by Lavie Tidhar
"Because every move in chess must lead to an endgame," Aramis said, and Orphan thought of the Turk, his pale artificial hands moving across the board in that dim-lit room in Piccadilly, a world and an age away.
He looked at Wyvern. The lizard stared back at him, one-eyed. "Why?" Orphan said again. But again it was Aramis who spoke. "This world is too much of a playground for Wyvern to want to see it invaded by others. Even if they only come here to take the others away. He is, I suspect, more in sympathy with the Bookman in this instance than with his own people. He wouldn't mind seeing you – if by some miracle you succeed to – prevent the launch of the probe. And now, Orphan, it is time for you to go."
Orphan stared at the island. Another island, like Britain, like the Binder's island. No.
Not just another island, he thought. It was the one that had shaped his world, had changed the way history may have been written. More than that, it was the end of his journey, the destination he had been travelling to since that moment by Waterloo Bridge, when he saw Gilgamesh, before going to the Rose to see Lucy… He thought of her again, and knew that he had to go on.
"I swim?" he said.
"We can't land," Aramis said. "The island's defences are quiet so far–" the way he said it wasn't very reassuring – "mainly because of Wyvern. Once you step onto the island, though, it's a different matter. So yes, you swim."
"What are the island's defences?"
It was Wyvern who spoke. "If you're unlucky you might find out," he said.
Orphan realised his clothes were dirty and smelled of smoke, and blood. The beginning of a beard, like a forest fire, spread itchily on his face. He didn't speak. There was nothing more to say. He took a deep breath, lowered himself over the side of the boat, and slid into the water.
It was warm, and he ducked his head into the water and felt grime and stink wash off him. When he raised his head again it was in time to watch the boat and its two strange occupants glide away. Orphan shook his head, spraying water, then dived again. He felt suddenly free, here on the edge of the island, alone in the water. It's a shame I can't stay like this forever, he thought. But it was not real freedom, he realised. It was the freedom that comes from lack of choice and, moreover, was the kind that only came with decisions delayed. It was a freedom of inaction.
He edged forward, kicked once, and began swimming towards the shore.
Things had been going smoothly, relatively speaking, until the insect came.
Orphan stood very still.
The insect reclined on his arm. The creature was as large as Orphan's fist. Its thin, transparent wings reflected rainbows. Two thick, black feelers touched Orphan's skin. A faint mechanical humming came from the insect. Bright compound eyes seemed to record him from every angle.
He had come out on the beach and saw no prints in the black sand, no sign of living things. For a while he had lain there, drying in the sun. Already it was getting hot. After a while, driven by hunger more than anything else, he rose and started climbing the low hill.
Vegetation was sparse. The landscape was rocky, dry – almost dead, he thought. When he crested the hill he stopped and involuntarily crouched down.
Not so dead.
From his vantage point he could see new parts of the island. The hills, he saw, spread out from where he was, and quite possibly ringed the island, effectively hiding the interior from view. But as for the interior… Ahead of him the ground sloped down into a dense forest. Trees whose names he didn't know rose high into the skies, their canopy a thick, impenetrable cover. He could not see signs of life, not yet, but… there was a path leading down to the forest. The path did not just materialise, he thought. It was made. It was the first artificial thing he had seen on the island. Yet, though he remained crouched, he could hear no sounds, could detect no movement.
Finally he stood, feeling exposed, and joined the path, heading downwards, towards the forest.
He paused before the first row of trees and peered into the interior. It was dark, and smelled of rotting vegetation. No drums, he thought. It was something of a relief. Not much, though.
Finally he stepped into the forest.
Going was slow. The forest grew on a slope. Twice he lost his purchase and slid down, grabbing desperately at something to hold. His thumb seemed to be working well. It was small consolation. When he finally reached bottom he discovered a narrow brown spring and followed it. He didn't dare drink the water, though he knew he would have to, soon. His throat was parched, and the sweat slid down his face.
At last the land opened up, the forest thinning, and he found himself before a small lake (really, he thought, a mere pool of water) in a clearing. He didn't know where he was. He had not, he thought, penetrated far into the island. He couldn't tell what was ahead.
Exhausted, he sank down and drank from the water. It tasted surprisingly cold, almost as if it were cooled by some underground engine. The thought made him choke laughter, until he realised that, for all he knew, it was a serious possibility. He splashed some water on his face, then stood.
It was then that he saw the insect.
The insect had come down to him from the canopy. It buzzed lazily down, marking figures of eight in the air. It seemed to be studying him. Then it descended with a burst of speed that had Orphan recoil back – and it fastened itself to his arm.
He stood very still. The insect's feelers tingled against his flesh. Then a sharp pain erupted in his arm and he bit his lips to stop a shout from escaping. The insect had bitten him.
Carefully, slowly, he looked at his arm. The feelers had sunk into his flesh. The insect seemed to pulse. Blood, Orphan thought. It was emerging from his body, absorbed into the insect's own. Already, it seemed fatter. He didn't dare try to kill it. Something stopped him, an awareness that this was not a normal insect, that it was – it was a machine of some sort, he thought. And – the island's defences? It was checking him, he thought – checking his blood? Fear gripped him then. I won't pass this, he thought. I'm an intruder. He didn't dare move.
For a few more moments they stayed as they were, a frozen tableau of man and insect, or man and machine. Then another, smaller pain came, as the feelers were withdrawn and the insect crawled over the two small puncture marks and smeared something cool from its belly onto the wound. Then its wings started again, and it rose into the air, looking bloated, and disappeared into the trees.
Did he pass? He didn't know.
If I didn't, he thought, I will soon find out.
The thought didn't make him feel any better, but he noticed that at least he wasn't bleeding. Whatever the insect had put on the wound, it had sealed it neatly. Orphan wondered what other things might be hiding on the island, then thought he really didn't want to find out.
He set off again. He walked around the small lake (reservoir? he wondered), noticing as he did the flowers that grew on the banks. They were tall, fleshy plants, the petals bright and heavy, like opening palms. A stalk as tall as he was seemed to rotate gently in the wind, following Orphan's direction.
I'm being watched, he thought. And then, Don't be ridiculous.
Still, the feeling persisted. He continued his way along the lake when he saw an opening on his left. Another path, this one wider, leading off between the trees. He followed it. The ground continued to slope down.
He began to hear sounds in the distance. In the beginning, it was only the screech of a bird in the trees, then another animal, possibly a monkey. He found them reassuring. They were natural sounds.
But the sounds built up. At one point he thought he heard a distant explosion, and froze in his tracks. He could not see much of the skies, could not look for a tell-tale sign of smoke. The trees had crowded around him again and the canopy closed over his head like the roof of a prison.
Shortly afterwards he heard another explosion. It seemed to come from the direction he was travelling in. Downwards and – he thought, though he couldn't tell – inland.
I must be heading
deeper into the island, he thought. The path had grown narrower and at last, and rather suddenly, disappeared. Again, he ambled his way through thick undergrowth. After a while he began to swear, and stopped, and finally, irritated and tired, wiped the sweat from his face with the edge of his shirt.
Which was when he saw the girl.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Elizabeth
Sweet prince, speak low: the king your father is disposed to sleep.
– William Shakespeare, Henry IV
She stood beneath a tree with a wide, mottled trunk. She was brown-skinned, with a sharp nose and wide, round eyes that even from a distance he could see were a deep blue. She wore overalls, of a kind that might be worn in a factory. Her arms were bare. So were her feet. She was not much older than seven.
Orphan had stopped when he saw her, and for a long moment he stood very still. So did the girl. They stared at each other, neither of them stirring. The girl tilted her head and examined him quizzically. She did not seem alarmed, but rather fascinated by this apparition. Orphan became aware of how he must look like, dishevelled and worn ragged, like something out of an adventure story, and he smiled.
The girl smiled back at him. "Are you an engineer?" she said. She had a high, clear voice. The forest felt very quiet.
An engineer? Of course, he thought. Somewhere on the island there must be engineers, the people who built the probe and worked to launch it. Or even others. If there were engineers there must be others, too: other specialists, no doubt, and cleaners and cooks – there might be a whole colony of humans living on the island.
"What do you think?" he said.
"You don't look like an engineer," the girl said critically.
"What do I look like?"
"A pirate." Orphan winced, and the girl laughed. "A big nasty pirate!" she declared. "Are you a pirate?"
"No," Orphan said. The girl looked disappointed. "I was one," Orphan added, "but only because I didn't have a choice."
"Oh!" the girl said. "You must tell me all about it!" she approached him, cautiously, and stood a few feet away. "When I grow up, you know," she said, as if confiding to him a great secret, "I'm going to be a pirate."
The girl confused Orphan. She walked barefoot in the jungle as if she had grown up in it, yet her clothes appeared factory-made, and were clean and pressed (in great contrast to his own). Her hair was long and black but looked untidy, and her skin was tanned to a darkness that suggested she had spent the entirety of her young life in the climate of the Carib Sea. Yet her accent…
Her accent was clear, precise, formal. It was the accent of the smart set, of Kensington and Knightsbridge, of society novels depicting tea-taking at the Ritz (Orphan, to his shame, had become addicted for a short period to these novels, which he had read behind the counter at Payne's). It was as out of place on the island as himself.
"Where do you live?" he asked. The girl shrugged. Obviously, she didn't think highly of his question. "Here," she said.
Of course.
"Where are your parents?" Orphan said, trying again.
The girl rotated her hand, thumb down, and pointed non-committally at the ground.
"Are they dead?" Orphan said, feeling horrible. Poor kid! he thought.
The girl frowned at him. "No, silly," she said. She kicked leaves with her bare foot and seemed to lose interest. She turned around and began to walk away. Orphan remained where he was, bemused.
The girl looked over her shoulder. "Come on!" she said.
Orphan, still bemused, followed her.
"What's your name?" he asked the girl.
"Elizabeth," she said. "What's yours?"
"Orphan."
The girl giggled. "Orphan's not a real name."
"What's a real name?" he asked, brushing away a branch. Where were they going? The girl seemed to know her way, but he was completely lost.
"You know," the girl said. "Edward, or Richard, or Henry, or…" She seemed to think about it for a while. "Or James," she said.
Orphan smiled. He remembered, when he was a kid, being interested in old coins. "They're all very royal names," he said.
"Orphan's not a proper name," the girl said. Orphan shrugged. He wasn't going to get into that. He must have had a real name, once. A name his mother had given him. But he had never known her. Orphan might have been a description more than a proper name, but it suited him fine.
"Where are we going?" he said.
"Don't you know anything?" the girl said.
Orphan shrugged again, too tired to argue, and said, "No."
"It's not far now," the girl said.
"Fine," Orphan said.
"If you're a pirate," the girl said, "then where is your cutlass?"
"I don't know how to use one," Orphan said. "I am… well, was… well, a poet, you see. And the pen, you know, is mightier than the sword."
The girl turned to look at him, then snorted a laugh. "That's not true."
"Books," Orphan began, but the girl stopped and looked at him in alarm, no longer smiling. "Books!" she said. She made a sign with her hand, as if warding off evil.
Orphan, not sure why she responded that way, backtracked quickly. "We had no books on the pirate ship," he said. "Anyone caught with a book was made to walk the plank!"
The girl slowly relaxed. Then she grinned. "Did they make you walk the plank?"
"No, of course not," Orphan said. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here, would I?"
"I think you did!" the girl said. "That's why you're here. You swam from the pirate ship and got to the island!"
The girl had strange ideas, Orphan thought. Unfortunately, this one was a little too close to the truth. He remembered Mr. Spoons making that last sailor from the Nautilus walk the plank, and shuddered. He hoped he never saw another pirate ship again for as long as he lived.
Which might not, he reflected, be all that long.
Then, without him noticing, he and the girl went around one final tree (its trunk the thickness of several men) and came out into the open.
Before them lay a crater.
The crater was enormous; it looked as though, at some distant time in the past, a giant fist had come down from the skies and punched into the earth, shattering it into painful splinters. It was a place where the land had bled; once-sandy patches were now areas of strange green glass where nothing grew. The crater lay bare before Orphan. Only its rim, high above it, was alive with plant life, and these, in sharp contrast to the crater itself, were plentiful but grotesque. Flowers as tall as Orphan nodded in the breeze, their colours in too-sharp relief, bloodied reds and oozing greens like the unmixed paint on an artist's palate.
But it was the scene below that captured his attention.
Down in the crater, two large, matt-black airships hung suspended, moored to the ground by long trailing cables. Below them, dome-shaped buildings sprouted everywhere. They reminded Orphan of mushrooms, and suddenly the thought of mushrooms – in butter, with fried onions and a piece of toast – made his stomach growl. When was the last time he had eaten?
The girl – Elizabeth – looked at him sideways and suddenly grinned. Orphan blushed.
It wasn't the buildings, however – nor the hordes of uniformed people who swarmed between them – that had captivated him. What had – what made his heart suddenly beat against his chest as if he were coming down with a cold – was the elaborate structure that towered out of the bottom of the crater. A giant metal tube, a mechanism supported by a complex web work of wires and machines. It was monstrous, a cannon magnified a thousand-fold, waiting for the powder to be touched and set alight, for the payload to be launched into…
Into space. He stared at the giant cannon and thought of the amount of power that would be required to power it. Were it used in war, it would devastate whole cities. The sweat on his face suddenly felt cold.
He was so absorbed in what he was seeing, that it was a moment before he realised Elizabeth was tugging urgently on his arm. "Hide!" she whispered.
He looked around, but it was too late.
Out of a path he had not seen before, following the crater's rim, came a group of men.
Soldiers. He did not recognise the uniforms – they carried no insignia – but he recognised the guns in their hands easily enough. He and the girl stayed rooted to the spot. She seemed as frightened as he himself felt. The soldiers approached and halted when they saw them.
"Hey," said a rich, drawling voice that belonged to a whiskered, middle-aged man who might have been the commander of this unit – a patrol, Orphan realised, though what they could be guarding against…
Himself, perhaps.
"What are you doing here?"
