Ison of the Isles (14 page)

When Tway had changed the bandages on his face, he had even steeled himself to look in the mirror for the first time, and it had almost killed his spirits. His face was horribly disfigured by the wound, the empty eye socket still inflamed and raw. He had quickly asked her to cover it up again. It was not that he had ever thought of himself as handsome, but at least his own body had always been familiar to him. He had trusted it, and liked it; it had never let him down. Now it felt like he was walking around in someone else’s face, someone scarred and hideous. The kind of person fit to be branded as a pariah.

Torr and his crew didn’t want to go ashore, so Gill, Tway, and Harg unshipped the jolly boat and got in, with Gill rowing. He brought them to land at the base of the broad ceremonial staircase that rose from the water’s edge to the marble promenade that lined the waterfront. As they climbed the steps, Harg looked up at the archway towering over them, thinking for an awestruck moment that all the great Isons through history must have entered this very way into their capital city.

The quayside street was crowded with peddlers, sailors, children, fishwives, longshoremen, all jostling past, some staring curiously at his bandaged eye and weather-beaten uniform coat. A Navy man standing on the doorstep of a corner building across the street was staring at him, and for a moment Harg feared he was going to call out; but he only turned to say something to a companion standing inside, pointing the stem of his pipe at Harg.

“Let’s go straight to Tiarch’s palace,” Harg said to Tway.

“It’s up this street,” she said, and led the way.

It soon became obvious that he had been recognized, and that word was spreading of his presence. As they headed up the Stonepath, people emerged from shops and doorways to stare superstitiously at them, and when Harg glanced back over his shoulder, he saw that quite a few of them were following. Alert now, he scanned for a sign of police, but there was not a uniform in sight. He forced himself to remember his old way of walking, before he had been disfigured, before he had doubted their support.

“This is not good,” Tway said at his side.

“Just ignore them,” Harg answered.

But they were getting harder to ignore. Farther up the street, a block was lined with a knot of young men who broke into cheers and whistles when Harg came in sight. There was something belligerent in their voices. He realized that they were all Torna, and the cheers were aimed not so much at him as at the Adaina who scowled silently from across the street. All the ingredients for a riot were there.

The crowd was getting denser as the street swept uphill between buildings. Harg saw again some faces he had already passed; people were circling around by the side streets to overtake them, swelling the crowd. They were getting noisier and angrier, as well—at each other, at him. Harg kept walking grimly, winded by the unaccustomed exercise. It had been a mistake to come ashore; he had not understood the city’s mood, or how volatile it was. Now there was nothing to do but go on. The Isonsquare where Tiarch’s headquarters lay was only a block ahead. Then half a block. He had to get there before the wave broke.

As yet, no one had dared confront him. But on the very edge of the Isonsquare that changed. An ancient Adaina woman in a shawl stepped forward to block Harg’s path. As he tried to sidestep her, she cried shrilly, “Get out of this city! We don’t want servants of the Mundua here. This is sacred ground, where we honour our Grey Folk.”

Harg wanted to ignore her, but too many were listening. “I honour your Grey Folk as well, mother,” he said. “I’ve got no quarrel with them.”

She pointed a finger at his eye. “That’s your punishment,” she said loudly. “Mora has branded you so all can see what you are.”

“I got this fighting for your sake,” he said. “If it’s a brand, it’s an honourable one.”

“It’s the mark of the Mundua!” she cried.

She was grandstanding for the crowd. Swallowing his anger, Harg pushed on. But as they passed, someone jostled Gill belligerently. Harg heard the scuffle behind him and instantly turned and snapped, “Stop that.” The men drew back, but a wad of spittle landed at Harg’s feet. He didn’t bother to look for its source, but merely turned and walked on.

Still there was no sign of any police. By now, Tiarch could not possibly be unaware of Harg’s presence on her very doorstep. He could scarcely believe she would not let her soldiers protect him.

When he emerged into the Isonsquare, his heart sank to see that Tiarch’s doors were shut, her shutters closed, against the crowd. His arm around Tway, he pushed through to the steps leading up to Tiarch’s door and mounted them. When he tried the knob, the door was locked. He pounded on it; there was no reply.

When he turned around, he saw that the crowd that had followed him up the street nearly filled the Isonsquare. He could feel their dangerous mood like an electric force: touch it, and it would discharge.

Gill was standing with Tway at the bottom of the steps. “Harg, we’ve got to get out of here,” he said.

There was nowhere to go. All around the square, the only open door was the one into the Pavilion cloister.

A missile sailed out of the crowd and hit him hard on the shoulder. With the pain, anger surged into Harg’s brain.

“The Innings would laugh if they could see you now!” he shouted, clutching his smarting shoulder. “What a victory for them to see the kind of thanks I get for walking the road to death for you. Out on the seas, they can’t beat us. But you—you can do what they can’t, and how they’d love you for it! You idiots, the Innings are your enemies, not me!”

A deep man’s voice boomed angrily out of the crowd, “The Innings aren’t tools of the Mundua and Ashwin!”

Harg pinned the speaker with his eye. “If the Innings win, you’ll have no Heir of Gilgen,” he said. There was a surge of noise at the name. Harg plunged on: “You’ll have no Ison, and no dhotamars, and in the end no words even to tell your grandchildren what they once were.”

There was an incoherent roar from the crowd. Harg knew he was not calming them down. But now he was started he couldn’t stop. He heard some cries of “Murderer!” and wheeled around to answer them. “What you don’t know is that we could have won the war that day,” he said. “We could all be safe now. Only that one man’s life stood between us and victory. And because we didn’t sacrifice him—because I let him live!—we may all die now, and our memory will vanish, and our islands will be scoured by invaders. You’re throwing stones at me for having set the Isles above any one man’s life. But no one’s life is more important than our country’s—not mine, not yours, not the Heir of Gilgen’s.”

“The Heir of Gilgen
is
the Isles!” a woman cried out. A roar of assent passed like surf through the crowd.

“No!” Harg shouted back. “
You
are the Isles. Every one of you.
You
are what we’re out there fighting for.”

For a few moments there was no reply. Then the man with the big voice yelled, “A man who goes against mora can betray us as well!”

The anger in Harg’s head sounded like wind in the rigging. “How dare you say you know where mora lies? What makes you wiser than we who have been out there facing Inning guns? We have been giving our hands and limbs and lives for you. The Innings got my eye, and my best friend’s life. Do you dare stand there safe and tell us we’ve gone against mora? I’ll give you this answer: what we’ve been doing is dhota. Even if our skins aren’t grey. We’ve been giving dhota for all of you, and all of the Isles, and we thought you were our bandhotai, to cherish us for what we did.”

He paused, looking out, wishing he could catch every eye in the crowd. “What chance do we have of our hands and legs growing back? Do you think this eye of mine will ever see again? No, I’m just a plain Adaina like you. But we’re giving dhota all the same—and I’ll tell you this: it’s a dhota so big that all the balances are going to bend, and what no one thought could be is going to happen. The skies and seas themselves are going to help us, and we’re going to beat the Innings. Not because of the Lashnura, but because
our
suffering counts!”

For several heartbeats there was utter silence in the square. Harg stood still, a little stunned at himself. He looked out over a thousand faces turned to him; in an instant of clarity he sensed it: he almost had their love. And suddenly he wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything.

Then the instant passed. Several people started yelling at once—belligerent voices, breaking the hush. Harg stood there, letting the epithets fall around him. As the hecklers’ courage grew, so did their number. Before long, a whole section of the crowd was chanting at him.

They didn’t want to free themselves. They didn’t want the hard work, or the suffering. They wanted someone to follow, someone to revere. And Harg could never be that person, as long as he was just one of them. The Adaina would never trust themselves to lead.

“All right!” he shouted bitterly. “All right, I’ll do it your way!”

He turned to the Pavilion’s open gate and started down the steps. Ahead of him the crowd parted, clearing a way. Blindly he walked on through them, through the gate, into the little garden inside. When he reached the stone, he seized the ancient hammer from its wrought iron stand and swung it over his head, bringing it down on the Isonstone in a bone-jarring blow. A huge chip split off and flew into the air.

“There!” Harg turned to face the multitude that had followed him in. “Are you satisfied now?”

There was such complete silence that Harg could hear the voices of the seagulls on the slate roofs, and the fall of an acorn on the grass nearby. Then, the doors of the Pavilion opened and five tall, grey figures entered the garden. The crowd pulled back, leaving Harg standing alone facing them. Slowly they approached him across the lawn until they stood before him.

He had to stiffen his knees to keep them from buckling. He had just faced down a murderous mob, but the fear he felt now went deeper. His hands were shaking; he clenched them at his sides.

The Grey Lady in the middle, a gaunt older woman, said, “Harg Ismol?”

“Yes,” he answered faintly.

“Come with us. We have been expecting you,” she said.

The days were dwindling noticeably now, as the brief summer of this northern land gave way to fall. Nathaway could not help but think of the warm autumn days that would be unfolding in Fluminos. The sidewalk cafes would be crowded, and the street musicians would be installed on their accustomed corners. The shops would be decorating their windows for the fall festivals, and the city’s heartbeat would be quickening into a thrumming rush. This was the first holiday season he would not be able to go home.

Lashnish, as usual, was veiled in rain. As he walked downhill away from the Pavilion, Nathaway could feel the city’s haunted, trancelike mood clinging all around him. It seemed to dwell in the sublime symmetry of the Altan buildings, with their almost musical shapes of harmony and order. He couldn’t read these misty streets the way he could his home town’s. The complexity here was not on the surface, but deeply buried in its past of lost greatness, its diminished present, its visionary hopes for the future.

The commercial district by the harbour—what he thought of as the Torna neighbourhood—was far more crowded and lively. The events of the past few days had had a galvanizing effect here. As word had spread, visitors had been pouring into the city, taxing its already strained ability to house them all. The mood of controversy and speculation reminded Nathaway of elections at home. There was the same sense that a historic shift was about to occur. But Nathaway could not share in this mood, either. When he tried to think of all the potential outcomes of the situation, there was not a single one that seemed acceptable to him.

His first two errands were at the tobacconist and tavern—not for himself, but for Harg. When he entered the tavern, there was a political discussion going on at the bar.

“I’ll bet you a bottle the Heir of Gilgen won’t come,” said a burly Torna dressed in sailor’s clothes. “Would you come to the aid of someone who tried to blow you up?”

“The Grey Folk don’t think like us,” a shaggy-haired Adaina man retorted. “The worse we act, the more they love us. As long as we ask for cure, they forgive it all.”

“But what if he doesn’t?” the Torna pressed. “What if he won’t grant dhota-nur?”

“Well then,” the Adaina said reluctantly, “I guess we’ll know that all those victories were really the work of the Mundua and Ashwin.”

And then
, Nathaway thought grimly,
it would probably turn from a coronation into a stoning
. He felt deeply dissatisfied at the barbarity of it.

The bartender had finally spied Nathaway. When she came over, the two men turned to stare, as people often did, and Nathaway was forced to purchase the bottle of rotgut he had come for in a suspicious silence.

When he emerged, Nathaway looked for the Tiarch’s-man who had followed him down the hill from the Pavilion, and saw him waiting across the street. Nathaway couldn’t help wondering what would happen if someone threatened to waylay him—would the agent come to his aid, or take notes and report back to Tiarch? Or join in?

His next stop was at the stationer’s, for paper and pens—and there, to his intense joy, the proprietor produced a letter that had come in for him from Fluminos. As he prepared to open it, he saw that it had been clumsily resealed. Irritated, he glanced at the shopkeeper he had just paid, but the motherly woman was looking perfectly innocent.

The letter included several newspaper clippings that he set aside, eager to read what Rachel had to say.

Dear Nat,

You can imagine the mixed feelings your last letter produced here in Holton Street—joy that you were safe, great concern at the terribly compromised position you are in. There is a wide difference of opinion here as to your situation. Mother was principally dismayed by your immoderate expressions of attachment to the native girl, and implores you to think ahead and use precaution before doing anything you might regret having to explain on your return here. J
[she meant the Judge, their father]
is more concerned about your legal situation. He thinks you may have to face some serious charges, and wishes me to say that defending you would be very difficult in the present mood of the country. Whatever you do, Nat, don’t get any more involved in this conflict. Even if your deepest convictions seem to be challenged, do nothing that could be misconstrued.

He felt a sense of futility at his parents’ advice. The time for precaution with Spaeth was long since gone, and he could scarcely get more deeply involved in the political situation. The fact that his father had actually sent a second-hand message, at some risk, showed that the situation was even more grave than he had imagined. He hoped that the prying eyes who had read the letter were not Inning.

Since you spent so much time flinging accusations at me for the public exposure of your letters, I feel compelled to defend myself. Dearest Nat, you simply don’t understand the power of your own story. You do not realize what a poignant romance it is, pitting patriotism against love, all caught up in the cruel compulsion of a needless war. But I assure you, the public does see it that way—for you should know that your letters were avidly read and widely commented on for their compassion and disinterested appraisal of the situation. People are constantly asking me, in great concern, how you are doing and when your story will resume. The fact that it has taken an even more dramatic turn is all the more reason for it to be a
public
story, and why I would not be doing you any favours to withhold it.

It struck him that her second paragraph had just contradicted her first. She was simultaneously warning him back and egging him on. He shook his head in frustration.

“From a lady, is it?” the woman behind the counter asked him.

“My sister,” Nathaway replied.

“Oh, I see.” She clearly didn’t.

The news from the Forsakens is all anyone is talking about here. The defeat of our Navy at Pont was a severe blow to our pride. You can imagine what the opposition is saying—calling for Corbin’s resignation and the reversal of the Navy reforms, attacking the Court for being too lenient with the natives, demanding a swift retribution. The humourists are portraying our Navy as buffoons hoodwinked into surrendering to a pack of feathered savages in dinghies. The press is quite vicious toward the islanders. I will enclose some clippings. Yours is really the only voice not calling for blood. If it were not for you, we would never dream that there might be some reason behind the revolt, or that the names we hear vilified belong to actual people—another reason I implore you not to stop writing.

He glanced at the clippings she had sent, and was shocked, not just by the tone, but by the sheer inaccuracy. It seemed as if every vile slander they could think of had filled the place of facts. He frowned, sensing why she had sent them. She would know his indignation would compel him to find out the real facts and send them to her.

The rest of her letter was full of questions and lists of things she wanted to know. The only significant news from home was obscurely ominous. Due to some threat Rachel was vague about, the city had decided to install iron gates on all the entrances to the Courthouse Square, to be closed when circumstances demanded it.

They have decided to include Holton Street within the gated zone, since our house lies on it. None of us is happy about it, but the world has become such a strange place it seems preferable to the alternative.

He folded the letter, feeling unsettled.

His last errand, at the optician’s, was one he had been looking forward to impatiently. The pair of replacement glasses he had ordered had finally arrived from Tornabay. It had been months since he had lost the last pair, back in Harbourdown, and he felt like he had been seeing the world through a haze ever since.

The optician, whose main business was actually navigational instruments, was an obsequious Torna impressed at having such an eminent Inning customer. He brought out the wire-rimmed spectacles and fitted them on Nathaway’s face, then held up a mirror so Nathaway could see himself. The glasses looked oddly out of place on his face. His wavy blond hair was so long now that he was wearing it tied back in a ribbon. He had abandoned his Inning clothes, and was dressed all in loose-fitting grey, like a Lashnura. He no longer looked like the sort of person to wear glasses.

He stumbled on the shop steps when leaving, his depth perception thrown off. Everything around him had harsh, clear edges now, a sharpness he found disconcerting. Telling himself that he just needed to get used to it again, he headed back uphill with his packages.

When he reached the Isonsquare, there was a commotion going on, and he came to a halt. Several wagonloads of lumber had been delivered, and a crew of workmen was busy constructing tiered seating to accommodate the crowds expected for the ceremony in two days’ time. In the centre of the square, another crew was working on a raised stage.

The feeling of dissatisfaction returned, redoubled. What earthly purpose could this barbarous public ordeal serve? What did it have to do with leadership? From his own experience, Nathaway guessed that dhota-nur would feel like being mentally dismembered. And he had only gone through an attenuated version of it.

It all seemed so sharply defined when he thought about it that way. But then he reached up and took off the glasses, and the Isonsquare returned to the way he had seen it before—all the edges blurring into one another, a realm of shifting ambiguities. When he looked only at the surfaces his glasses made so clear, the borders between barbarism and civility were easy to discern. But looking at it as the Grey Folk did, as part of a perilous world that could only be balanced through the power of atonement, nothing was simple any more. Suffering not only had a kind of holiness; it could uplift whole nations, and shift them into new paths.

Troubled, he hesitated with the glasses in his hand, undecided whether to put them on again. At last he folded them and put them in his pocket, then crossed the Isonsquare to the Pavilion gate.

The gate still stood open, for there was a steady stream of people who came to see the Isonstone; but the entry was guarded around the clock by a sort of volunteer Adaina militia that seemed to have sprung up for the purpose. As Nathaway passed the man on duty, he nodded and received no response. They had never shown the slightest interest in his comings and goings, nor those of the resident Grey Folk. He concluded they were there only for Harg’s benefit—either to protect him or to prevent him losing his nerve and absconding.

Once inside the cloister Nathaway paused and walked over to the Isonstone. He felt a need to work his thoughts out, so he went over to a secluded bench sheltered from the rain underneath the overhanging roof. There, he opened the package from the stationer’s and took out some paper, pen, and ink.

Dear Rachel,
(he wrote)

Some very dramatic events have taken place in Lashnish over the past week, and I now find myself with a rather painful choice to make. You tell me not to become involved as if it were something within my control; but I am in a position where
not
doing something will drag me in just as deeply as doing it.

He then told the story of Harg’s arrival in town and the events that led up to the claim of dhota-nur, which Nathaway and Spaeth had watched together from a window of the Pavilion. He tried to recapture the drama of the moment as he had seen it, but was dissatisfied with his efforts.

I wish I had the ability to describe to you the electrifying effect Harg’s words and bearing had on the crowd that day. Or the effect he has had since then on the Grey Folk here in the Pavilion, who were poised to be prejudiced against him. The clippings you sent are terribly unfair to him. They portray him as a rough, swaggering brute. Nothing could be more untrue. Physically, he is rather small; but he easily dominates a roomful of larger men, not by being loud or overbearing, but by a kind of focused intensity. He has an uncanny ability to size up people and discern the best qualities in them—a trait that makes him quite magnetic, for who doesn’t want to be appreciated for his or her best abilities? Everyone feels magnified when they are around Harg, able to achieve things inconceivable otherwise. In short, he is a very dangerous person—not from any malice or intent, but simply from his natural genius at moulding people into what they dream of being, rather than what they really are.

The chain of events he set in motion that day by striking the Isonstone is full of peril. You may wonder why, if a man can become leader of the Isles simply by hitting a stone with a hammer, people are not constantly doing it. In fact, it is very rare because of the grave consequences. First, the Heir of Gilgen must arrive to judge the candidate fit for dhota-nur—something everyone here seems perfectly sanguine about, even though they know the Heir to be a prisoner of our Navy somewhere in the South Chain. Presumably he can free himself by some sort of magical means. Only when that hurdle has been passed can the truly important part commence: the dhota-nur, a healing ceremony so arduous it has been known to kill the participants. This will all seem very barbarous to you, but take my word, it is justified by a philosophy that makes perfect internal sense, and only falters when it is viewed from outside, by our standards.

My own role in this came about by accident. While in Tornabay, you will recall that I met the Heir of Gilgen, and he gave me a token called the Emerald Tablet which, it turns out, has a long history and plays an important part in the ceremony of dhota-nur. If Goth arrives here in the next three days (which seems impossible to me), he will doubtless reclaim it and all will be well. But in the far more likely event that he does not come, all eyes will then turn to Spaeth, his daughter and rightful heir. If she takes on the mantle of her ancestors and performs the ceremony, it will be at terrible risk—but more than that, if she succeeds, then she will become the Onan, bandhota to the Ison, his inseparable companion and bride. From that day forward she will live only for him. They will be bound by what the Grey Folk consider the strongest bond that can exist between two people.