The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  “Gather the men,” he said. “And find me a boy with a good arm.”

  * * *

  Andries De Vries was twenty, and his only crime was to admire from afar the beautiful young wife of a trader on the voyage out from Holland. But nothing on the Batavia had gone unwitnessed. Now that wife was the chattel of the islands’ ruler, his crime had returned to doom him. He knelt on the rough sand between the tents, surrounded by Cornelisz’s men, while the Onderkoopman stood before him.

  “Andries,” Cornelisz said, as the young man tried desperately not to cry. He had already wet himself, much to the amusement of the ring of killers. Cornelisz leaned over and gripped his trembling jaw, raising his head so their eyes met. “Andries, I have to decide what to do with you.”

  The men sniggered. Cornelisz tensed for a moment, then turned to the nearest. “Walter, your knife.”

  The crony hesitated. Cornelisz clicked his fingers. Reluctantly, Walter passed it over: a sliver of sharpened angle iron tied into the end of a bone. Cornelisz contemplated it, turning it this way and that, then aimed the point towards Andries’ eye. The young man squeezed his eyes shut, tried to turn his head away, but Cornelisz held his jaw tight, and he could not.

  “Andries. Andries.” Cornelisz gave his head a shake. “Look at me. No. Look at me.” The young man did as he was ordered.

  “You could be killed, Andries. I think we all acknowledge that.” More sniggers from the surrounding killers. “But I need you to emphasise a point for me. Will you do that?” Cornelisz raised his gaze and took in his cadre. “Everyone here was selected for a purpose, and only that purpose.” He looked back down at his young captive. “And now I have selected you.” He turned the knife around, held out the handle. “Take it. Go on. Take it.”

  Andries stared at it in terror. Cornelisz leaned closer, pinched his jaw tighter. “If you don’t take it, I’ll have to tell them to kill you. This is the only way you live. Take it, my boy.” Cornelisz reached for an unresisting hand. He placed the blade into it, and drew Andries up to his feet.

  “There are only two classes on this island. Those who do what I tell them, and the dead. Is that clear?” He was addressing the whole group now, his voice strident, intense. He turned Andries towards the tent at the top of the rise. “Twenty children lie in that tent. Twenty useless mouths, eating our food, drinking our water, shitting and mewling and sucking up our diminishing resources with nothing in return. It is time we dispensed with this drain on our wealth.” He looked to Andries. “Well?”

  The young man stared from him, to the blade, to the tent, then back. He took a step away, staggered as he felt the pinprick of blades at his back. He made to drop the knife, but Cornelisz’s hand was around his, clenching tight, trapping the handle inside his fist.

  “They die, or you do, boy. I have no preference.” He nodded to Pietersz. The older man took the unwilling conscript by the arm, frogmarched him to the entrance of the tent, and opened it. Cornelisz watched as he whispered something in the boy’s ear. They matched stares for a dozen heartbeats. Then the younger man’s head dropped, and he disappeared inside the tent.

  By the time he returned, red-armed and weeping, Cornelisz had summoned Lucretia. She stood by his side, two henchmen behind her, while Andries staggered down the rise and dropped the knife in the sand at Cornelisz’s feet. Cornelisz smiled at him.

  “Now,” he said, “tell her.”

  “What?” The boy could barely speak. His throat was swollen shut from grief, his eyes puffed and raw, streaked with blood where he had wiped tears away. Cornelisz glanced at his men. “Tell her what you have done.”

  “I . . . ”

  “Do it, boy.”

  Andries glanced at Pietersz, who had sidled into his range of vision. In short bursts, in words belched out rather than spoken, Andries confessed his task. Lucretia burst into tears long before he finished.

  “What have you done?” she moaned, and it was not clear whether she spoke to the boy or his tormentor. “How could you? How could you do this?”

  Cornelisz retrieved the knife from the sand and handed it back to its owner. The henchman dragged Lucretia back to his tent. He waited until they had returned, then addressed the group.

  “Learn this,” he said. “Anyone can be taught to do what you do. This lad is proof of that. I require only two things from you. Obedience and loyalty. That is your first lesson. As to your second . . . ” He turned his gaze upon the sobbing murderer at his feet. “Stand up, boy.” Andries did so. Cornelisz turned him towards the open beach. “Go on,” he said gently, “Go on. You’re free to go.”

  Andries staggered a few steps, righted himself. He began to walk away then, as sudden fear and repulsion overcame him, to run. Cornelisz watched him go, then turned back to his men. “As to the second,” he said, his voice tight as a garrotte. “Disobey me, exceed your instructions, betray me, and I’ll have you hunted down like vermin.” He pointed to three men at random. “You, you, and you. Talking out of turn is an act of betrayal. Kill him.”

  The men grinned, and ran in pursuit of the fleeing Andries. Cornelisz sneered at the remainder of his group.

  “Out of my sight until I need you again.”

  They went in silence.

  * * *

  Cornelisz crouched on the sand and watched the traitorous ocean. The sacrifices were not working. The waves had grown still. Torrentius lay in prison on the far side of the globe, and he, his most faithful servant, sat trapped on a lie of an island, surrounded by the smell of the dead. The waters were thick with blood. More than two dozen had fed them, and still there was no portal through which he could draw his Master, no deliverance for the man whose dreams he should be bringing closer with every killing.

  “What do you want?” he asked the grey wash. “Why do you not reward my loyalty?” He scooped up a nearby stone and flung it. It skipped across the face of the waves, three times, four, then sank. “What do you want?”

  A susurration at the back of his mind. A darkness that engulfed him in an instant, and pressed his face flat on the ground, filling his mouth and nose with sand.

  “A King for a King,” they whispered. “A King for a King.”

  And then they were gone, and Cornelisz was coughing and spitting sand and the waves were falling against the beach, laughing, always laughing.

  * * *

  “Come in, Father. Sit down.”

  Predikant Bastiaenz was a dithering old fool, but he had retained enough sense to keep his family as far from the centre of the whirlwind as possible. Cornelisz had no love of priests. It was priests who had declared Torrentius a heretic and a Satanist, who dragged him from his bed in the middle of the night and threw him into the dungeons of the Tuchthuis. Cornelisz was no friend of priests. But the old man was hardly kin to the hard-faced ascetics who tore down his Master’s church. Cornelisz needed no enemies. All he needed were tools.

  “Tell me, Father,” he asked as the old man attacked his thin soup like a starving man, which, Cornelisz conceded, he was. “Do you consider Jesus your King?”

  Bastiaenz slapped his lips together and frowned in concentration. “A complicated question, my son . . . ” He eyed the loaf of hard bread in the middle of the table. Cornelisz pushed it towards him with a smile.

  “Here, please, have some more.”

  “Thank you, thank you.” He tore off a hunk big enough for two, plunged it into his broth, and sucked noisily at it.

  “You were saying?”

  “Yes, yes.” He slurped down a gobbet of bread. “A complicated question. We are all under our Lord’s rule—“

  “Oh, certainly.”

  “But the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to any man who truly accepts the Lord Jesus as his saviour.”

  “Is that so?” Cornelisz leaned back in his chair. “We are all Kings in Jesus’ eyes, then.”

  “We are all equal under his gaze.”

  “Good.” Cornelisz smiled. “You have a big family, Father, all tucked away n
ice and warm in your tent, I hope. A wife and five children, is it? No, six. Six children.”

  “As warm as can be achieved.” Bastiaenz paused, spoon halfway to his lips.

  “And are they all Kings, father? All your children, and your big, homely wife, all cuddled together in your tent? Are they all Kings to Jesus?”

  The old man laid his spoon down, and regarded Cornelisz with serious eyes. “Anyone who accepts the Lord into his heart, who works for the betterment of his Kingdom, is as a King in Heaven, Onderkoopman. All will be received to His Bosom as if they were Kings on Earth.”

  “Oh, that is good to hear.” Cornelisz smiled and pushed the bread closer to his guest. “Eat up, Father. Eat up.”

  * * *

  Cornelisz paced from one wall of his tent to another, then back again. A dozen steps, over and over. Lucretia hunkered down in one corner, too afraid to move lest he turn his rage upon her, but he was past caring. She was immaterial, now. He would kill her, just to be rid of the problem of her, but there seemed little point. Nothing was working. Nothing was having an effect. He had given the waves their Kings, a whole family of them, had performed the rituals and made the proper obeisances, and his only reward was an image, afloat above the water: not even of Torrentius, but of an ascetic Englishman with sad eyes and a perfumed collar, his thin pointed face turned towards Cornelisz as if momentarily interrupted from the task of governing his country.

  “I know what a King looks like,” Cornelisz muttered, kicking at the tent wall as he turned once again. He screamed through the open flaps towards the waves, unseen from this angle but hissing across the sand and into his ears, always hissing. “I know what a King looks like!”

  “That’s good.” Pietersz stepped into the tent and gave his commander a quizzical glance.

  “What do you want?”

  “You might want to come and look at this.”

  “Don’t bother me. I don’t have time—“

  “You should make some.”

  “Don’t—“ Cornelisz stopped. Something in Pietersz’s manner made him pause, some nervousness or uncertainty he had not seen before. Cornelisz nodded towards the outside world. “All right. Show me.”

  The two men hurried down towards the beach. More of his men were gathered, gawking across the water towards a thin plume of smoke.

  “The soldiers,” one of them shouted, pointing towards it as if Cornelisz could not see it with his own eyes. “The soldiers.”

  Cornelisz stared at the smoke in disbelief. It had been three weeks since they abandoned Hayes and his men on the distant island. There could not possibly be water on that miserable rock, no way for the company to keep themselves alive. But there was the smoke, undeniable against the blue sky, shouting to any civilians who may care to see it: we have found water. We have found hope. Cornelisz turned to Pietersz.

  “Who else has seen this?”

  Pietersz shrugged. “Probably everyone on the island by now.”

  Cornelisz stared past him, to the water and the laughing waves. “A King for a King,” they hissed as they slithered onto the sand and back again. “A King for a King.”

  “Kill them all,” he said.

  “What?”

  “All of them.” Cornelisz stalked to the tide line and began kicking the water as it reached for him. “Kill them all. Every one!”

  Pietersz wheeled away and yelled to his men, the bloodlust in his voice like a blast of nausea in Cornelisz’s ears.

  “You heard the man!”

  Cornelisz’s cadre streamed up the beach towards their tents and weapons. Cornelisz stared across the water as they left him, watching Hayes’s signal rise into the sky like proof of a burning world.

  A King for a King. One leader of men for another. And he would provide, even if he had to kill the man himself.

  * * *

  For a week they slaughtered anyone they could catch, hunting down the weak and slow like a pack of hungry dogs. Cornelisz stuck close to his tent, allowing them full reign, consoling himself with mastery of Lucretia: one hand for dispensing punishment and the other to pin her tight while he gave himself over to whatever pleasure he wished. After five days he tired of her, and stepped outside to sneer at the carnage around him. Men lay in drunken disarray, their dissolute concubines laid out beside or beneath them as they rutted like animals in the dirt. From afar came the sounds of pursuit, high keening whistles as groups of predators chased their prey through the scattered gorse, and the occasional scream, abruptly cut off, as they ran their victims to ground. And above everything, the laughter of the deep waters, mocking his feeble massacre. He stepped between his debauched minions, and found Pietersz at the head of the beach.

  “Ah, you’ve rejoined us.” Pietersz eyed him sideways. “Figured you didn’t leave any explicit instructions, so I let the boys enjoy themselves.”

  “How many done properly?” Cornelisz stared at the muddy sands. At the far end of the beach a body bobbed gently face down in the wash. Cornelisz did not recognise it. Just another civilian to feed the waves. He flexed his fingers and felt no warmth in them.

  “Some,” Pietersz replied. “Not many.” He cocked his head as, somewhere towards the centre of the island, someone started screaming, high and hopeless. “Lot of trouble to drag them all down here.”

  Cornelisz wandered to the ocean’s edge. The voices were stronger here, mocking him, pricking him with one word whispered over and over like a taunt. “King, King, King . . . .” He crouched and scratched a line of runes into the wet sand, watched the water wash over them and eat them.

  “Soon,” he whispered to them. “And then you give me what I want, or so help me . . . ”

  “The scurf licked at his fingers, cooling them, calming them. A promise from the edge of the darkness. He rubbed them together, feeling the salt on his skin. “Anything else?”

  “Not much.”

  “The other island?”

  Pietersz stayed silent. Cornelisz glanced up from his contemplation. The other man shuffled his foot through the sand, shrugged.

  “Smoke went out a few days back.”

  “And?” Cornelisz rose, stood close enough to Pietersz to draw the remaining truth from his reluctant lips.

  “A few escapees,” the nervous lieutenant admitted. “Probably made it across. We couldn’t get them all.”

  “Escapees?” Cornelisz heard his voice rising, saw the flush in his lieutenant’s face.

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly here to keep things in order, were you? It’s a big island. Once they knew we were coming, they didn’t stand around waiting to be caught, did they?”

  “And how did they get across several hundred feet of open water?” This, to the waves. Pietersz, misunderstanding the nature of the question, providing a reply.

  “Bits of driftwood, mostly. Some swimmers. A couple managed to build a raft.”

  “A raft? How long does it take to build a damned raft?” Cornelisz felt his hands curl into fists. Pietersz saw the action and hunkered down onto the balls of his feet: a fighter, expecting the fight.

  “Long as it takes to keep out of the way of a bunch of leaderless men with drink in them, I expect.”

  “And what kind of leader are you?”

  “One who follows orders.” He measured Cornelisz with cautious eyes. “The Predikant is with them.”

  “They know, then. You’ve let them find out what we’ve been doing.” Cornelisz quivered with anger. It would be a small thing, to attack this man. A small moment, giving in to the anger that threatened to turn his mind red. Instead, he forced breath through his nose, peeled his fingers back into single digits, turned away from his second-in-command and contemplated the hole in the horizon where the smoke no longer rose.

  “No matter,” he said through gritted teeth. “A smattering of hungry, ragged civilians. Let him have them.” He inhaled deeply, let it back out again. “They’ve no weapons, no means of escape.”

  “You said that about the water.�
�

  Cornelisz let the words fall to earth unanswered.

  “Get the men organised,” he said. “Kick them sober if you have to. I want them armed and ready to man the boats by dawn.”

  “What about the rest of the civilians?”

  “To hell with them.” Cornelisz flexed his fingers. The itch for Lucretia had returned to them. “I have bigger sacrifices in mind.”

  * * *

  They departed just after first light. Six boats, filled with as many men as were armed and willing to kill a soldier for Cornelisz: every one of his original cadre and a dozen more who had joined them since the first night of killing, drawn by the promise of rum and women and continued survival. They were back by midday the following day, their numbers depleted, one boat missing altogether.

  “They’ve built a fort,” Pietersz reported. “Piled rocks up into walls.”

  “You have the only weapons. You had superiority of numbers.”

  “They had the walls, and the high ground, and enough rocks to throw down on us all day and all night. And water.”

  Cornelisz dismissed him with a contemptuous flick of the hand. The men went back to their drinking and their women. The waves laughed silently against the shore. Cornelisz returned to his tent, and Lucretia, and his sand-stained fingers driving deep inside her while she wept.

  They tried again, once the men had tended their wounds and replenished their bloodlust. And again, in the following week. The ground and the stone walls and Hayes’s bloody-minded courage repelled them. Cornelisz screamed his defiance at the waves, and they, in turn, whispered in his mind as he slept, showing him pictures of his Master, buried deep within Government dungeons, waiting for rescue that never arrived. As the second week became a third, Cornelisz grew tired of their taunting, and gathered his men once more.

  “Across,” he ordered, climbing into the prow of the lead boat and setting his back to the shore.

  “Are you sure about this?” Pietersz asked, as they crested the first line of breakers and pushed out into the channel between the islands.

  “About what?”