Tamaruq (21 page)

A shout from above interrupts them, startling Vikram and the others. It sounds like a warning. El Tiburón turns and barks something back in a language Vikram does not recognize. Then, with no warning, he sprints across the beach, drops to one knee, tosses aside his hat and takes the rifle from his back, aiming the weapon out to sea. Vikram follows the line of sight and can just make out the bobbing light of a small boat.

The pirate fires a number of precise, soundless bolts. That’s not Patagonian technology, Vikram thinks, unsettled. It is too far away to see whether the pirate has hit his mark, but somehow Vikram does not doubt it. He senses the jitteriness of Mig at his side and knows the boy will have questions later about the company they are keeping. He cannot let Mig know he shares the boy’s fears.

‘What was that about?’ he asks the Alaskan quietly. He doesn’t want to ask the obvious question. If they have made a mistake, there is no getting out of it now. The shout from above made it clear the pirate is not alone.

‘A warning, I suspect,’ she answers.

‘To them?’

‘To us.’

‘How many warnings do we need?’

‘A lot of people would like to execute El Tiburón,’ she says. ‘Perhaps even more than would like to get hold of you.’

El Tiburón waits a moment, despatches one more round, and rises, returning his hat to his head. The pirate proceeds to walk calmly back to where they are waiting, strolling along the water line. Vikram can hear the ocean lapping at the beach. The tide is coming in. Within the hour, this cove will be flooded.

‘Who were they?’ Vikram asks.

An expression of surprise crosses the pirate’s face.

‘Should I know? They threatened this meeting.’

‘Did you kill them?’ asks Mig.

The pirate gives him a haughty glance.

‘Certainly.’

Vikram keeps his face carefully neutral.

‘El Tiburón, the Alaskan tells me you are the only captain who can help us. What can we do to persuade you?’

‘I will take you.’

‘You will?’

Vikram looks to the Alaskan, and catches her in the midst of rearranging her face. She’s as surprised as me, he thinks. She was expecting to bargain.

‘I haven’t said where I’m going—’

‘It is not hard to guess. You are correct, I am the only who can take you to Osiris. Any others will fail.’ The pirate extends one gloved hand. Cautiously, Vikram takes it, and they shake briefly as people do in this country in greeting or farewell. El Tiburón tips his hat in a salute that appears ironic, and turns on his heel.

‘How we will know—’

‘I’ll send word. Via the nirvana.’

The two sailors are jolted by that. They stare at the Alaskan, then drop their gaze uncomfortably. The Alaskan laughs hoarsely.

‘Thank you for that, El Tiburón.’

The sailors begin to push the boat towards the tideline, conversing between themselves, clearly disturbed by the revelation, or the pirate, or both. Mig stares after the retreating pirate. His hand is in his pocket, squeezing the length of rope he carries with him everywhere. Blurring into the dusk, Vikram sees the faint outline of El Tiburón scaling the cliff, moving hand over hand like a gecko. He blinks, and the man has vanished.

‘There were bones in the caves.’ Mig’s voice at his side is very quiet. ‘Leg and arm bones, all stacked up together, in rows. I never saw bones like that. I never saw so many.’

‘It’s probably nothing to do with El Tiburón,’ says Vikram.

‘Then why did he want to meet here?’

Vikram doesn’t answer immediately.

‘You have to trust me on this, Mig. It’s our best chance.’

It’s too dark to see Mig’s expression, but his disbelief hangs between them, and the boy heads back to the boat without another word.

Another day. Another island. Shri has lost track of how many they have visited. They all look the same. The dancing trees and the sea and the insects at night and when the insects finally stop the silence, a different calibre of silence to the deaf and blind swaddling of Antarctica, one full of hidden things and things withheld. Then there was a storm, abrupt and terrifying, that almost blew them out to sea, and lost half of their provisions. The physical hardships she could manage, if it weren’t for the children’s absence, eating away at her like a sore that refuses to heal. She can’t connect to them. She can’t see their faces or hear their voices. She can’t protect them from those little shits at school. She’s been cut loose.

Meanwhile, their goal remains frustratingly elusive. Ask an inhabitant of the archipelago and they’ll nod and hum and swear they know and yet reveal nothing. The man who survived redfleur? Oh yes, we know who you mean. He’s on this island. No, that island. No, the one after that, for certain. Go west, five kilometres, say? Maybe six. You’ll find it. There’s a cliff whose face is marked with the shape of the parrot. There’s a tree with its branches burned to a stump. You’ll know it when you see it. You’ll know it for certain.

‘I’m beginning to think they’re all lying to me,’ she says to Ivra. ‘No one wants me to find this man. What if we can’t find him? What if he doesn’t even exist?’

‘It’s not lying,’ Ivra says. ‘It’s the Patagonian way.’

‘I hate the Patagonian way. No one tells you anything. They never answer questions with an answer.’ This doesn’t seem adequate to express her frustrations, so she casts about for something more concrete. ‘They kill
whales
.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw a whale, in the harbour, when I arrived.’ Shri remembers vividly the mammal’s blood leaking into the sea. The water turning to red. ‘It had been slaughtered.’

Ivra’s expression clears.

‘That’s not the case. That whale came in from the ocean. It tried to swim into the archipelago. It was dying.’ Ivra pauses. ‘It was fleeing from something.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Face up to it, your precious Patagonians are whalers.’

‘It was fleeing,’ Ivra insists. ‘It had been attacked. The ocean’s changed, you know. We don’t know what’s out there any more. The whale is an animal of the Nazca, no Patagonian would ever harm one. But have it your way, if you want.’

He turns his back, clearly offended. I’m pushing him away, thinks Shri. But I can’t help it. I can’t stand this place. I have to find the Osirian, and soon.

The message from the daily scout report is unambiguous. Taeo Ybanez’s partner is in Patagonia, and she is looking for the Osirian.

This unexpected development throws the camp into turmoil and presents Vikram with a new quandary. He had anticipated there might be repercussions from the holoma, but not this – not the woman in person. And it appears she is travelling with someone: another Antarctican exile, a man who has been in the country for over a decade, whose loyalties are questionable, to say the least. Shri’s presence, and the openness of her mission, creates a new danger. The longer she is out there, asking questions, making herself visible, the greater the possibility of attracting attention to their camp. She has already veered close to their island.

Vikram gives instructions to leave her looking. They have a departure date from El Tiburón. They don’t have to hold out for much longer. He tries to shut out memories of Taeo, dead on his back, the lingering fumes of opium, the hologram of his partner, frozen. But they refuse to go quietly.

‘Please eat something,’ says Ivra. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You have to eat. I can’t let you get sick.’

‘I’m not hungry, Ivra. Anyway, we should conserve what we have. Please, just leave me in peace.’

She is thinking of Tuesday. That Tuesday, now the only Tuesday which matters. The word they used was accident, not suicide, but accident is easier to say: blameless, requiring no interrogation. How is she to know the truth? The truth is that Taeo changed, and she did not see it. She can only guess at when and how the process began. Was it standing in the room at the Facility, a space with four walls but in every other way the antithesis of home? Was it this whispering, allusive climate that did it? The way the trees communicate at night? Or exile to a place forgotten and insignificant where it is possible to become forgotten and insignificant, or realize that you always were, or at least come to believe it.

Or further back: perhaps in the moment of crossing, the moment over water, caught between two countries. Or the morning of waking, to discover anew what he had done, the morning she stood over him and said
tell me this is a terrible mistake, Taeo, tell me
and even as he opened his eyes, bleary and bloodshot, she knew it was not and that the consequences would be severe and brutal. Or at the point of composing, drunk but in a state of what he claimed was clarity. Or before that. When he put his DNA to the super-ships contract. When they moved into the central, more affluent part of Vosti with credit from a job in Civilian Security. When Kadi was born and they looked at their tiny daughter covered in blood and mucus and felt for the first time the weight of responsibility for a lifetime beyond their own.

She finds her thoughts turning to Cataveiro. When she first arrived in Patagonia the idea had seemed absurd, a lunatic’s cause. Now she can see how one might, suddenly, take flight, embark on the lunatic mission. That this might bring her closer to him.

Ivra is studying her worriedly.

‘At least have some water,’ he presses.

‘They must be following us,’ she says. ‘Civilian Security. Our defenders. They said they’d be right behind me. But I’ve never seen them. Not a glimpse, not even during that storm. We might have died. Perhaps something’s happened. Perhaps they don’t need me any more and they’ve left us out here. Have you thought of that, Ivra? Have you considered that they’ve abandoned us, you and me both?’

‘Oh yes,’ he says absently. ‘I used to believe in the Republic, you know. Then I realized they’d fucked over this country as much as the Boreals. Though the Boreals might still be worse. You know they have treatments, for what people here call the jinn, for the older redfleur strains? Price they put on it, you’ve got to be a tycoon to import that stuff.’

She watches the wave caps ruffling the strait below.

‘You’ve got a thing for the Patagonians, don’t you, Ivra?’

‘I just see things how they are.’

‘You ever think about where you come from?’

‘My home town?’

‘I mean your family. Your ancestry, the old countries.’

‘Not before I came here. Then, maybe. But Brazil’s a desert now. I went once, to the edge. It’s true I felt something there, a call, I can’t explain it. Like I could walk out and keep on walking, like if I gave up my life for the desert it would give back something so… exquisite, it wouldn’t matter that I was dead.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ she says.

‘That’s all right,’ he says. ‘Nor do I.’

‘This country makes you think too much.’

‘It does something.’

‘She’s on the next island,’ says the scout. ‘She’s been there for the past twenty-four hours, on the beach. Just sitting there.’

‘She’s a problem,’ says the Alaskan. ‘You need to deal with her.’

‘You can’t bring her here,’ says Mig furiously.

‘I didn’t say bring her here,’ says the Alaskan. ‘I said deal with her.’

‘So you want to kill her?’ Mig turns to Vikram, his eyes bright with rage and hurt. ‘That’s what she means. It’s what she does!’

The Alaskan rolls her eyes. Mig can see what she’s doing. Bending them, playing them like cards. Don’t listen to
him
, she seems to say.
He’s
only a boy. What does he know?

‘Nobody’s going to kill anyone,’ says Vikram. ‘She’s not to be harmed. That’s an order.’ He sits in thought. ‘If she’s still there tomorrow I’ll go to her. But not on the beach. Get her somewhere out of sight.’

Mig slouches away. This is a ridiculous plan. He goes to sit by his radio hub, an activity which usually calms him, or at least offers a distraction. He fiddles with the dials, trying to find a better signal. There is never a good signal here. He misses the music stations, the samba and the tango and the drums. You can’t get a murmur out of Station Cataveiro. He has spent hours trying to trap a station that might play the recording of Pilar’s last fado, but he’s never heard it, not once, though he knows it’s out there and others have, have spoken of the beautiful voice, a voice of angels, like nothing you’ve heard before. Is this Pilar’s last laugh? Her voice is like a spirit that loiters just behind your shoulder but disappears in the moment you turn, giggling to itself, pleased with the joke.

He hasn’t been long at the hub when he hears the unmistakeable sound of the Alaskan wheeling across the ground towards him. Mig stiffens. He keeps his back turned and concentrates on the radio he is working with.

The Alaskan rolls to a halt.

‘What a neat little setup, Mig,’ she says. ‘Funnily enough, it reminds me of the one we had in Cataveiro.’

Ignore her, he tells himself fiercely. Ignore the freak.

‘And how are you enjoying being the Osirian’s shrimp?’ she continues.

How he hates that voice. He shouldn’t respond, he knows he shouldn’t – but he can’t help himself.

‘I’m not his shrimp.’

‘As you say,’ says the Alaskan. ‘As you say.’

Mig resists the urge to get the rope and throttle her there and then.

‘I’m working,’ he says instead.

‘And I’m sitting.’

‘You can sit somewhere else.’

‘I’m nicely accommodated just here, in this… charming patch of dirt.’

Her eyes glint, the way they do when she is sparring with some unfortunate in her debt. She is enjoying his discomfort.

‘You left me alone in Cataveiro, Mig,’ she says. ‘Left me to die, like a rat in a trap.’

‘You didn’t though, did you?’ he says savagely. ‘You didn’t die.’

He turns his back but there is no point in trying to work the radios with the Alaskan lurking a pace away; equally he does not want to move, to leave the radios in her proximity and concede that she has won, so he sits in seething silence, making a show of listening to the spluttery signal, until he notices someone is watching them. Watching, but pretending not to. It’s one of the sailors who came with them to meet the pirate.