Ison of the Isles

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  There was a satisfying flurry of activity as a timber-cutting party, a scouting party, and a carpentering team were organized. The men seemed energized again by the prospect of going forward, not back. Those not detailed to work settled down to catch some sleep.

  Harg sat back against a stone, thinking that he too should sleep while he had a chance. He closed his eye and leaned back; but as his body relaxed a hundred worries skittered into his mind.

  The timing, as always, was critical. The jaws of the trap had to come together at the same time. Jearl, in charge of the fleet, would at this moment be putting up a good show of menacing the harbour, diverting the Innings’ attention toward the sea. And Calpe would be preparing her part of the trap. He could trust her not to act prematurely. She had more cunning than the rest of them combined.

  Calpe’s help had come as a surprise. Her message had reached him when the fleet had first entered the Inner Chain, brought via the brother of an apprentice to a perfumer who did business with the Palace. She was the last person he had expected to hear from, since he had left her behind to be captured by the Innings. Now she was offering to pass on important information if someone could rendezvous with her at a secluded anchorage up the coast from Tornabay.

  Everyone had told Harg it was a ridiculous risk for him to do it personally. They had been right. He was too recognizable, the possibility of a trap was too great, and the trip took him away from the fleet at exactly the wrong point in the preparations. He had done it anyway. Calpe’s capture had been his blunder, her captivity his responsibility.

  And so he had been waiting in a battered fishing boat, a knit cap pulled low on his forehead, when an Inning pleasure yacht cast anchor nearby. It was a useless-looking thing, decorated with gilded curlicues, its deck cluttered with folding furniture. Harg’s boat rowed up to it, pretending to have pearls for sale.

  A liveried servant listened to his sales pitch, then allowed him on board and took him below to a cabin so bedraped with curtains and full of pillows that it looked like a giant unmade bed. Calpe was lounging barefoot on a couch with another woman. When she saw Harg her only reaction was a slight widening of the eyes. She rose, stretching. The servant left.

  She looked stunningly beautiful. Her face was set in a corona of gold-bleached hair. She wore a long gown of some sheer, clinging fabric that revealed and concealed by turns every movement of muscle, every line of her breasts and thighs. Her arms and neck were bare except for bands of silver. At every movement her garments whispered secrets. She was dressed with consummate art, and yet seemed nearly naked.

  But if her body was exposed, her face was another matter. Her thoughts had withdrawn behind the armoured barrier of her beauty.

  “Harg,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t expect you to come yourself.”

  He glanced warily at the other woman, who was staring at him with a sweet, vacant smile.

  “Don’t worry,” Calpe said. “She can’t talk.”

  The woman smiled like a child.

  “The Innings do it by driving a rod into a particular part of the brain,” Calpe said. “They know exactly how.”

  Harg’s revulsion must have shown on his face, for Calpe smiled with a glass-bright exhilaration and said, “They would never do it to me. The Innings love to hear me talk. It’s half the fun.”

  “What have they done to you?” Harg said.

  “Why, given me power,” she answered.

  “Over what?”

  “Over them,” Calpe said, steel-sharp. Then the shaded lids half-dropped over her eyes, and she said, “Over their fantasies.”

  She turned her head, exposing an exquisite line of throat to him, and said to her companion, “That’s right, isn’t it, Lilly?”

  The woman giggled.

  “You probably think I am a prisoner,” Calpe said. “It’s not true. The palace women are free to leave; we simply choose not to. Some of the women there have followed their officers for years. Two of them are even Innings. No, it’s the men who are the prisoners, and we know how to keep them that way.”

  Harg said roughly, “Whose concubine are you? Or do they share?”

  She looked at him with half a smile, not minding his reaction at all—almost savouring it, in fact. “I am Provost Minicleer’s,” she said. “No one else touches me.”

  He gave an inarticulate protest.

  “The other women didn’t know how to handle him,” she said. “He likes to cause pain, and to feel it himself. Trying to recapture an experience he had once with a Grey Lady, or so he claims. I fight him off, and swear at him, and make him think he’s conquering me.”

  “You’ve gotten very clever,” Harg said.

  “One has to be, in this world.”

  “In the Innings’ world, you mean.”

  “Well, that’s this world.”

  She stepped closer. A faint scent of perfume came to him. “I even told him about us. It made him crazy, to think I’d been yours. He asked all about you.”

  It was nearly making Harg crazy, to think she was now the toy of some Inning degenerate. Part of him was still strongly attracted, another part repulsed. She had been so fresh, so free. Now pain glittered from her every pore.

  “Come back with me,” he said.

  Her eyes widened a hair. “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “You said you were free to leave.”

  “I have worked hard to get where I am. You think I was joking about power. The Innings speak freely to their women, and we speak to each other. They never suspect us of understanding them. We hear of every move before it is made, we know their rivalries and plots. They are in our hands most nights. I can be very useful to you, if you’re not too proud to have my help.”

  She was right; she could be useful. And yet, her help was tainted by the touch of Inning. Like everything pure and young in the Isles.

  She was watching him closely. “You think I’m a whore,” she said softly. He couldn’t answer; to deny it or admit it would have choked him.

  “Tell me what you know,” his voice grated.

  She gave him a complicit, my-corruption-is-yours smile. He wanted to slap her.

  The information she had was interesting but not immediately useful. There was conflict within the Inning command, and between the Navy and the civilian authorities—plots and politics he only half understood. But as she spoke, it began to come clear to him what role she might play. It made him feel unclean to suggest it, but he did.

  “What a charming idea,” she said. “Like something out of an Inning opera.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Of course. My Ison commands me, and I obey.”

  The pillowed cabin was making Harg claustrophobic. He was about to leave when Calpe reached out and touched the scar on his face.

  “Everyone said you’d been disfigured,” she said. “But I thought the dhota-nur would cure it.”

  “There are some things even dhota can’t touch,” he said.

  “What a pity,” she answered. “You were so good-looking.”

  The feel of her cool fingers was maddening. He wanted to touch her in return, to prove his prior claim on her. He could see she wouldn’t prevent him.

  The last person who had touched him like that was Spaeth. For an instant he held them together in his mind: one primitive and cleansing as a sea storm, the other alluring and corrupt. At that thought, his lust soured on him, and he turned to go.

  The Innings are winning this war, he thought as he climbed back into the fishing boat that had brought him. Whether we beat them or not.

  *

  He woke feeling stifled. He sat up gasping, then coughed when the filthy air met his lungs. There was a fine black dust all over him.

  Brixt was pacing irritably. “I don’t know what’s keeping them,”
he said when Harg joined him. “It’s been almost four hours.”

  Harg felt disoriented, for he had no sense of having slept so long. At this rate, they might be trapped in this hellish place for days.

  Soon after, the timber-cutters returned. When Brixt rebuked them, the young man he’d put in charge said, “It was more than a mile, sir. It was five miles at least.”

  Now that he’d been out here a while, Harg believed it.

  The carpenters quickly set to work building the frame that would hoist the cannons up the cliff and onto the causeway. Once the pieces were rough cut, the head carpenter—a bald, meticulous man who fussed over all the measurements—set to work, carving out huge mortise-and-tenon joints. Brace by cross-brace, the tower went up. By scavenging metal parts from the harnesses, and wheels and axles from a cannon carriage, they rigged a makeshift pulley and winch. Brixt started muttering that they should have brought a capstan from one of the ships; but by notching a wheel to prevent it rotating backward they improvised a system nearly as good.

  When the first cannon barrel swung free of its sledge, dangling in a rope cradle, the timber tower creaked but held. The men on the guide-ropes gave a cheer; Harg nearly snapped at them to hold their exuberance till the task was done. Up and up the iron tube swung into the yellow air. The men atop the cliff guided it over to where another sledge waited ready to draw it away, then shouted for the pulley-men to lower it.

  Harg never saw what happened. There was a crack of splintering wood. With a shout, the men jumped away, and the cannon fell, then disappeared. A length of rope snaked after it. Harg blinked, but there was no sign of the cannon. It had vanished.

  There were cries of astonishment from up on the ridge. Harg scrambled up till he could see what had happened. A jag-edged hole gaped in the ground where the rock had given way and the cannon and sledge had fallen through.

  Harg knelt at the edge of the hole to look down. It was pitch black. “By the rock!” a man at his side said. “It went clear down into the realm of the Naked Bear.”

  The spot they stood on was hollow, a bubble in the rock. Harg tossed in a pebble; it clattered only ten or fifteen feet down. “Who wants to go down and see if the cannon’s salvageable?” he asked.

  A curly-haired lad too young to be sensible volunteered. They lowered him down by a rope, lantern in hand.

  The first thing he called out was, “It’s a cave!” Then, “It’s big!” From the way his voice echoed they could tell that.

  Harg called, “How’s the cannon?” But there was no answer. The lantern light had disappeared. The boy had gone exploring, apparently. Harg swore softly. “Get busy repairing that hoist,” he said to the men around him.

  Presently, the boy’s footsteps sounded from below and the light wavered back into view. “It’s a tunnel, sir,” he called up, his face raised to the light. “It goes on just about forever, underneath the ridge.”

  “How’s the rotting cannon?” Harg said. But already his mind was on other things. If the ridge was hollow, they would be foolish to try to follow it. The slightest weak spot, and more cannons might fall through. They might reach Tornabay without a single field piece.

  “The cannon’s fine,” the boy called up.

  Harg stood. The scout was across the hole, watching him from sharp, wild-animal eyes. Ignoring him, Harg climbed up on a nearby boulder to see what he could see of the landscape. A gust of wind had cleared off some of the haze, but it only revealed more of what he had already seen: frowning wrinkles of rock, waiting to trap them.

  “What do you know of the Mundua?” a voice said at his elbow. He looked down to see the scout, standing arms akimbo, scanning the landscape as if he had just asked a practical question.

  “Nothing,” Harg said.

  “I wish the Onan were here.”

  Harg didn’t reply. Everyone thought it odd that Spaeth was still back in Lashnish, when she should have been at his side. He knew there was speculation about it, and suspicion. Between that and his unhealed eye, they were beginning to guess the truth. He wouldn’t be able to hide it much longer.

  “You see,” the scout went on, “the Mundua may be trying to help us, or hinder us. I don’t know which. The Onan would know. I would say it was too risky to take their help, except that you are Ison. They are not supposed to have any power over you.”

  Harg didn’t miss the uncertain phrasing, but he chose to ignore it. “These lava caves,” he said. “How far do they usually run?”

  “Sometimes for miles,” the scout said resignedly.

  “I want you to go down and see where this one goes, and if it’s possible to get out at the other end. Pay attention to obstructions and narrow spots. You understand?”

  The scout did not like it, but he understood. They lowered him down with another lantern, and he and the boy set off together.

  A messenger had arrived with the news that the main contingent of troops had caught up with them. Again Harg felt a twinge of disorientation; it seemed to have taken them far too long. He went to talk over the situation with his two captains. By the time he got back, the scout had returned.

  The cave ran for a mile, maybe two, before ending on a gentle slope at the edge of the lava field. There were no obstructions a few men with picks and crowbars couldn’t clear. “I didn’t expect any,” the scout said, eyeing Harg.

  Gill had come up with the rear detachment, and now stood at Harg’s side, looking down into the black hole the cannon had made. He shivered. “Are you serious, Harg?” he said quietly. “It sounds way too easy to me.”

  “If the mountain wants to help, I’m not going to turn it down,” Harg said.

  “You’re sure this is help?”

  If he said yes, they would all believe him. He was Ison. “Yes,” he said.

  They set to work hoisting and lowering the cannons and mules through the hole. The men weren’t happy with the prospect of going underground, but Harg put on a confident face that convinced them.

  Anything that could be carried on two legs, Harg sent to join the main force to pick its way overland. Only the heaviest equipment would go by the tunnel. “We’ll beat you to the other end,” he called cheerfully to Drome as the overland contingent left. Then he caught hold of the hoist rope, set his foot in the cradle, and signalled the pulley-men to lower him down. Jerkily he sank; the broken rock went past like a black eggshell, and darkness closed over him.

  Underground, the cave was bedlam: frightened mules braying and kicking, men shouting, sledges and tangled harness everywhere. The dim lantern light barely touched the rubbled ceiling arching high overhead. Harg saw a preoccupied soldier set a lantern down atop a keg of gunpowder, and yelled out a warning. At this rate, they wouldn’t need firesnakes to menace them. They were perfectly capable of wiping themselves out without the Mundua’s help.

  It took half an hour to get the mess sorted out into an orderly line. They strung reins between the teams of mules to keep them all together, then set out, Harg at the head and Brixt at the rear. Gill walked at Harg’s side, and the scout carried a lantern before them.

  It was easier going than Harg had dared to hope. The floor was a frozen stream of black stone, rippled in the direction of their travel. It sloped gently downward, a little steeper as they progressed. Harg told himself it was only the slope of the mountainside, but it was hard to keep from feeling that they were going deeper into the earth.

  In the blackness, there was no telling how far they had come when the scout paused, his lantern showing a branch in the tunnel ahead. Harg called out for a halt, and all down the line behind they heard the drivers curbing their mules.

  “What’s wrong?” Harg said to the scout.

  The man’s sharp face was weirdly lit by the lantern: his chin, the tip of his nose, his eyebrows. “There was no spot like this when I came through,” he said.
/>
  “There must have been,” Harg said, knowing it was untrue. “We can’t have gotten off track; there has only been one way.”

  The scout shrugged nervously. “I can scout them both, but I know what I will find.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Any path I take will lead out. Any path you take will lead wherever the mountain is trying to get you to go.”

  Harg felt a fatalistic resignation. “You choose, then.”

  “That will make no difference.”

  The two branches looked identical, but a wind was blowing from the left-hand one. Perhaps a wind meant a way outside. “We’ll take that one,” Harg said.

  Before long, the downward slope grew even steeper, and the drivers had to rein back the mules to prevent them from going too fast. The wind picked up till it was whistling past their ears. It was warm.

  “I don’t like the look of this,” Gill said.

  “You have a better idea?” Harg asked. Gill was silent.

  Would there be a song someday about the Ison Harg who was no Ison, who led an army down into the maw of Mount Embo? Harg wondered how the chorus would go. Something about being eaten by fire, perhaps. He could almost hear it, sung to the tune of “Seven Dead Men on the Beach.”

  They had gotten some ways ahead of the main party when Harg stopped suddenly. “Shield your light,” he told the scout. The man took off his jacket and draped it around the lantern till blackness closed in. Or what should have been blackness. There were faint highlights of orange light on the rock walls ahead.

  Indecision gripped Harg. “Do you think we should turn back?” he asked Gill.

  The sweat on Gill’s face glistened faintly. “Would it gain us anything?” he asked.

  No. Even if they reversed course, the tunnel might lead them directly back here, as long as the mountain hadn’t yet had its way.

  “Give me the lamp,” Harg said to the scout. “Go back and tell the rest to wait. I’ll go ahead and see if it’s safe.”