Ison of the Isles (33 page)

Death shouldn’t come like this, he thought, to someone who hadn’t finished with life. It should come after he had grown weary, when the ripples of his death would not spread far. When he had seen all he wanted of the world, all the sights and mysteries he would never know now.

He was dozing when they came to get him. The soldiers led him down a smoke-stained tunnel to a room that held only a large plank table with a lamp hanging over it, and left him there alone. He waited, noticing all the details—the worn spots on the table legs where it looked like straps had been attached, the stains on its well-scrubbed surface, the iron hooks high on the walls. There was a murmur of voices in the adjoining room, barely audible, then the clink of metal. Soon he heard the voices raised in argument, and crept over to listen at the door; but the low murmur had resumed. After half an hour there was silence; then the guard came and led him back to his cell.

The second time they came for him, it was the dead of night. A tense young Torna colonel gave him a heavy cloak to put on, then tied a blindfold over his eyes and pulled the hood over his head. They led him down steps, across what seemed like an open courtyard, past a place that smelled of garbage, then into another building. They left him in a wood-panelled room with a carpet, a table, and a couch. He waited, expecting someone else to appear, but no one did. At last he lay down on the couch, not particularly caring whose it was. When he woke up with sunlight filtering through the louvres in the shutters, it occurred to him that perhaps it was his.

Twice in one day, he heard loud arguments in the hall outside, and the guards apparently refusing someone entrance to his room. That evening, after bringing in his food, the guard suddenly came back in and snatched the tray away again before Harg could touch it.

Was someone trying to poison him? With nothing else to think of, the idea became an obsession; yet it made no sense. Why should the Innings want to kill him in such a private way, when every other method was at their disposal? The chilling notion struck him, that perhaps it was his friends trying to kill him kindly, in order to spare him a worse death. Had he already been condemned without trial? Would the guards show up some morning to take him to execution without warning?

It was evening when the guards showed up. He had scarcely slept the night before, full of premonitions. This time they led him openly into another wing of the palace, into yet another room, this one a stone-walled bedroom with a jute rug on the floor, a table, and a cold fireplace. When he stood by the door he could hear the distant sound of music.

A few minutes later the guard unbolted the door and a man bustled in, carrying a lamp and a sheaf of papers. He said, “We haven’t got much time. Take a seat, my boy, and we’ll get to business.”

Wild theories flashed through Harg’s brain. The visitor was a round man with a blank, domed skull protruding from a fringe of curly hair. “Are you an Inning?” Harg asked suspiciously.

“Inning and in practice, as the saying goes.” He held out a hand. “Wabin Bartelso, Advocate. I’m your legal advisor.”

Harg crossed his arms and stepped back. The man was obviously a clown sent to suit the letter of the Inning law, so it would appear as if they had treated him fairly.

The lawyer took in Harg’s hostile stance, then lowered his hand. “Ah. I see there’s going to have to be a leap of faith here. Unfortunately, the first thing I need you to sign is a paper appointing me your counsel so I can represent you at the trial.”

“What trial?” Harg said.

“You don’t know? You are probably the only one in Tornabay, then. There has been quite the controversy over it.” He brought out a sheet, densely written with large calligraphy at the top, and laid it on the wood table. He then took a pen from the frizz of hair behind his ear, and an inkpot from one of many pockets in his voluminous overcoat. “Right there, if you please,” he said, indicating a place for Harg to sign.

Harg didn’t move. “How do I know what it says?”

Bartelso took out a pocket watch and glanced at it. In a voice of strained patience he said, “Unfortunately, the Admiral has only allowed me half an hour with you, and we’ve got a lot to cover. But do read it, if you must.”

Harg wasn’t sure whether the man meant to mock him or was merely an idiot who thought Adaina fishermen learned to read legal documents, so he just stared at him in silence.

After a few beats Bartelso said, “Ah. Not yet, eh? Well, we can take care of that later, then.” He whisked the document away and sat down at the table, putting on a pair of reading glasses and arranging his papers before him. “Have a seat, my boy. You make me nervous, standing there with murder in your eyes.”

“I’m not your boy,” Harg said.

Bartelso, who had up to now been in a constant flurry of motion, suddenly came to a stop. He took off his glasses, studying Harg seriously. “No, of course not,” he said. “An unfortunate figure of speech. I do beg your pardon.”

It was so startling to have an Inning apologize to him that Harg sank down on the edge of a chair. Outside the door, the music had grown louder. It was a waltz.

“Who sent you?” he said.

“A friend of yours. Nathaway Talley.”

Harg was not the slightest bit sure that Nathaway really was his friend.

“What are they charging me with?” he said.

“Only two things,” Bartelso answered. “Unfortunately, they’re assassination and treason. Either way, the penalty is death.”

It was no more than Harg had expected. He was silent.

“Now here’s the important part,” the lawyer said. “Because of the political situation, the Admiral needs to try you in public, as a civilian. It’s a demonstration of impartial Inning justice, you see.”

“You mean it will be fair?” Harg said sceptically.

“Goodness, no. It’s just better than a military trial would be. But what he has in mind is to try you on the block. Trust me, you don’t want that.”

“Why not?”

“What they would do is chain you down to a block of wood throughout the trial. You couldn’t see the judges, or the witnesses, or face the court. It’s meant to intimidate and humiliate, and it’s very effective.”

It sounded like something Talley would want for him. Harg’s stomach ached with tension.

“Don’t worry, I can get you out of it,” Bartelso said. “The block is only intended for cases where the defendant’s own testimony is likely to incriminate him. By robbing a person of dignity, you can rob him of caution and guile as well. What I will do is declare that you are going to renounce your right to testify in your own behalf.”

Harg stared at him, wondering whether this was a ruse to gag him.

“Now, listen,” Bartelso said, leaning close. “When you enter the court, you must not utter a word. There’s a legal reason it’s too complicated to explain right now. Believe me, though, you have to leave the talking to me, even when they ask you directly to reply.”

“I can’t justify myself?” Harg said.

“Holy blazes! That’s the last thing you should try to do.”

He had thought at least he would be able to put forward his arguments, his reasons. Without that, his execution would be senseless. “If I say a word, they’ll put me on the block?” he said.

“Not exactly,” Bartelso said. “You can avoid the block as long as you don’t testify. No, it’s a jurisdictional argument I’m going to make. If you utter a word, you acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction over you.”

It sounded ridiculously arcane. All Harg wanted to know was the basics. “They’re going to execute me anyway,” he said, looking at the Inning to see if he would be honest.

Bartelso’s eyes held a glint of sympathy. “I wouldn’t say you had a good chance. I’m professionally obligated to say you have a chance. But you’re in a heap of trouble, son.”

Hesitantly, Harg said, “Is there any way you could get them to hang me, instead of . . .”

Bartelso interrupted hastily. He looked embarrassed. “That’s another step. Don’t worry about that yet. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I can delay things.”

Harg wasn’t sure that was what he wanted. He never got to say so, for the guard opened the door and gestured Bartelso to leave.

“It hasn’t been half an hour!” the lawyer protested, snatching out his watch.

“That’s all you get,” the guard said implacably.

Bartelso shoved the contract at Harg again. “Sign it,” he said. “Don’t worry about the bills; the Talleys will pay.”

Harg might have reached for the pen, but with that statement he pulled back, reminded that he had no idea who to trust, and no idea what the paper said.

“Come along, sir,” the guard said.

“I’ll leave it with you,” Bartelso said. “Bring it to the courthouse.” He tucked his other papers under his arm and held out his hand. “Good to meet you, sir.”

Harg stared at him motionless, so uncertain what to think that he could not act, till Bartelso threw up his hands up in a helpless shrug and left.

Even though Bartelso had told her to expect it, Spaeth was not prepared for Corbin’s reaction when the marriage notice was finally published.

She sensed something when she heard swift, booted footsteps approaching down the hall, and the guard’s salute. He entered her chamber not through the private door, but from the hallway. It was late in the evening; he had left for a banquet hours ago, and now he was dressed in full uniform. With a coldly controlled motion, he threw down a printed sheet on the table before her. “Explain this, if you please,” he said.

She looked at the broadside. “What is it?”

“It is a wedding announcement.”

Spaeth didn’t know what he wanted her to say. He was pale as ice.

“For the past three hours I have been fending off questions about it,” he said.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“You might start with whether is it true. No, don’t bother. I sent someone to check, and it has been registered.”

“Then you know all I do.”

“I don’t know why you did it. I don’t know what I have done to make you betray me.”

Astonished at this reaction, she searched his face. He was being perfectly honest; the uppermost thing in his mind was betrayal. It was the thing in life he feared and despised above all, and it had happened to him over and over again, from childhood on. “I didn’t betray you,” she said seriously. “It had nothing to do with you. It was a private thing between me and Nat. He wanted it; I didn’t see any harm.”

He was speechless for a moment, then said acidly, “You can’t play the naive native with me. I know you, remember. At least, I thought I did. I thought—” He stopped, looking away from her, unable now to say what he had thought.

Spaeth rose and tried to take his hand. He stepped back. “It doesn’t matter!” she pleaded urgently. “It has nothing to do with you and me. We’re bandhotai, or could be. There’s nothing more important than that.”

“You’re joking,” he said.

“I’ll marry you, too, if you want,” she said desperately.

He stared at her for a few moments, rage and infatuation warring in his eyes. Then he turned and went to the hall door. When he opened it, the soldier just outside came to attention. “Take this woman down and put her in a cell with the rest of the prisoners,” he said.

“Yes sir!” said the guard.

Corbin turned back to Spaeth. “You have elected to be my enemy. Very well, you will be treated that way.”

*

Bartelso’s visit had left Harg in a state of terrible unease. He felt as if his life were being used as a shuttlecock in a game where he didn’t know the rules, or even the point. Yet none of the other players was going to be dead at the end.

On the night before the trial, they transferred him back down to the dank row of cells in the basement where he had started out. As before, they left him without a light, so as evening came there was absolutely nothing to do but sleep, and that he could not do. He lay down, thinking he needed rest to be alert tomorrow; but his heartbeat was so loud in his ears he felt his neck-veins would burst. Every slight sound—the scrape of a foot outside his door, a dog’s bark outside—made him start, skin tingling. As he stared into the dark, scenes from his life started playing in his mind like tormenting insects, stinging. Why, on this of all nights, was he harried with horrors and mistakes? Why could he remember no
good
things?

He could time his nights by the change of guards an hour before midnight. He heard it too soon and sat up, despairing of ever getting rest. Minutes after, the heavy door at the end of the row of cells banged open. There were footsteps, men’s voices, and a light. He came to his feet, alarmed that they had come already to take him to trial.

But they were only bringing in another prisoner. He stood at the iron gate of his cell, watching. At first he thought he was hallucinating from lack of sleep. It was a woman, wearing an elegant dressing gown hastily thrown over nightclothes. When the guard raised the lamp over her head, he saw her clearly—silver hair tied back from her face, grey eyes lined with worry. “Spaeth?” he whispered, disbelieving his own lips.

She saw him then, and her lips formed his name. As the Torna guard pushed her past, he reached out through the bars, and their hands touched. Her eyes on him were hungry as a starved dog’s.

“Get your hands off the Admiral’s woman, you stinking pile of brown,” the guard said. He shoved Spaeth on and let her into the cell next to Harg’s, locking the gate.

When the cell block door boomed shut and silence fell, Harg whispered, “Spaeth? What are you doing here? I thought . . .” He thought of how he had seen her last, standing next to Corbin Talley, lending him her mystery. The guard’s words were still ringing in his mind.

“He is angry at me,” she said simply.

He tried to keep from imagining what sort of lover’s quarrel had landed her here. Or what sort of lover Corbin Talley must be. He tried not to think of how she had been touched with those ice-cold hands, used to ease his bodily desires, made into his possession like the rest of the Isles.

“Harg?” she said.

Why was he tormenting himself? He had no claim on her. He had had his chance, and let it pass. Talley had just taken what he had not had the courage to.

“Harg?” she said again.

“Yes. I heard. He’s angry at you. Me, too.” He gave a strangled laugh.

“Hold your hand out,” she said.

There was only a stone wall separating them. He reached out between the bars. When he stretched as far as he could, his fingertips brushed hers. The bare touch brought the rest of her vividly to mind. He could almost feel her, pressed against the other side of the cell wall, just as he was pressed to his side.

“They’re going to try me tomorrow,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just the show before the execution.”

She was silent then. “Touch me again,” she said at last.

Their fingertips brushed. All the lost chances in his life were aching.

“Spaeth,” he said, hesitantly.

“Yes?”

“The guard this time of night is Adaina. He comes through around midnight. He’s been ordered not to talk to me, but he might listen to you.”

She didn’t answer, but he knew she understood.

When the guard came through and shone his light into Harg’s cell, Harg was lying on his cot as if asleep. He listened intently, and heard the man’s steps pause at the next cell. There was a whispered exchange; he couldn’t hear the words until Spaeth said, almost aloud, “Please.” Then the guard moved on.

When he came back down the row of cells, there was another whispered conversation. At first the guard started to leave, then went back. That was when Harg knew she had persuaded him. He forced himself not to move as he heard the soft sound of the key in the lock. The light came opposite his cell, and he turned to look as the guard opened the gate and Spaeth slipped inside. The man locked it after her, then left.

Without the guard’s light it was pitch dark, but Harg knew exactly where she was, for she radiated longing like a banked fire. All the things she had once stirred up in him were aching again, brought to life by her presence. He was almost afraid to touch her.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she said softly. “I thought you would go to your grave unhealed, and I was going to have to carry your pain around in me forever.”

“I’m sorry, Spaeth,” he said. “I was a damned fool.”

“Is he truly going to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Then there is nothing I can do but help you go without pain.”

His mouth felt dry. He tried to laugh, but it sounded macabre. “I don’t think that’s what Talley has in mind.”

“Your past pain, I mean,” she said.

“I know what you mean.”

It seemed like a very different offer now that there was only a day or two left of his life. For that little time he could be free of the entrapment of the past. He could walk into tomorrow healed. The only price would be himself—a worthless currency.

“I still wouldn’t be Ison,” he said.

“No. You didn’t need any help to become Ison, Harg. You fought the Mundua and won, all by yourself. In the end, they couldn’t control you.”

“They came damned close.”

“Then perhaps I did help you, a little.”

“You did.” He took her hand then, savouring that unconditional Lashnura forgiveness. No matter what he had become, she would still love him.

A shiver passed through her body when he touched her. Feeling it, he tensed, his mind alive with memories. “Will it be like last time?” he whispered.

“No,” she said. “You have done the hard part. Now all you need to do is let go.”

“You won’t take away the memories?”

“No, only their pain. And I can’t take anything but what you give me.”

She was trying to hide the longing in her voice. He sat down on the bed, trying to calm his nerves, and she sat beside him.

“I need something to draw blood,” she said.

“They don’t let us have knives down here.”

“I know! He gave me a brooch.”

He waited while she unpinned it. He felt the swift little motion as she stabbed herself with the pin; then she touched his temple, and her finger was wet. Almost instantly he felt a dizzy, euphoric openness, as if his consciousness were a spreading pool. He thought, this was the way it was supposed to feel.

She touched the other temple, then his forehead and throat. Then she raised a hand to his face and gently pushed the patch away from his eye. Where her fingers touched the knotted skin, an electric tingling woke his senses into excruciating clarity.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “Do you see the wound?”

He did. It was still festering in his face, rooted with fishhook feet in his brain. How had he managed to ignore it?

Her cheek was cool against his face. He felt her lips move lightly against the blind, burning socket. The scar’s roots were relaxing their hold; deep in his brain the barbs grew slack. It was an alien thing, he realized, not part of himself. He had grown twisted around it till he mirrored it, like a mould; but it wasn’t him.

“Let it go,” she said.

Slowly, like a gentle surgeon, she drew it from his flesh. As its deep-buried roots pulled free, he felt wholesome blood rush into its place. Suddenly released from a pain to which he had grown so accustomed he had not even felt it, he laughed. He felt giddy and light.

Spaeth’s body had gone stiff. Her indrawn breath hissed through teeth bared in a silent grimace. He touched her face; her eye was closed and watering. He took her in his arms, feeling an intense tenderness.

“Don’t worry,” she said distractedly. “It will pass. We can’t stop now.”

She opened his shirt to touch him just under the ribcage, where his body carried the invisible wound he had inflicted on Goth. When he closed his eye he saw it: a bleeding gap where something had been cut from inside him. He groaned, barely able to breathe from the pain. Quickly, Spaeth threw off the dressing gown she wore and pressed her body against his so that he felt the breath under her skin. And then her breath was inside his skin, and the pain was flowing into her, leaving him free.

Again and again she returned to find the parasite wounds embedded in him. The cell around them receded as he grew lightheaded with curing energy. He no longer wanted to hold back; he wanted to pour everything into her, to feel that delicious surge of painlessness. Each cure became a consummation.

Hours later he drifted up out of a healing sleep. There was a hint of grey light at the window. His body felt more utterly relaxed than it had been in months—no, years. He savoured the feeling of just resting, unencumbered.

Spaeth’s head was nestled against his shoulder, her arm across his chest. Her bare skin felt hot against his. Looking down at her, he saw a resemblance to Goth in her face. It was that feverish glow of disease that wasn’t hers. The thought didn’t produce the familiar wrench that accompanied all his thoughts of Goth. He turned his head to kiss her rumpled hair, and thought,
What a strange feeling
. He felt light, and marvellously simple, yet not unlike himself. In fact, what was left in him was more truly
him
than what was gone.

He tried to gently draw away from Spaeth in order to sit up; but even in sleep she instinctively clutched at him. When he lifted away her arm, she woke.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “You need it.”

She shielded her eyes from the dim light; the left eye was bloodshot and tearing. There were, in fact, shadow-scars all over her. He bent down to kiss one. Her grey skin was velvety smooth, and quivered under his lips. Her body was half his now, and intensely precious to him. He wanted more than anything to start touching it all over again. She lay there gazing at him as if he were all she wanted in the world. It made him feel euphoric.

“Harg,” Spaeth said, “do you want to have children?”

The question, so out of context, didn’t jar him as it should have. He had fantasized about being granted a normal existence; but would he really do it? “I don’t know,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I’ve never wanted to be responsible for a child.”

She picked up his hand from where it rested on the blanket and meshed her fingers in his. “You sound just like Goth.”

With a shock, he realized she was right. What he felt was exactly what Goth must have felt, what had stood between them all these years.
I am no better than he is
, Harg thought; and then, an even stranger revelation:
He is no better than me
. Goth was just a fallible person caught between his intentions and his actions. Trapped and floundering, like everyone else.

Spaeth put a hand on his arm. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.” And while the first part wasn’t true, he slowly realized that the second part was.

*

The guards that came to fetch him were dressed in red and black uniforms Harg had never seen. Two of them trooped heavily into the room a little after sunrise, rousing Harg and Spaeth from a doze. The younger one laughed hilariously to find the prisoner naked in bed with a woman; the older one was angry at the lapse in security. He ordered Spaeth out of the bed, and when she moved sluggishly he yanked her by the arm and thrust the dressing-gown at her. “Have a care!” Harg said angrily. “She’s ill, you dolt.” With a glare at him, the guard pushed Spaeth out into the corridor half dressed.