Ison of the Isles (6 page)

“Sounds like a toast to me,” Barko said.

And so Harg called out for quiet and proposed the toast, “All of us together.”

Everyone raised their glasses and repeated, “All of us together!”

Later, he and Barko went out to smoke a pipe on the porch of the inn. A rain squall had passed while they had been inside, and now a reckless wind was rocking the harbour boats, making their masts swing like pendulums. The square was empty.

“So what’s this news about Dorn?” Harg said. “Has he done something I don’t know about?”

Barko took a long, thoughtful pull on his clay pipe before answering. “It’s not so much what he’s done as what he’s saying, and how it’s changing people’s opinions.”

“What’s he saying?”

“You can probably guess. He’s calling us all collaborators. He was questioning our motives even before the news arrived that you had joined Tiarch.”

“I didn’t join Tiarch!” Harg said sharply. “She joined me.”

“Either way. Dorn says he’s the only true Adaina leader, the only one who never served the Innings, never truckled with the Torna. He says he was fighting back while you were sucking your thumb, and now he’s still fighting back while you’re sucking up.”

“Asshole,” Harg said darkly.

“It makes sense to a lot of people.”

It made sense because there was a kernel of truth in it. It also spoke to the deep resentments built up through the years of Torna power and Adaina subjection. It appealed to the base parts of people’s natures.

“Look, I respect Dorn for what he did in past,” Harg said. “But it got him nowhere. His real problem is that there’s a new leadership with better ideas, who want to do what it takes to win.”

Barko shrugged. “All the same, I wouldn’t go into the Adaina section of town alone at night, if I were you.”

This shook Harg to the bone. “Really? Is it that bad?”

“There are people who have been whipping themselves up into a frenzy over this. It’s like you opened the lid, and everything’s exploding out. With Dorn questioning your motives, it could get really nasty.”

Uppermost in Harg’s mind was a feeling of betrayal. He had just fooled himself into believing he was loved, and now, like every other time in his life, he found it wasn’t true.

Right under that was exasperation at the short-sightedness of it. People cared more about airing their grievances than about solving them. “Damn it,” he said. “Why can’t they just leave me alone and let me win for them?”

There was a long silence. When Harg finally looked over, Barko was watching him appraisingly. “We do have a system for dealing with this,” he said. “A system that would wipe out all doubt about your motives.”

He was talking about dhota-nur. Harg looked away, his jaw set.

Barko went on, “It’s making people pretty nervous that Tiarch is in Lashnish with the Isonstone, and you’re here.”

“Tiarch can have the damned Isonstone, and welcome to it,” Harg said.

“You’re in the minority on that.”

“Well, my vote is the only one that matters.”

Barko was shaking his head. “I don’t get it, Harg. You’re already doing all the work an Ison would do. Why not have the legitimacy?”

Harg had never talked to anyone about this, not even Tway. For a while he stared out into the harbour, at the magnificent fleet assembled there. Reluctantly, he said, “Do you know what dhota-nur is?”

“It’s getting rid of all the bad memories, all the mistakes, all the crap that collects in your life and controls you,” Barko said. “Why would you not want that?”

In a low voice Harg said, “Take away all the bad memories from my life, and there wouldn’t be anything left of me. That’s all I am—just a collection of mistakes and rotten motives. If a dhotamar made me into a good person, I wouldn’t be myself any more.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, Harg,” Barko said.

“I’m not apologizing. If I didn’t have any regrets or grudges, I don’t know if I’d want to get up in the morning, much less do what it takes to be Ison. We don’t need a good man to lead us, Barko. We need someone mean and cunning. Dhota-nur wouldn’t make me a better commander. It’s too much like . . . mental castration.”

“Oh.” For a moment, Barko was shocked into silence by this image. “Well.”

They stood awkwardly, not looking at each other. At last Barko said, “Ison Orin went through dhota-nur, and it didn’t neutralize him.”

“He
lost
, Barko,” Harg said.

“So you’re saying all these centuries the Grey Folk have been wrong about what makes a good leader?”

“Don’t ask me what the Grey Folk think.”

Barko eyed him sideways. “Would it be different if the Heir of Gilgen weren’t your kmora-father?”

Harg felt something inside him tense at mention of Goth. Since failing to rescue him, Harg had felt an overlay of guilt on top of all the other feelings. It felt, irrationally, as if he hadn’t tried hard enough. As if, on some level, he hadn’t really wanted Goth to be free. “What-ifs don’t matter,” he said.

Barko fell silent. As they stood there, Harg’s thoughts strayed back to his childhood—a time when random, unpredictable things had constantly happened to him, and everyone in his life had proved unreliable, Goth most of all. By age twelve he had known that the only person he could ever really trust was himself. To lose any control over himself was like letting go of a life preserver in a cold ocean. It was, simply, a matter of survival.

The door behind them banged open and Katri sauntered out. “What are you two doing out here?” she said. “Everyone was asking where you were.”

Shaking off his mood, Harg turned to go back inside. “Come on, Barko,” he said, “there’s still beer left.”

*

When the warship
Smoke
cleared the headlands of Ekra, there was nothing but the north wind and the steely waves of the Widewater ahead. Unprotected now by the island’s forested hills, she heeled over and surged ahead, the water boiling under her bow. The clouds seemed almost low enough to snag and tear on her masthead.

Harg braced himself against the
Smoke
’s quarterdeck rail, glorying in the sudden pitch of the deck under his feet. It felt good to get the details blown out of his brain, to be actually
doing
something. A stinging spate of wind-blown spray struck his face, and he grinned. The ship had too much sail on for safety, but he loved the sensation of the straining oak muscles beneath his feet.

Ahead and behind sailed the long, staggered line of his fleet. The ships ahead were already taking in sail; the ones behind were still in the lee of Ekra. It was a grand sight, all of them together. Seven tall warships: it was a fleet to go to a man’s head and make him cocky, if he was so inclined.

Captain Jearl approached across the quarterdeck, and Harg forced his face back into a proper military impassiveness. The ship’s crew was mounting the ratlines to reef the sails. Each seemed to know his or her job; their movements were smoothly synchronized. Harg was about to praise their training when he saw the captain frowning critically at some imprecision, invisible to him, and he decided to stay quiet.

Smoke
’s first lieutenant, Jonci Garlow, joined them on the quarterdeck. She was the most radical of the innovations Harg had thrust upon the unwilling Torna officers in the past two weeks. It had caused one of his few outright arguments with Jearl. He had finally persuaded the captain that they needed to train up some Adaina officers by having them serve under men of superior knowledge of Navy discipline and procedures. Jonci had seemed like a good choice for the experiment. She had spent a lifetime commanding ships, mostly merchant vessels out of Harbourdown, where merchantmen often had to fight to keep their cargoes. Her cool competence had impressed Harg, and so far she had taken her fastidious captain’s directions with tact. Harg badly wanted her to succeed.

She squinted off toward the northern horizon, where a dark streak of squall was heading toward them. She wore her dark, grey-shot hair pulled back and tied in a scarf, but it always looked windblown anyway. “Weather’s not with us,” she said. “The Mundua are hunting.”

“They can’t swallow ships this big,” Harg said. “We’d get stuck in their throats.”

The frown on her sharp face told him she wasn’t convinced. Reaching inside her uniform coat, she brought out a packet of dreamweed. She walked across to the lee rail and stood there, the wind whipping her hair about, while she cast a handful of weed onto the waves. Harg realized the crew on deck was watching her—the Adaina with anxious approval, the Torna with amused contempt. He clenched his teeth, knowing she had just lost face with half the crew; yet if he stopped her, he would lose the trust of the other half.

Jearl was standing erect at his side, looking straight ahead.

Down in the ship’s waist, a grizzled brown seaman took out a dreamweed packet of his own and walked to the gunwale. Harg could see half a dozen others ready to do the same. “Get back to your post!” the Torna boatswain snapped at the sailor. The man stopped, glowering. Then he looked up at Harg, as if waiting for him to intervene. Harg stared back, rocklike. “Do you want a whipping?” the boatswain shouted. “Get back!”

At last the sailor glanced skyward, pocketed his weed, and turned back, muttering.

“You can see the problem,” Jearl said, his eyes still on the horizon ahead.

“We all have to bend a bit,” Harg answered.

Except for the
Smoke
, the ships from Tiarch’s fleet were still commanded by the Torna officers who had come with them, while the ones from Harbourdown were Adaina-led. Originally, Harg had wanted to mix the officers on all the ships, but in the end he had given in to the vehement objections of both parties. The Tornas had argued that it would subvert their discipline, the Adainas that it would undermine their authority. Neither side wanted to take orders from the other. In the end Harg had decided to wait until the divisions were smoothed over by action.

The ship’s bow plunged, and spray leaped over the forecastle. Some of the sailors whooped as the chill water soaked them. They were good seamen, the Adaina; unused as they were to the big ships, they had taken to the techniques instantly. The discipline was another thing. Yet they had to learn it.

The last of the line of ships had cleared Killy Head. Now the fleet was truly on open sea. Ahead, the lead ship was flying signal flags. Harg squinted at them, but waited for the signal lieutenant, spyglass under one arm, to come up and report. The young Torna officer saluted the air somewhere between himself and Jearl. “
Wavedancer
reports sighting the target off the larboard bow, sir.”

“Wear round in formation,” Harg said. The lieutenant saluted and left to give the signal.

As soon as the signal was up, they saw the
Wavedancer
shift course to a southwesterly heading. The second ship waited till it reached the spot where
Wavedancer
had changed course, then followed like a soldier on parade. But the third came about too soon, ruining the clean orderliness of the line.

“Lieutenant!” Harg said. “Signal the
Spinneret
to get back in line.”

Spinneret
was Dev’s ship—one of Barko’s pirate recruits. He had seemed a resourceful captain, ready to take a risk. But not, apparently, a stickler for proper procedures.

Harg glanced surreptitiously at Jearl’s erect figure. He had started out impressed by the man’s knowledge, but now he realized it was almost all book-learned, from old training manuals that still reflected the days when the Innings had used their ships as if they were moveable forts that could be moored alongside targets and used to batter them to bits. The Northern Squadron had seldom attacked anything on the move. Instead, they depended on their mere presence to scare off adversaries. For a peacekeeping force, it had worked. For a fighting one, Harg knew it wouldn’t. Not against the Southern Squadron, at any rate.

It was the
Smoke
’s turn to come about. Jonci gave the orders in a crisp, calm voice, and the crew brought the ship about with a quick precision. The sails filled again on their new course, riding with the waves. The yawing of the deck was much less giddy now. “Make ready to attack,” Jearl said.

“Gun crews on deck!” Jonci called out. As the order was relayed below, a stream of young men and women poured out onto deck, one knot of them whooping and tussling with each other in high spirits. The gunnery master bellowed at them, and they assembled, ten to a gun, and set about releasing the trucks, attaching tackle lines, and making ready to load.

Harg watched with interest, for guns were something he knew intimately. The ones aboard the
Smoke
were impressively modern for such a backwater as the Forsakens: seven feet of solid cast iron barrel, they were mounted on rolling trucks so they could recoil inboard, with tackles secured to the carriage to run the guns in for loading and out again to fire.

Now he could see the target ahead—a raft of old barrels with a mast, which they had towed out earlier and set to drift with a sea anchor. It bobbed and wallowed in the waves. “Ports up!” Jonci ordered, and all through the ship there was a deep rattle as the gunports lifted. Jearl scowled, and Harg knew it was because the ports hadn’t gone up precisely at the same second.

“There’s too much sea to use the lowest guns,” Jearl said crossly, glancing over his shoulder at the approaching squall.

“The Innings won’t let us choose good weather,” Harg said.

The first boat was almost upon the target. “Lieutenant! Signal to fire at will,” Harg said.

The signal flag was no sooner up the mast than they saw a puff of smoke erupt from the
Wavedancer
’s side. A few seconds later a ragged report reached them. There seemed to be no effect on the target.

Wavedancer
sailed on. One by one, as the ships came even with the target, they took their turn firing on it. Harg watched carefully for each puff of smoke and its timing.

Smoke
’s gunner went down the larboard battery, checking the priming on each gun. Jonci ordered, “Run the guns out!” The crews heaved at their tackles till the black snouts of their weapons protruded from the side of the ship.