The Silent Isle (28 page)

Dane turned
around and sank down against the parapet.  Bodies, of men and monsters,
lay tangled and twisted on the wall-walk and in the courtyard below. 
Blackthorn, beloved dog of the late Franklin Moore, was struggling to
rise.  As Dane watched, he laid down his head and moved no more. 
Dane glanced at the body that lay beside him on the battlement, Aaron’s
body.  Crawling over to it, he rolled Aaron onto his back.  This
action caused him to realize how hurt he was.  His whole body felt a mass
of cuts and rising bruises.  His forearm was torn and bleeding but
strangely numb and he could hardly grip with that hand.  Even so, Aaron
looked a lot worse.  Dane would have hardly recognized him if the man had
not been fighting beside him a few minutes earlier.  He wondered if Aaron
had suffered or if it had been quick.  At any rate, it was over for him
now. 

Dane rose to his
feet.  He was too stiff to take the ladder so he headed for the stairs.
 This brought him to the place where Tipper had been fighting.  What
Dane saw first was a pile of dead
shriken
, at least half a dozen, and
Tipper’s dog,
Dioji.
  Dioji still gripped the
throat of the last
shriken
in his teeth.  He growled as he watched
Dane approach.  Dane knelt before the dog and held his hand out over the
dog’s head.  The growl stayed in Dioji’s throat but did not rise. 
Dane lowered his hand and rubbed and scratched the dog between his ears. 
“I know, boy,” he said.  “I know.”

While one hand
massaged Dioji’s head, Dane reached over Dioji with the other and shifted a
shriken
off of Tipper’s body.  Tipper lay on his back with his knees bent. 
His leggings and his leather jerkin were torn and bloodied but his face was
unmarred.  Dane brushed Tipper’s hair out of his face.  He looked younger
in death than he had in life.

Dane patted
Dioji’s head and rose and stumbled on down the battlement.  He saw Bailus
standing, his hands resting on the head of his hammer like a cane, and Leech
kneeling beside Will.  Will’s leg was wrapped in so many bandages it
looked like a beehive.  His face was pale but he was sitting up and his
eyes were clear.  Dane and Leech helped him to his feet and guided him
down the stairs.

They made for
the infirmary.  Owen was sitting outside, leaning against the door jamb.
 

“I’m sorry,
sir.  I tried to hang on to that bow but he got the better of me.”

“He got the best
of all of us,” Dane said.  “If anyone should apologize, it’s me.”

Dane pulled Owen
to his feet and helped him through the door. 

“Where’s Molly?”
Will asked from behind them.

“She ran out
after the boy,” Owen said.  “I’d almost forgotten about that.”

Will pulled away
from Leech and hobbled out the door.  “Molly,” he shouted. 
“Molly.” 

Dane came out
and steadied him. 

“They went left
I think,” Owen called. 

Both men turned
and saw a door standing open two rooms down.  The door leaned inward at a
crazy angle.  It had been wrenched halfway off its hinges. 

“No,” Will
said
, and staggered towards it. 

As he neared the
open door, a dazed-looking Lane stumbled through it into the courtyard. 

“Molly?” Will
demanded. 

Lane was holding
his good hand to a bloody tangle of skin and hair on the side of his face but
he nodded towards the door silently. 

Will bounded
inside with Dane right behind him.  They almost tripped over the body in
the doorway.  The
shriken
lay on its back with its head twisted to
one side.  Something lighter and thicker than blood was slipping from the
cracks in its lopsided skull.  A wooden rolling-pin lay in the dark puddle
of fluids leaking from the creature. 

Molly huddled in
the far corner of the room.  The boy, crying softly, was buried between
her arms.  When she heard her husband saying her name, she spoke to the
child and stood up with her arms still around him.  Her hair was disarrayed
and her face and hands were covered in cuts and scrapes.  Her apron was
torn and bloodied like a battle-worn banner. 

“Oh, Will,” she
said as they embraced. 

Will didn’t say
anything, he just stood there holding her and blinking hard.

Rawl, Paul, Josie,
and Mirela were crossing the courtyard when Dane left the room.  They
walked into the infirmary together to find Owen standing over Elias’s
bed.  Owen was saying something but no one caught what it was because
their attention was fixed on Elias.  The priest was sitting up in bed and
his eyes were open.  He smiled at them as they entered.  They rushed
to his bedside and all began asking him questions at once. 

“Give him some
space,” Leech said. 

“When did you
wake up?” Paul asked.

“I woke up to
the sound of screams,” Elias said.  “It worried me, hearing those screams
and seeing the room deserted, but somehow I wasn’t afraid, not really.”

“How did you
wake up?” Rawl asked.

“The screams, of
course,” Paul said.

Elias shook his
head.  “I heard screaming in my slumber, but that is not what roused
me.  I woke when
She
left.”

“When who left?”
Josie asked.

Elias smiled
weakly.  “I think that is a story better left for another time. 
Perhaps when I am stronger.
  Perhaps when I understand
it
better
myself.”

Leech ordered
some food and water brought for Elias.  Then he set his attention on the
myriad wounds his friends bore.  He started with Will’s leg, which was the
most serious.  He removed the bandages he had slapped on as he had knelt
above Will on the wall while the battle raged about them.  Mirela, Josie,
and Molly volunteered to help him.  Molly washed the wound while the
younger women followed Leech’s instructions to lay out materials for sutures.

Dane led the men
who did not need Leech’s immediate attention outside to begin the miserable
work of dealing with those past helping.  They spotted two figures laying
in a lovers’ pose at the base of the wall.  One was a
shriken
, the
other was Pratt.  The handle of Pratt’s knife protruded from the ribs of
the creature. 

“He must have
stabbed it as they fell,” Rawl said.  “You think about that, he used his
last split second to kill his enemy instead of breaking his fall.”

Rawl and Paul
pulled the
shriken
off of Pratt.  One of Pratt’s arms was twisted
underneath him at an angle that made Rawl’s head spin.  His brother took
Pratt’s ankles and he, when he had pushed down the nausea, took Pratt’s
shoulders.  As they began to lift, Pratt groaned. 

“He’s alive,”
Rawl said, forgetting himself in his surprise and joy and setting Pratt down
too roughly on his broken arm. 

Pratt
shouted.  His eyes were open now.  “
You trying
to kill me?”

“Sorry,” Rawl
said.  “You just surprised us.”

“Are you
comfortable there?” Dane asked.

Pratt nodded
towards his arm, which was still twisted under his body.  “What does it
look like?”

“Rawl go tell
Leech he’s here,” Dane said.  He turned back to Pratt.  “If we move
you, it might make it worse. 
Better that you sit tight
and wait for Leech.”

“Great,” Pratt
said.  “In the meantime, you guys wouldn’t have a swig of something
strong, would you?”

Bailus pulled a
flask from inside his jerkin, uncapped it, and pressed it into Pratt’s good
hand.  “Keep it,” he said.

They covered
Pratt with a cloak, as the sun had passed now behind the hills.  Then they
retrieved the bodies of their fallen friends with litters and laid them in the
center of the courtyard.

Ira Scott, who’d
thought the shock-sight of his
mohawk
better defense
than any helmet, was dead.  Lars Naylor and Flint Childers, two men who
had circled the island with Kit Forsythe, were dead.

When Leech
finished stitching
Will’s
leg, he set Pratt’s arm,
splinted it and placed it in a sling.  Then, postponing more proper
treatment of lesser wounds, they bore their friends to the meadow. 
Everyone had at least minor wounds, but all of them who could
helped
to dig the graves.  It is very tiring work
digging graves for your friends, but they worked at it, taking turns, until all
the graves were dug.  Dioji lay beside Tipper the whole time and growled
when Rawl and Paul lifted his litter and lowered it into the earth.  As
soon as the grave was filled in, Dioji came and lay on the fresh-turned earth
and whined.  Elias gave the eulogies.  Dane felt relieved to be able
to stay silent.  Elias spoke about their sacrifice to hold the darkness at
bay and how they had gone now where the darkness would never touch them. 
As their little group filed back to the fort, Rawl knelt and tried to pull
Dioji away from the grave.

“Come on, boy,”
he said.  “We can come back tomorrow.”

Josie stood
behind him, looking on.  “Let him be,” she said after several attempts
from Rawl to pull the dog away.

“I guess you’re
right.  He’ll come home when he’s ready.”

“I think he
thinks he is home,” Josie said.

Rawl took her
hand as they walked back to the settlement.  “By the way,” he said,
“Thanks for this morning.”

“You already
thanked me for saving your life.”

“Not my
life. 
Crane’s life.
  I don’t know what I
was thinking.  But I think you saved me in more ways than one today.”

She kissed him
lightly on the cheek as they passed through the gate.

Later that
night, Rawl and Josie stood on the wall overlooking the meadow.  They
watched Dioji’s prostrate form until the mist rolled in and it was too dark to
see.  In the morning, the dog was gone.

After burying
their comrades, Dane and his people faced an almost equally disagreeable
task:  disposing of the
shriken
corpses.  The bodies, though
taller than men’s, were surprisingly light and the men dragged them by their
ankles and piled them on the edge of the meadow opposite the graves.  Dane
suppressed a shudder each time he grasped the scaly, stalk-like legs. 
They decided to burn the bodies but would have to wait till morning to gather
wood and build the bonfire.  Dane ordered his men, many of whom were
walking wounded, back to the infirmary. 

Paul’s two front
teeth had been knocked out.  Bailus had lost a pinkie.  Dane wondered
how he had not noticed these things earlier.

“Did you manage to
save the teeth?” Leech asked as he inspected Paul’s mouth.

“Um, no, sir,”
Paul said, looking rather embarrassed.  “I think I may have swallowed
them.”

“I can go out
and pull you a few of Rundal’s,” Rawl said.

“Rawl!”
Josie said.

“I’m in over my
head here,” Leech said.  “But I’m sure we can fix you up back on the
mainland.”

“Speaking of the
mainland,” Pratt said, indicating his arm.  “Wouldn’t you say this is a
ticket home?”

“Find me a ship
and a captain,” Dane said, “And I’ll write you that ticket.”

“Maybe I’ll just
try swimming,” Pratt said.

Dane left the
infirmary and went to his room, but not before stopping by the kitchen for a
bottle of whisky.  In his room, he struggled out of his buff coat and
poured the alcohol over the cuts on his arm.  He gritted his teeth against
the burning.  The flail that had struck his arm had held tiny, barbed
blades which had pocked his forearm with jagged punctures.  He threw back
the blanket from his bed and pulled up the sheet.  Holding the hem in his
teeth, he made little tears in it.  Then, pinning the edge of the sheet to
the floor with his knee, he ripped off strips from the incisions he had
made.  It was wrapping the bandage that gave him trouble.  He
couldn’t find a way to hold the end of the cloth against his bad arm so he
could make a tight wrap.  He tried several times and only got increasingly
frustrated until a pair of hands gently took the bandage from him. 

“It wouldn’t
kill you to ask for help once in your life, you know,” she said.  “It
might even do you some good.”

“There was a
long line,” he said as Mirela began to wrap his arm.  He marveled he had
not heard her come in.

“What’s your
plan for tomorrow? 
More of the same?”

“Do I have a
choice?” he said.

“Choice,” she
said, absently.  “Funny you should mention it.  I don’t think these
creatures have a choice to attack us or not.  We’re free to choose. 
Free in a way they’ll never understand.  I think something deep inside
them that they can’t overwrite drives them on.”

“So let them
come,” Dane said.  “We kill more of them than they kill of us.  And
every time we fight we kill more of them than the time before.”

“Dane,” she
said.  “This is not a war you can win.  They will build a ramp right
over the walls with their own corpses if they have to.  They will smother
us with their dead.”

“So, what do you
want me to do? 
Surrender?”

“No, I want you
to find a different way to fight.”

“I’m open to
suggestions.”

“It was given to
you to lead these people; you must find your own way.”

“You seem to
know a lot about them, and Paul thinks they’re afraid of you.  I want to
know what you know.”

“It’s not what I
know that matters,” she said.  “It’s
Who
I know.”

“Then let’s talk
about it.”

“It would be
better shared with all the others at once, I think.”

He
laughed.  “Were you born this way or do you do it just to tease me?”

“I could never
tease you,” she said.  “You take everything too seriously.”  A smile
flashed across her face.

He caught her
chin and tipped it up.  “Smile again,” he said.