Ison of the Isles (18 page)

“Yes, it is,” she said. “It always has been.”

“Well, get unconcerned then,” he said. When he saw her face, he knew he had hurt her, as he hurt everyone around him, everyone who cared. It made him blazingly angry at himself. “Get away from me!” he said. “Go on back to Yora. Go marry some fisherman and have a dozen babies, and get fat and placid. That’s the world you’re meant for. Not this one.”

Her face was white. “All right,” she said. “If that’s the way you feel.”

It wasn’t, but he couldn’t say so.

She turned to the door without another word. It was the last he would see of her, he thought. He had severed himself from the past. He had to go forward now, into a world where no one would forgive him.

He could hear the echo of guns in his brain.

*

When Harg entered Tiarch’s office, he found Captain Dev there, incongruously seated on a spider-legged chair. Tiarch rose at once, but Harg deliberately turned to Dev first, reaching out to grasp his arm firmly in greeting. They hadn’t seen each other since Vill. But instead of the old camaraderie, the look in Dev’s eyes was part awe, part unease, as if Harg had traitorously metamorphosed into a thing of mystery. It made Harg feel like a visitor in his own body.

He turned to Tiarch then, fixing her with a smouldering stare.

She was unintimidated. “Nice of you to join us, Harg,” she said.

“Nice of you to let me in this time,” he retorted. “Have you decided you can risk supporting me now?”

“It seems to me you’ve done just fine without my support,” she said.

“You mean I’ve done what you always wanted.”

“What all the world wanted, Harg.”

An irrational frustration rose up from the volatile place where all his emotions had gone. She acted as if he were still just Harg, and not Ison. Her lack of awe belittled what he had been through. “Well, from now on keep out of my business,” he said.

“I wish I could. Unfortunately, your business is everyone’s business now.”

Dev’s eyes were flicking from one to the other of them, uneasy to hear them quarrelling. In a kindlier tone, Tiarch said, “Sit down, Harg. You’re obviously not recovered yet. Can I offer you some food? Coffee?”

He sank into a chair. He hadn’t come intending to pick a fight with her. His nerves were on a hair trigger. He stared at the floor, appalled at the magnitude of the deception he had undertaken.

As she was pouring him coffee, he looked at Dev and said, “What are you doing here, Dev?”

The captain shifted uneasily. “Vice-Admiral Joffrey sent me with dispatches.”

It seemed an odd way to use one of the two best fighting captains in the fleet. “Why, what’s going on?”

“Start over, Captain Dev,” said Tiarch. “From the beginning.”

The news from the South Chain was appalling. The Inning fleet had left Vill in ruins. They had stripped the countryside, burned the fishing boats. Hundreds of Adaina captives—men, women, and children—had been rounded up into Torna merchant boats and shipped off to be sold as slaves in the Inning dependency of Hrakh. When the Navy set sail for Crent, they had not bothered to leave Vill defended. There had been nothing left worth defending, only crows and hungry dogs.

There were no military objectives on Crent; Talley seemed bent on nothing but destruction. Everything that made the island habitable went up in flames or perished. The animals they slaughtered and left lying in the farmyards; the crops and homes they burned, the towns they sacked. And in the midst of their labours they took time to spread terror. There were brutal tales of torture and rape.

As Dev spoke, Harg could smell the smoke and fear, and feel the lick of flames on skin. He had seen such things before. He had even done them; Talley would know that. He would know the nightmares such deeds left behind. The cruelty was a taunting message. A letter from Inning: for every bullet fired, another innocent person will perish. For every battle, an island. This is justice.

Tiarch said, “The news will spread like wildfire now. The entire South Chain will be in terror.”

“People are already fleeing,” Dev said. “No one knows where the Innings will turn next. There is no safety anywhere.”

It was a good enough strategy, Harg thought coldly, if you had the stomach for it. The Innings had nothing to lose by depopulating the Isles. As the terror spread, resistance would disintegrate. Unless something could be done to protect the South Chain, there would be no local support—nothing but two armies fighting over a wasteland. And the Adaina would already have lost what they were fighting for.

Talley has found our soft underbelly
, Harg thought. He could see himself now, chasing the Inning fleet from island to island, always a day too late to prevent another atrocity. Soon it would begin to seem as if he were causing the carnage, by failing to stop it. Time was on the Innings’ side. Time, rumour, and ruthlessness.

“What’s Joffrey doing?” Harg asked.

“Nothing, yet,” Dev said. He glanced at Tiarch, clearly unwilling to speak his mind. Harg thought he knew now why Dev had been sent back to Lashnish. He had a mutinous air.

“The Innings know where we are,” Dev said. “They aren’t interested in fighting us. All they want is to leave the South Chain in ruins.”

Tiarch was toying with a pen. At last she said, “Corbin Talley is a monster.”

Harg could feel Dev watching him impatiently, full of expectations. Still he said nothing. At last Dev could hold it in no longer. “Harg—Ison—you have to come back and take over. The Navy needs you. The South Chain needs you. You have to stop these butchers, and bring back mora to the land.”

Harg looked at Tiarch. She was watching him with a sad smile that said as clearly as words,
Better you than me
. It occurred to him that this was why she had wanted an Ison: someone to take on all the impossible expectations, so she could concentrate on the possible ones.

A hero could have held up under all the hopes, but he wasn’t a hero. He was just a damaged human being trying to do his best.

At last he said, “Talley’s trying to provoke us. He either wants us to attack recklessly, or to get bogged down defending the South Chain till we run out of support and supplies.”

“Well, we can’t just stand by,” Dev said.

“That’s what he’s counting on us to say. Talley would be pleased to pieces if we threw ourselves at him in a rage.”

Tiarch was watching him carefully. In a neutral voice, she said, “The problem is, we can’t win a protracted war. We haven’t got the resources.”

“We’ve got mora on our side,” Dev said. “We’ve got the balances.”

“The balances don’t pay the bills,” Tiarch said.

Dev rose in disgust. “I don’t have to listen to this Torna talk. There are Torna armies out there raping Adaina women and shipping Adaina kids away into slavery. And you’re talking about the
bills
?”

Harg said sharply, “Stop it, Dev. We can’t turn on each other. We’ve got to stick together, and do what Talley doesn’t expect.”

He looked up and found they were both watching him. “Which is?” Tiarch said.

They expected him to have a solution. Out of all the wreckage in his brain, he was supposed to dredge up a brilliant plan. He had to bluff somehow, or they would discover what a fraud he was. But in the instant he hesitated, he realized he didn’t need to bluff; he knew what they would have to do. It was as if he had always known it, in the back of his mind. It was a plan that would take a cool callousness worthy of Corbin Talley.

“Our problem in the South Chain is that Talley has put us on the defensive,” he said. “We can’t win a defensive war, so we need to turn the tables and seize the initiative again. That means hitting where he’s most vulnerable, where he has to respond.”

“Yes?” said Tiarch. “And where is that?”

“Tornabay,” Harg said.

Both of them were frowning. Harg plunged on, working it out even as he spoke. “Tornabay is his base, his centre of power. All his supplies and support come from there. If we cut him off, he’ll be strangled. He knows that, so he can’t let us do it.”

Tiarch was looking more and more disturbed. “Harg, I don’t think you realize how much of
our
support comes from Tornabay. You think the money for all this is coming from the Outlands? No, we have friends among the city merchants.”

“All the better,” Harg said. “That means we can count on support there.”

“Cities that are attacked are destroyed. Cities that are captured are sacked. We ruin Tornabay, and we ruin our support. By the rock, we ruin the Forsakens, because Tornabay is their heart.”

“That’s why we’ve got to have it.”

Dev broke in. “Pardon me for asking, but what about the South Chain?”

This was the hard part. The part a good man could not have done. Harg steeled himself and said, “We don’t have the forces to defend the South Chain. We’ll have to pull back.”

For a moment Dev was silent, staring at him. “Sacrifice them, you mean. Let them die.”

Harg forced himself to meet Dev’s gaze. “Do you want to try and save them, or do you want to win?”

“You call that winning?” Dev said.

Inwardly Harg flinched, but he took care to look unmoved. “If Talley sees us going for Tornabay, there’s a good chance we can draw him away from the South Chain. Maybe even get him to split his force.”

“And there’s a good chance he’ll just go on burning and flaying Adainas for the sport.”

“We could chase him through the South Chain forever. If we defend one island, he has only to go to the next. We can’t attack his whole fleet; we haven’t got the force. We could win a thousand skirmishes, and still be no closer to victory. But if we take Tornabay, we control the whole Inner Chain. He won’t dare let that happen.” Tiarch was looking thoughtful. “But
can
you take Tornabay?”

“Leave that part to me.”

Dev rose. The air of rebellion emanating from him reminded Harg of himself, once. “It seems to me the Innings have already won in this room.” His eyes bored into Harg. “It’s a good plan, all right. Nice and strategic. Talley would be proud to have thought of it. He’d be proud to know he’s made you into such an Inning, Harg.”

He turned to the door. Despite his anger, his shoulders slumped in defeat. Harg rose to go after him. “Dev,” he said, “come back. We want the same thing.”

“Do we?” Dev turned. It was no longer just anger in his face; it was biting disappointment. “I want to save my home and my people. What do you want?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just left and slammed the door behind him. Harg was at the door, about to jerk it open, when he stopped, one hand on the knob, the other against the frame, unable to go on.

The silence gathered accusingly around him. At last Tiarch said behind him, “It’s a good military plan, Harg.”

Her sentence seemed unfinished, so he finished it for her: “Every other way, it stinks.”

She didn’t answer, so he turned around and said, “That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

“Well, Dev isn’t the only one who is going to feel betrayed. You need to prepare yourself for that.”

Harg thought of Crent, then forced it from his mind. He didn’t dare let himself think of it. There was no time now for revenge or remorse. They were luxuries he couldn’t allow himself. “The only way to beat these Innings is to use their own cunning against them,” he said.

That was it. All he had to do was win. Afterwards, everyone would forget how he had done it.

Yet he wondered if souls grew back once you lost them.

*

When Goth came out on deck, the night was sparkling. He watched the sky like a child, feeling that he stood on a beach at the edge of space. A vast teeming sea surrounded the small island of the world. He wished he could step off into the edge of its waves.

He mounted the companion ladder to the quarterdeck slowly. Everything was more of an effort now. Perhaps it was age, or perhaps it was achra.

The drug’s effects had changed. Instead of unlocking other circles for him, it was now leading him more deeply into this one. Paradoxically, it was teaching him not to see things deeply but to see them
lightly
—to rest his mind like a feather on the world, unsnagged by any source of pain or attachment. He was gaining insight not by escaping, but by staying exactly where he was, by being more intensely
there
than ever before. He had become acutely aware of the processes of his mind and body, of the flow of his senses across the surface of the world. He now found deep pleasure in the simplest things: a candle, the smell of wool, the feel of a thought in his mind, silence.

Corbin Talley was standing, as usual, at the stern rail, straight as a plumb line. He did not turn when Goth came up onto the quarterdeck and sat in the canvas chair habitually placed there for him so he could keep the Admiral company. Goth watched him, outlined against the smudge of white that was the galaxy.

Goth said, “The ancients used to say that the farther you look into space, the younger it becomes. If you could see to the very edge, you would see the birth of all things. The beginning is present at every moment, pushing outward like a tide on the beach of nothing. We live in the midst of a continual creation.”

The Admiral turned to look at him. There were lamps hung on the mizzen spars and by the wheel, and Goth could see his face clearly.

“Have you looked at yourself in a mirror recently?” Talley said.

“No,” Goth answered.

“There are times when the light seems to go right through you; I sometimes think you are turning into smoke.”

“It must be the achra.”

“You are taking more of it than I have ever known a person to survive. It will kill you, you know.”

“Are you warning me away from it?” Goth asked, faintly amused at the irony.

“I wish you would cut down.”

“I cannot. You know that. It’s why you gave it to me.”

Talley gave a quick, displeased frown. “I gave you one dose. The rest has been your own choice.”

The gesture of pain had been extremely subtle, but it set off the old, instinctive reaction. For a moment Goth was blinded by yearning. Tears sprang to his eyes. It had been growing on him lately, this desire to give dhota one last time. Even as he gained control over all the other bonds, this one was conquering him.