The small schooner which took us bounced on the waves like an over-eager puppy. I was eager to get to the island too - my first unescorted trip away from the ship. The shoreline was rocky, rising quickly to a forested, hilly interior with terraces that had been cut into the hills. Fruit trees and sugar cane plantations were slowly eating up most of the fertile land.
We made landfall at a small jetty on the sort of beach that would once have been heaving with fish-belly white British tourists. Just two people were waiting for us there that day, a tiny Chinese woman who looked as delicate as a doll, and a big North African man whose face was deeply marked with tribal scars.
I hopped off the boat onto the sand. My sandals sank in, grains seeping in over the side to cascade grittily over my toes.
"The doctor?" the Chinese woman asked.
I nodded, and to my surprise, turned to see that the schooner was leaving, none of its crew of four staying to baby-sit me. "We'll be back at sunset," the captain told me. "When you're finished with the patient you can relax, take a tour of the island if you want. Queen M said you'd earned a holiday." He grinned at me like he expected me to be grateful, and I managed a thin smile back.
They brought the injured man down to the beach, transporting him on the back of a rickety donkey trap. They'd given him a leather cord to chew on, but muffled little whimpers of pain were escaping round the sides. The edges of the wound were already blackened, starting to rot in the humid tropical air. His eyes stared into mine, pleading. I guess he knew what the price of my failure might be. It all depended on the state of his ligaments, but I didn't tell him that. I just shot him up with enough morphine that he wouldn't be worrying about anything very much for a while.
After that I injected local anaesthetic around the wound and got to work. It was jagged and deep enough to have nicked the bone. At the edge of the nick I saw a small piece of metal and after a second I realised that I was seeing a tracking device. Finally - a piece of luck. Except not really, because now I knew that it was embedded right in the bone. No way to remove it without breaking the bone around it.
Nothing about this was going to be simple.
I sighed and carried on with the job I'd been brought to do. There was dirt in the cut too, and I could see the beginning of sepsis. As I irrigated the wound and cut out the tissue that was already past saving I found myself drifting back into that trance-like state I'd first learned when I was a junior house officer putting in 60 hour weeks at the Royal London. You couldn't see the person you were working on as a person. It had to be a job, a little bit of technical expertise you were displaying. Saving a life was only secondary. You focussed in on the skin and subcutaneous fat and bone until it was just another material you were sculpting.
I was so caught up in it that it wasn't until I'd nearly finished, delicately sewing the edges of the wound together with the smallest stitches possible - as if he was going to care about the ugliness of his scar - that I noticed someone watching me as I worked. Not just watching. Drawing. I caught a brief blur a pale face and dark hair, the scritch-scritch of a pencil against paper.
When the bandage was in place, I took a moment to look closer. A Japanese guy, younger than me probably. The flat planes of his cheeks and downward tilt of his eyes gave him a slightly rakish air. His hair was gelled into sharp little spikes and his clothes looked like he'd spent too long thinking about them.
Without asking for permission, I took the sketch pad from him. I blinked, twice, and then I let out a small, helpless laugh. I'd expected something lifelike, a medical journal illustration or a vérité style of war reporting maybe. But he'd turned us into a comic: soft, round curves and big doe eyes which made me look like a ten-year-old mutant. The guy I'd been working on was drawn screaming in pain. There were Japanese characters coming out of his mouth in a speech balloon which I guessed loosely translated as 'holy shit that hurts'.
I looked up from the drawing to the artist. "OK - who the hell are you?"
He smiled. He had shockingly white teeth, so straight you could use them as a spirit level - but there was a wide gap between the two front ones. It turned his rakish look to something slightly goofy and I instantly found myself liking him more. "I'm Haru. And you, I think, are Jasmine. I'm very pleased to meet you." His voice was strident, accent a little Japanese, a little American.
"Yeah. You've clearly heard of me but strangely no one's said anything to me about you."
He looked a little offended. "Really? Well, I'm the court artist." I laughed, which pissed him off still further. "No, I'm serious. Queen M knows that a society isn't just about the physical things, the food and the power. Without art and culture we may as well return to the stone age."
"Funny," I said flatly, "she didn't seem too bothered about the artistic qualifications of the people we left behind when I went recruiting."
He winced. "Yes, well - I guess culture's a luxury still. You can only afford so much of it." His eyes skittered around, trying to avoid mine, and after a moment I looked back down at his work, flicking through the drawings.
They were good. They were all in the same style as the first, some of them divided into actual panels, super-heroic figures leaping across the page in tight-fitting, brightly coloured costumes. I was pretty sure the beefy guy in the blue spandex rescuing a little child from a fire was supposed to be Soren. I wondered if that was something which had actually happened. "So I'm guessing you were a Manga artist in a previous life," I said, looking back at him.
He shrugged. "Wanted to be. Never seemed to find the time to go professional."
"Then Queen M came along. Lucky old you. She just leaves you free to wander, does she? Draw when the inspiration strikes?"
He flushed slightly. "I travel the islands. I guess you could say I'm the court reporter. A sort of... photo-journalist."
"So you've been pretty much everywhere?" And this, suddenly, was interesting. A short cut to finding out what I needed to know if I was ever going to get out of here.
"I've been here seven months now so... yes, I'd say I've seen most of it."
"Good." I smiled, almost sincerely. "Then you can give me the tour."
He took me round the plantations first. It was cotton-picking season and the fields were crowded with people of pretty much every nationality, backs bent achingly over the scrubby plants. It was like a scene from three hundred years ago, given a United Colours of Benetton makeover. I wondered how many people here were natives of the island, survivors of the Cull. Had Queen M used the already available resources or had she wanted a clean sweep, no complications from people who saw this place as their home and her as an interloper? For once, without Soren and Kelis watching and judging every move I made, I felt free to ask.
"I'm going to speak to some of them," I told Haru. "Find out if there are any parasites, diseases, something that might get passed on to the rest of the crew."
He shrugged, not very interested. When I looked back at him a few moments later he was already sitting cross-legged on the ground, sketchbook on his lap.
I could see the workers snatching quick glances at me as they toiled. There were two women, armed, lounging at the end of one of the fields. But they seemed more concerned with the game of dominoes they were playing than with watching the workers. I ignored them and they ignored me as I headed over to the cotton pickers.
"Hi," I said to the first person I came to, a petite white woman who couldn't have been much older than twenty. Her hair was almost the same shade of red as mine, darkened only by the droplets of sweat wriggling out of her pores in the punishing heat.
She smiled shyly but kept on picking.
"I'm Jasmine. The new doctor."
"You come to treat George, then?" Her accent was hard to place. Czech maybe.
"Is George the guy who got too friendly with a machete?"
She nodded.
"Yeah. He's going to be fine."
"It wasn't an accident, you know."
I raised an eyebrow,
and she finally looked right at me. "Yochai meant to hit him. George was making moves on his woman."
"And what's George going to do about it now he's staying in the land of the living?"
She became very interested in her work; small, clever fingers pulling out the cloud-puffs of cotton, and I knew that I wouldn't get any more out of her. Still, this was interesting. Queen M's rule wasn't absolute if nasty little squabbles like this broke out. There was some freedom of movement in the chains.
I spoke to more people: a dockworker from Portsmouth who'd been chosen for his knowledge of ship repairs; a Jivaro from the Amazon, picked I guessed, for his sheer brawn. It was hard to tell from his few words of English. There were several Americans, mainly from the Southern states, and there were people who'd been born and raised on St Kitts, then watched five years-ago as everyone else around them died. They'd been trapped here with food rotting in the fields; the corpses of their friends and family for company, before Queen M had come. They didn't see Queen M as an interloper; they saw her as a saviour.
Some of the others though - they were a different story. Hidden in their eyes was the same burning anger I'd felt in myself, tamped down now but ready to burst into flames at the right provocation.
I believed that they would rise up, if they were given the chance. But I didn't get the slightest sense that they'd begun to plan it yet. There was no underground railroad spiriting slaves away here, as there had once been in the Deep South. Most of them barely spoke each other's languages. They'd never met before being brought here, terrified and powerless. I began to appreciate Queen M's strategy, the reason she was willing to burn jet fuel, travelling to every corner of the world. These people's diversity, their disunity, was her strength.
And she didn't make their lives too unbearable. There was one day's rest a week; food and drink for everyone in the evenings along with parties, good times. They had something to live for and therefore something to lose.
Still, there was a power in their buried fury, here under the relentless Caribbean sun, the brilliant blue skies. I had to hold onto that hope.
After an hour, I went back to Haru. He looked up when my shadow fell across the page and flipped round the last sketch he'd been working on without my asking: the workers in the field, bent over the crop. It was a surprisingly melancholy picture. He'd captured the blankness in some of the eyes, the sense that the labour was given unwillingly. A sort of hopelessness.
"It's good," I told him.
"Yeah." He looked back down at his picture. After a moment he carefully tore it from the pad, rolled it up and shoved it into his backpack. "Maybe I won't show that one to Queen M."
I could still see it in my mind, though, all the faces, the people I'd talked to today. And I knew that escaping wasn't enough. I had to free them too. Don't get me wrong - my motives weren't that altruistic. A big part of it was because it would piss Queen M off, and I really wanted her to realise that she'd underestimated me. But it was also because if he were there, I thought it was what he would do.
I asked Haru to take me to some other plantations. I spoke to more people, who told the same stories, only in different languages. But that wasn't really why I was there. By the third plantation I'd figured out that there were two guards for every hundred people, and neither of them stayed the whole night. There was only one permanent garrison on the island according to a rickety old Barbadian, but the soldiers there tended to stick to themselves. Queen M was pretty bloody confident in her power over these people.
Pretty bloody confident of her power over the guards too, I realised. The people she armed and let out of her sight.
"How are people chosen for guard duty?" I asked Haru.
He looked at me suspiciously, a raised eyebrow asking why I wanted to know.
I shrugged. "Seems like a pretty plumb job to me - sitting on your arse all day when everyone else is working in two hundred degree heat. I just wondered how people landed it."
"Thinking of signing up?"
"Guns have never been my thing," I told him. "I don't like the feel of them, you know? The knowledge that you've got something in your hand that could kill everyone around you and you wouldn't even raise a sweat."
"Really?" He frowned. "I think I like them for exactly the same reason. That incredible potential to change the world, in such a small thing. But the soldiers - she chooses them because they're big and strong and maybe a little stupid. Same as everywhere, I guess."
"People with previous training?"
He shook his head. "Not usually. She prefers to train them herself."
Prefers people who know only what she wants them to know. But I didn't say it.
Still, Haru wasn't stupid. His black eyes narrowed, considering me. "You're wondering how she makes sure they're loyal, right?"
I tried to look casual. "Well, it must be a concern."
"I guess. What I heard is she chooses people who have no family, or people whose whole family is here."
Of course, that made sense. People who could be loyal to her unambiguously.
The sun was beginning to sink towards the horizon as we walked back along the rough tarmac road towards the beach. I watched it for a while, the astounding reds and pinks as the light refracted through thicker layers of polluted air. Dirt making beauty. I was sure Haru would have something to say about that.
When I looked across at him, he was still studying me, and I thought maybe he had been this whole time. "Yes, there aren't many guards," he said quietly. "But it's not that simple. To escape you need a way off the islands, or all you are is a sitting target and Queen M can come and deal with you when she wants. More importantly, you need to take care of the tracking device. No one will leave her while they've still got it in them. You might think you can persuade them, but you're wrong. You'll tell them that if everyone goes, she won't be able to hunt them down. And they'll know that's true - but she'll hunt some people down, and what if that person's you?"
I shook my head as if I didn't know what he was talking about.
He grabbed my arm, fifty metres from the beach. The schooner was waiting for me in the water, the figures of the crew black silhouettes against the sunset. "I can help you. If you'll trust me. I know this place better than you, the people too." He was talking in an urgent whisper, as if afraid that the distant figures of the crew might overhear us.
How can you help me? I wanted to ask him, when you don't even have the courage to say what you're saying out loud. But all I said was, "I'm not interested in escaping. I don't have any family out there, either. And I've got a cushy job too."
He released my arm, but he didn't stop staring at me. "Are you going to report me to Queen M?"
I shook my head, turning away from him.
I caught his crooked smile out of the corner of my eye. "Then you're not the happy little citizen you pretend to be, are you? I'll be waiting - when you're ready to talk."
The captain informed us that the flagship had moved, so the journey back would take us a couple of hours. The stars were crisp and bright, and I guessed that our crew, grizzled islanders who looked like they'd been born on the waves, were using them to navigate. I tried to talk to them about it, but the replies they gave were monosyllabic. After a while I gave up and went to stand in the bow, as far from Haru as I could put myself on the small boat. I watched our white wake, disappearing into the distance until it was impossible to distinguish it from the waves.
There's something very peaceful about sailing at night, the solitude of it. The noise of the sails as the wind caught them suddenly seemed very loud. And there it was again: a sharp flap that was almost like a whip-crack.
Except that it wasn't our sails.
There was absolutely no reason to panic. We were in friendly waters; the sea was filled with Queen M's ships. But when I saw the expression on the sailor's faces, the sudden flush of fear in Haru's pale cheeks, ghostly in the starlight, I knew that what I'd heard was the start of something very bad.
&nb
sp; "They're windward and gaining," one of the sailors shouted, voice hoarse with panic. I was shoved aside roughly as the others hurried to the sails and swung the boom right round. A second later the wind caught the sails in the new direction and the deck tilted to a forty-five degree angle. I'd been completely unprepared. The motion flung me like a rag doll against the starboard railing - except that the railing wasn't there, it was ten feet lower than it should have been and instead of the bone-thumping crash I was expecting I just kept on falling.
The ocean looked dark and deep beneath me, and somewhere out there was whatever had caused this sudden, frantic flight. Without any conscious thought, I flung my arm out, grabbed hold of the railing as my body arched over it.
My fingers caught and held, the dead weight of my body dropping down. The pain in my shoulder was indescribable. I was sure it was dislocated. My fingers felt like every single one of them had been broken at once. But I held on, until I felt the brutal thump of my body against the side of the ship, my chest bruised to the bone by the impact. I let out one, fierce sob of mingled relief and pain.
My body bounced once, twice, against the hull. I thought I heard the sound of a rib snap, or it could have been something on the boat breaking. I was too dazed to tell. My eyes flicked shut, wanted to stay shut. My brain wanted to switch off. I wished all that noise would just go away so that I could go to sleep like I wanted to. All the shouting, the screaming. That infuriating whimpering.
My fingers had almost slipped from the railing when something inside me shouted and I jerked back into consciousness. For a second, it had sounded like a voice. Like the Voice - willing me not to let go just yet. But it couldn't be, could it? The anti-psychotics were supposed to have killed that Voice for good.
And then I didn't really care about it anymore, because my head swung round as I tried desperately to claw my other arm up to the railing, to drag myself back onto the deck - and I finally saw the boat which had been pursuing us.
Kill or Cure Page 6
