Ison of the Isles

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  “Croom,” Talley answered, his voice neutral. “There will be some friends of yours waiting there with a boat. The only promise you must give me is to leave the Forsakens by the shortest route. Otherwise you will be hunted down.”

  Harg saw the gleam of Talley’s teeth as he gave a joyless smile. “You understand, this is not a bargain Inning will honour. This is strictly a private matter between you and me. My orders were to carry out your execution tomorrow, so that the High Court in Fluminos could act suitably shocked by my severity, and disavow responsibility. They weren’t sure of the repercussions, you see, and wanted to be able to pin the blame on someone else. It is always handy to have a monster to hold over people’s heads.”

  His voice was unemotional. Harg stared at him, still disbelieving. “Are you acting against orders, then?” he asked.

  Talley smiled thinly at him. “You could say that. I have just broken the law and helped a condemned fugitive to escape. Not even my family will be able to cover this up, not that they would try. I’ll be the one accused of treason now.” His smile was like a black glass knife.

  “You deserve worse,” Harg said, thinking of all Talley had done.

  Looking out the window, Talley said, “Justice is more elusive than our law implies. And mercy is nearly driven from the land.”

  The racket of the wheels filled the silence between them. “What if I had used the gun and shot you back there?” Harg said.

  “Then, obviously, I wouldn’t have been able to carry this plan out.”

  It had been some sort of strange, twisted test. Another trial, this one of Talley’s own devising.

  The carriage stopped at the head of the cliff, where the road plunged in steep switchbacks down to the sea. “You will have to walk from here,” Talley said. “The road is too dangerous for a vehicle at night. Go to a tavern called the Sunken City, on the main street. Your friends are waiting there.”

  Harg sat staring at him for a second.

  “Go on! Get out of here!” Talley said.

  On a sudden impulse, Harg reached across and grasped Talley’s hand. For an instant, it was as if he touched the Inning’s mind; it was all laid bare, as in dhota. Harg felt a compassion that terrified him. “Let her cure you,” he said, then dived out the carriage door.

  He ran the first hundred yards or so, partly out of sheer exuberance in his freedom, partly out of fear that it was all a trick, and soldiers would come out of the shadows to arrest him. On the second switchback he slowed to a walk, panting, able to see by moonlight before and behind, and no one was waiting in ambush. It was a clear, chilly night. Below, he could see the lights of Croom, and the moon cast a shiny trail on the sea, as if someone had newly buffed the waves.

  The Sunken City showed signs of having been a popular place earlier in the evening. Now the crowds were gone and the staff was clearing up. He stood at the door, looking around, feeling conspicuous. Two people were still drinking at a table in the shadows; they saw him and started up. He almost dodged out the door before he recognized Katri and Tway.

  They each hugged him wordlessly; no names were uttered. Katri tugged him by the arm into a shadowy alcove, whispering, “Horns, am I glad to see you whole.”

  “There’s going to be some disappointed people when they have to cancel the show tomorrow,” he said. He was still trembling with the thought that he’d escaped it.

  “I’ve got two boats,” Katri said. “Talley gave me my freedom on condition I get you safely to Rothur, so they’ll think you’re with me. But you won’t be. My boat will be the decoy, and the other’s yours. She’s all stocked so you won’t have to lay in to port till you reach Rothur. Want to see her?”

  “Yes!”

  They left the inn and headed for the dock. The boat was a sloop fitted for single-handed sailing. Harg jumped on board and began checking out the sails and lines. Katri’s boat was moored alongside. She said, “I’ll make straight south, as if to Rothur; you go west, as if to Lashnish. If anyone gives chase, they’ll follow me.” She leaped aboard her boat and disappeared below.

  Tway was standing on the dock, watching. “Want a crew?” she said.

  He couldn’t imagine she meant it. “I’m leaving the Isles, Tway. Only the Ashwin know if I’ll ever be back.”

  “Do you think I’m as dumb as that knot you’re tying?” she said impatiently. Then, conversationally, “You’re doing it backwards.”

  He looked down, found she was right, and unravelled it. He said, “You don’t know what you’re asking. The Rothurs are beasts. They make their wives live in separate houses.”

  “You think I want to marry one?” Tway said.

  He tried to picture Tway in Rothur—Tway, with her tart tongue and her practical grasp of what mattered. He almost laughed. It would serve the Rothurs right.

  “Is that a yes or a no?” she demanded.

  “You got any skills?” he said, to tease her.

  She said, “I can tie knots in places you’ve never even imagined.”

  “You’re hired,” he said.

  She jumped aboard and quickly set about loosing the mainsail.

  She was everything he came from, familiar as his own past. A part of his past he could still salvage, that he hadn’t destroyed beyond recall.

  “Tway,” he said seriously, resting his arms on the transom of the cockpit, “you can find someone better than me.”

  She paused to look at him over the boom. “Oh, I think you’ll do for now,” she said.

  There was a good east wind, and they set course down the channel north of Rusk with the sails splayed wide. Sitting with his feet braced against the edge of the cockpit, with Tway sitting warm beside him, Harg looked up at the stars and nearly shouted in joy at his freedom.

  *

  Tornabay was finally getting back to normal. The mongers were back haggling in their stalls, the insurance offices were doing a brisk business, and Torna developers were looking with interest at all the real estate fortuitously cleared by the fires. Even the Adainas camping in the ruins had a new look of solidarity, as if each of them personally had outwitted Inning justice. Though the entire year of conflict had netted them precisely nothing, when they met on the street they looked like they were exchanging secret handshakes with their eyes.

  “Don’t they know they’ve lost?” Nathaway said to Spaeth. “They’re so complacent to be victims.”

  They stood on the balcony outside his hotel room, which looked out on the Rivermarket. She was wrapped in a woollen man’s coat that nearly reached her ankles, for the east wind was chilly. Her hair was braided and coiled on her head again, the way she liked it.

  It was two days since she had told him she was pregnant. The news had staggered him. The first words out of his mouth had been, “Whose is it?”

  “What do you mean? It’s mine,” she said.

  “I mean, who’s the father?”

  “You can be, if you want.”

  He had still tried to probe, to suit his Inning notion of paternity, but it was useless. She didn’t know and didn’t care.

  He was getting used to the idea now. Though it still made him jumpy, and he sometimes looked at her like a man doomed in court to a life sentence, she could tell he was already falling in love with the child, sight unseen.

  Pregnancy was a lovely consolation, but there was still a hungry, empty space inside her—and would be, as long as Harg and Corbin were alive, and Corbin uncured. Her two complicated bandhotai, carrying all the cares of two incompatible worlds. She leaned against Nathaway, enjoying the simplicity of her feelings for him. He was in his usual state of unfocused dissatisfaction with the world. Nothing ever quite lived up to his expectations.

  “They’re just going to fall back into that Adaina stoicism,” he said. “The Governor’s already reneging on his promises about the la
nd, and no one will fight him.”

  Spaeth squeezed his hand. “Fighting doesn’t work. What we need is dhota.”

  “There’s not enough Grey People alive to do the curing the Isles need,” he said.

  That was why the Emerald Tablet had passed on, she thought. She looked at Nathaway, and thought with a quirk of inner laughter that dhota had worked on him, and no dhotamar had ever touched blood to him. It had been the dhota of the ordinary Adaina that had captured him. He had absorbed the memory of them into his pores, and nothing could ever get it out of him. Perhaps the Inning empire would be the same. “They should have a care who they conquer,” she said. “They say the victor always becomes the victim.”

  “Is that another of your Lashnura proverbs?”

  “Yes.”

  She put her arms around him, and he held her close. She said, “You think the war is over. It’s not. We’re going to beat the Innings yet, but not their way. We’ll have to do it our way, with mora. The more they make us sacrifice, the more power we will have.”

  “That’s outrageous!” Nathaway said. “It’s totally unjust.”

  There was a minor commotion behind them, back in the room; Bartelso had arrived. He joined them on the balcony, breathless from climbing the stairs. “My dear boy,” he said, seizing Nathaway’s hand, “I just heard the good news, that your lovely wife is adding another Talley to the world.” He turned to Spaeth, beaming. “Well done, my dear. Now I’ll get congratulated for having had the foresight to marry the two of you in time.”

  Spaeth had no idea what he was talking about, but it seemed well intentioned, so she smiled. Nathaway was looking awkward. Bartelso clapped him on the back. “I dare say your mother never suspected you would be the first one to present her with a grandchild, but she will be very pleased.”

  “You think so?” Nathaway said anxiously.

  “I know it.” His face changed, and grew more serious. “It will soften the bad news.” He took a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to Nathaway. “They’re not going to let the Navy handle Corbin’s case. They’re going to try him before the court in Fluminos,” he said. “It’s going to become a political lynching.”

  Spaeth felt a cold dread at the news. She looked up at Nathaway. They both knew what it meant. She had to follow her bandhota.

  “Then we’ll go,” Nathaway said, squeezing her hand.

  “You’ll love it, my dear!” Bartelso said. “It’s the most exciting city in the world. You know, if you spit from a rooftop anywhere between the Knob and Holton Street, you’re sure to hit a lawyer.”

  “We’ll make an effort to try,” Nathaway said.

  Bartelso looked at the two of them, sizing them up. “You’ll definitely liven the place up. Yes, indeed.”

  After he had bustled off, Spaeth stood trying to convince herself that he was right, and she could be happy outside the Isles.

  Nathaway put his hands on her shoulders. “You will like it, Spaeth,” he said. “I promise. Some night I’ll take you up onto the hills overlooking the city, and you’ll see the whole valley sparkling like a thousand stars. You’ll say there is magic in us, too.”

  “I have walked other circles,” she said. “I suppose I can walk Holton Street.”

  Seriously, he said, “Isn’t there any way to free you from my brother?”

  She shook her head. “No way at all. I must cure him some day. When that happens, he will love me, and I will love him more than anything in the world. But it won’t change the way I love you.” She could see that it troubled him, but there was nothing she could do about it. Her ancestors had seen to that.

  Later that day, when Nathaway was out booking passage on a ship to Fluminos, she returned to the balcony, a terrible ache of homesickness already in her heart. No Lashnura was meant to leave the islands for the lands outside, where the earth was inert and unfeeling. She thought of the words she had spoken, about sacrifice, and felt that it wasn’t over for her.

  She had no illusion that the Innings would be kind to her, no more than they would be to the Isles. She thought, We are their past they have lost. They need us, and therefore hate us. They want to destroy us because we are their salvation.

  The rooftops by her balcony came together in a complex mesh of angles, slate and clay and cedar shingle all mossy with age. In one of the rooftops was a gable window standing open, where a black housecat with yellow eyes was watching her. Tensing, she leaned over the railing toward it. “Ridwit?” she whispered.

  The cat blinked slowly, but said nothing.

  How the panther would ridicule her for what she had become—just another dhotamar enslaved to her bandhota. And yet it was only through dhota that she had achieved any justice. Only by giving up control had she found control.

  “Ridwit, am I doing the right thing?” she said.

  The cat didn’t answer.

  About the Author

  Carolyn Ives Gilman writes both fiction and nonfiction about frontiers. Growing up close to the U.S.-Canada boundary, she became a historian of borders between nations, races, and cultures, and a writer of fiction about even more exotic worlds than ours.

  Carolyn Ives Gilman’s most recent novel, Isles of the Forsaken, starts the story concluded in Ison of the Isles; it has been compared to the works of Mary Doria Russell and Ursula K. LeGuin. Her first novel, Halfway Human, was called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF” by Locus magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Bending the Landscape, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others, and she has a collection of short fiction, Aliens of the Heart, from Aqueduct Press. Her work has been translated and reprinted in Russia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, and Germany. She has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award.

  In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in 18th- and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her latest nonfiction book, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, was featured by the History Book Club and Book of the Month Club. Her history books have won the Missouri Governor’s Humanities Award, the Missouri Conference on History Best Book Award, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, and the Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award from Choice magazine. She has been interviewed on All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, History Detectives, and the History Channel. She is currently working on a history of the American Revolution on the frontier.

  Carolyn Ives Gilman is a native of Minnesota who now lives in St. Louis and works for the Missouri History Museum.