Isles of the Forsaken (26 page)

Now, three Torna merchants from the prosperous wharf-side neighbourhood were facing him as if he were the only thing standing between them and ruin. “There are pirates roaming the streets in bands out there,” said their spokesperson, a middle-aged woman named Majlis Callow. “We have warehouses, shops, homes. The Innings at least protected us from looters and riot. You have to control these lawless men.”

Harg felt a sense of despair at how instinctively they turned to him for authority. He didn’t have a police force. He hardly had anything; the forces he had commanded that day were either guarding prisoners or stinking drunk by now. There was no discipline, no organization—it had all been cobbled together, spur of the moment.

“Barko!” he shouted over the din of the crowd. Barko came over, looking flushed with drink. Harg envied him; he hadn’t had a chance to eat, much less drink, since coming back to town. “Where the fuck is Holby Dorn?” he asked.

“Up in the Redoubt,” Barko said.

“What’s he doing up there?”

Barko only shrugged.

“Well, send somebody up there and tell him to get his ass down here to control his men,” Harg said angrily.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Barko said. He was looking at Harg in incredulity at the thought that Holby Dorn could, or would, stop anyone from looting.

The Tornas looked panic-stricken at Barko’s response. Majlis turned to Harg. “Captain Ismol, you’ve got to do something. We’re begging you.”

He needed the Torna. If the pirates started a riot, it would turn racial, and then the Mundua alone knew what would happen. Harg thought of the piled-up wardrobe. By morning, he could be standing in wreckage and smouldering ruins.

He put a reassuring hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll do something.” What, he had no idea. “Barko, do you know the situation out there?”

Barko turned and beckoned over some new arrivals. “You guys see what was going on?” he yelled.

“They’ve built a big bonfire down in the Market Square, and they’re shooting off guns and stuff,” one man said.

“Any disorder?” Harg asked.

They laughed. “Sure, they’re breaking some windows. I heard that some Torna shopkeeper shot a guy in the leg.”

Harg didn’t find it humourous. There was a window of opportunity to stop this before it got out of control. He couldn’t use force, so it had to be persuasion, bribery, or flimflam, possibly all three. He said to Barko, “We need a distraction. Go get a couple of kegs from Calpe’s basement, but for Mundua’s sake water it down. Then bring it along to Market Square. I’ll try to get the pirates there.”

He looked around for Tway. Before he had gone upstairs she had been tending bar while Calpe tended prisoners up in the Redoubt. He spotted her, and pushed through the crowd, leaning across the bar to talk privately. “Go get Spaeth,” he said. “Bring her down to Market Square.”

“Are you sure?” Tway said seriously.

“No. But do it anyway.” He needed the insurance.

He climbed up on a table then, and waved his arms for silence. When the din had sunk to an uproar, he shouted, “I’m buying a round!” There was a deafening cheer; he held up his hands for silence. “Not here! Come on down to the bonfire at Market Square, and the first hundred people that show up get a drink on me. Go out and make sure all the pirates know. Bring them along, and we’ll have a
real
party.”

He jumped down and headed for the door then, with a high-spirited mob pressing behind him. It was a risk, putting more people into the streets. Witnesses might be a deterrent, or just more fuel for the fire. As they passed through the streets of Harbourdown, Harg hailed everyone he saw, inviting them to the Market Square.

The bonfire turned out to be built from the contents of the half-renovated customs house, which had been stripped clean. There was already a crowd there, and a street fiddler entertaining them for tips. When Harg joined them, he saw that they were feeding the fire with all the licenses, passports, certificates, and registrations that the Innings had imposed on them. A fierce old woman came forward with a fistful of permits to toss contemptuously on the fire, and Harg laughed aloud to see the paper shackles of the invaders go up in flames.

It took some time for everyone to assemble, and Harg spent it going through the crowd shaking hands and congratulating people, telling them not to leave. He could tell when the pirates started arriving, because the tone became more rowdy and rough, the crowd laced with belligerent young men looking for trouble. When Barko finally rode into the square with a cartful of liquor, there was no time to lose. Harg sprinted to the top of the customs house steps and held up his arms. The fiddle fell silent, and so did the crowd.

“Did anyone ever say that Thimishmen didn’t know how to stand up for their rights?” Harg shouted out over the square.

“No!” the people in the front of the crowd roared back.

“Well, if they ever did, you’ve proved them wrong today.”

There were cheers and raucous shouts.

“Do you remember how those Innings were lording it over you yesterday?”

“Yes!” the crowd responded.

“Well, where are they now?”

There were catcalls and a few obscenities.

“I love you guys,” Harg shouted.

There were cries of “We love you too.”

“Today you’ve proved what islanders can do.” He paused for the cheering to die down. “Pretty soon they’ll be talking about you in Tornabay, saying, ‘We’d better not mess with Thimish.’ But they’ll also be talking about you on Ekra and Pont and Romm. And you know what they’ll be saying? ‘Those Thimishmen stood up for me, too. We weren’t able to do it ourselves, but Thimish did what we should have done, and we owe them.’ Your names are going to travel all over the South Chain, because you had the courage to do what was right. Your names are going to travel to the Inner Chain, and even the Tornas are going to say, ‘They stood up for us, too.’ Because it’s true.”

There were a few hoots at this, but most of the crowd was listening, arrested by this new view of themselves. Looking out over their faces, Harg could feel a presence, a power, in their collective mood. It was like music; the square throbbed with energy, an invisible force that had sprung into being from their synchronized attention, and he suddenly knew he could shape it into something beautiful, or something deadly.

“What you did today is bigger than just Thimish,” he said, his voice echoing from the buildings in the silence. “It’s bigger than Adaina or Torna. It’s bigger than all the South Chain. You stood up for regular people everywhere. Tonight, Harbourdown is your town, your home, but it’s more than that, because everyone will be looking at you and saying, ‘I wish I could be a Thimishman, too.’ We’re all in this together, rich and poor, man and woman, elder and child. Let’s celebrate together, and show the world we’re just ordinary, peaceful folks who aren’t going to let empires shove us around.”

They erupted in applause, and Harg felt the volume and force of their emotion lifting him, washing over him. They had a radiance, a greatness, that made him love them; he wanted to embrace them, to become their instrument, till he glowed with their invisible power.

The fiddler came up onto the steps beside him, and waved for silence. “I’ve got a song,” he shouted out. “It’s called the Ballad of the Battle of Thimish.”

He struck some notes on his fiddle, and before long he had the whole crowd singing the chorus. Harg watched in wonder. The mood had completely changed. Good will and fellowship were flowing through the town in irresistible waves. By the time Barko broke out the booze, it was almost unnecessary; everyone was drunk on good feeling.

As he started down the steps, he caught the sight, over to his right, of silver hair and pearly grey skin. Spaeth was standing there watching him, fully visible to the rest of the crowd, and he hadn’t even seen her. For a moment he froze, feeling a qualm at the implications. No wonder they had all listened to him. They had seen her, and thought her presence meant more than it did.

He went over to her. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have involved you in this. I thought—”

She didn’t let him finish. “Harg, I haven’t seen mora so powerful, or someone who worked it so well, since . . .” She stopped, as if warned by instinct not to compare him to Goth.

Her eyes were the colour of moonlight, and they were looking at him with an expression that made his heart skip a beat. He had never thought that anyone would look at him that way. He put a hand on her cheek; she looked intoxicated with his closeness.

“You’re in pain,” she said, and reached up to touch his hair where it was matted with blood from the scalp wound the Inning had given him.

“I deserve it,” he said. “I did something really stupid, trying to be a hero.”

She ran light fingers across his forehead, down his cheek. Her touch felt cool and soothing, like wintergreen. Before he had time to think, his own fingers were running through her hair. It looked like moonlit water flowing over his hands.

“Let me help you,” she whispered. “I want to. I need to.”

“You don’t want to be my bandhota,” he said softly.

“I have to be someone’s.”

She was almost pleading. This was his chance, he thought. He could have her, body and soul. How ardent she looked, half mad with compassion. They could spend a night like he had never dreamed of having.

And in the morning she would wake with all her freedom gone. She would be

his slave, and he would be her master forever.

With a pang of thwarted desire, he realized he couldn’t do it. No matter how his body yearned for it. He took her hands in his, and kissed them softly. “I can’t let you waste yourself on me,” he said. “Save your dhota for someone who deserves it.”

He turned away then. Behind him, she drew in a breath that was nearly a sob. Sternly he forced himself on. As he descended the steps, he wondered if he had gone insane. Any other man would have done it.

No one spoke to him as he crossed the square, engrossed in his thoughts. When he came up to Barko, the pirate raised a speculative eyebrow, and Harg knew then that everyone had been watching.

“I need to find a horse,” Harg said. “I have to go up to the Redoubt and check out what Holby Dorn is up to.”

“I’ll come with you,” Barko said.

“You think things are under control here?”

Barko scanned the square, where people had started dancing to the fiddle music. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re okay now.”

The dark streets away from the square were deserted. Barko led the way to a stable, and Harg pounded on the door. A shutter next to him rattled open a crack, and the muzzle of a shotgun poked through. Harg backed away, his hands in the air. “Hold on,” he said, “I just want to hire a horse.”

Barko stepped between him and the gun. “Don’t you know who this is?” he demanded angrily. “This is Captain Ismol. You owe him your freedom and your safety.”

The shotgun lowered, and someone muttered an excuse. Then the bolt on the door shot back, and the proprietor gestured them inside.

They got two horses. Retracing the road he had ridden down only that morning, Harg was visited with a sense of unreality at all that had happened. Before passing through the fort gates he turned around to look down on the town, on the four warships riding in the harbour, the bonfire by the wharf.

“It’s all ours again,” Barko said with a quiet satisfaction.

Inside the Redoubt, they found Birk’s squad still firmly in control of the guns, and Calpe’s of the prisoners. “It was a little tense here for a while,” Birk told them. “I think Dorn and his guys came up intending to start something, but when we wouldn’t back down they decided to help themselves to the Innings’ cognac instead.”

“Good for you, Birk,” Harg said.

“Well it was
our
fort,” Birk said, with righteous indignation. “Those pirates never captured a fort in their lives. You going to kick him out?”

“No,” Harg said. “I just want to talk to him.”

“We’ll stay close in case you need us.”

They found Holby Dorn installed in the room that had been Proctor Fullabeau’s office. It was lavishly furnished with Inning symbols of dominion. The light from a bright coal fire danced over the crystal decanters arrayed on the walnut side table, the brocade upholstery of the furniture, the polished brass fender. Things of age, beauty, and value: they were the symbols Innings used to stake out the gradations of rank and race, to show who ruled whom. Now the mahogany desk was littered with empty bottles, and two of Dorn’s men were slumped on the settee, snoring drunkenly.

Holby Dorn was either not drunk or not showing it. When Barko and Harg entered, he was looking out the window between the wine-coloured draperies, massive as a snow-capped mountain. He turned, ponderous yet charged, and his small, bright eyes fixed on Harg’s face.

“You, eh?” he grunted.

Harg crossed his arms. “I just had to stop your pirates from sacking the town, Dorn. Since you wouldn’t control them, somebody else had to. Now don’t complain to me if you’ve lost authority.”

Dorn’s face was hard as glacier-scarred granite. He said, “You think you’re pretty damn smart, don’t you?”

“Yes, since you mention it. And I am.”

Their gazes met square on, and for a while their eyes contested silently. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you stirred up today.” Dorn said slowly. “Taking the fort and assassinating the commandant aren’t acts of piracy. They’re full-blown acts of war.”

“I know,” Harg said. “It was the only way to get the Innings to take us seriously.”

“Well, congratulations. Now you’ve got their attention, they’re going to send out half the fleet to hunt you down.”

“I’ll be disappointed if it’s only half.” It was bravado, and they both knew it. But Harg was still riding the surge of power from the Market Square, and he wasn’t in the mood for humility. Deliberately, he sat down on one of the gold brocade armchairs, aware that he profaned an icon. “That’s why we can’t go around looting our neighbours. We’re going to need them.”

Holby Dorn placed a muddy boot on the edge of the polished fender. “My guys wouldn’t have touched Adainas,” he said.