after her burial, the whale tooth white against the fury of his brow. Dow was waiting at the ruined docks with the others, and with a gesture Jake had beckoned him away, into the rubble of the town. Dow had followed, wondering if the harpooner meant to make good on his promise – and thinking he’d almost welcome it now, amid so much grief.

  Beneath a broken archway Jake Tooth had turned at last, and drawn Dow close. ‘You think I intend murder now, New Islander? If so, you know me little. I am to blame as much as you. Did I not speak in favour of the attack, when Agatha argued against it? I knew the risks. This is war. And she is but one more casualty.’

  But then the harpooner had gripped Dow’s shoulder hard, and leaned in even closer, his lank hair hanging in Dow’s face. ‘But we are bound now, you and I – for together we have wrought the death of one who was finer than either of us. Never forget that. And if her death is to have any purpose at all, then we must prove now that the winning of the Chloe was worth her life. We must make use of that vessel.’

  Dow had stared in amazement, for it was only then that he finally understood what he should have understood long before. The harpooner and the captain had not merely been shipmates through
all those years on the Snout. They had been lovers; there could be no mistaking the desolation in Jake Tooth’s eyes.

  ‘I hear you,’ Dow had said, if only out of respect for that desolation, for he had no idea how to accomplish what Jake was demanding.

  The harpooner had gripped tighter yet. ‘Don’t think I won’t kill you, New Islander, one day. If I see fit. Agatha was the peace lover, not me. Drawing blood was my employment of old, and killing is no burden to me even now. But she believed in peace, and because of her, so did I. In the end, little though she wanted to, she had come to believe in you too, I think. So don’t waste the chance she has given you. And for her sake, I will let you live for now, so that you can do what it is that you must do.’

  But what that thing might be, the harpooner had not said. He’d only released Dow at last with a shove, then stalked off into the ruins.

  Atop the tower, Dow sighed.

  He was aware that Nell was watching him patiently. It had been her idea to climb up here this afternoon, to escape his cares, and she didn’t want to interrupt his reverie, he knew. Ah, but there was no escaping his cares, and they extended far beyond the deaths of Johannes and Agatha. After all, the dead were the dead. There was nothing to be done for them.

  But the living?

  Dow lifted his gaze from the Rip at last, and turned to look down now at Stone Port harbour, to where is his real dilemma lay.

  It was not the safe haven it had once been; not with the town razed, the wharves burned, and the sea wall breached in many places. Nevertheless, the natural arc of the harbour remained, a shield against the currents of the Rip, and two ships rode at anchor there now. The Snout and the Chloe. They were not alone, however. Around the two ships was berthed a collection of smaller craft, like lost ducklings clinging to two adopted mothers; dozens of different boats in all. Some were Twin Islands attack boats, but others were regular launches and cutters that had come from Ship Kings vessels.

  For as the sun had set on that awful day, and as the embattled fleets had made off southwards – to what final end no one in Stone Port yet knew – they’d left behind a sea dotted with boats, bearing hundreds of orphaned sailors, with still more waiting to be plucked from the water. Just as had the Snout and the Chloe, most of these castaways made for Stone Port, arriving in wretched groups throughout the night – Twin Islanders and Ship Kings in roughly equal numbers, enemies still, but too shocked and weary by then to care, or to fight on.