The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (25 page)

‘That has been my conclusion, yes.’ Once again there was a suggestion of laughter in the words. The ghemph had a sense of humour.

‘Perhaps,’ Tor interrupted, ‘it may be best if you told us about this place. And be careful if you move around us. We are shackled to poles placed across our shoulders.’

Alain reached out and touched me, to feel the method of my confinement, and I jumped as his fingers brushed by my waist before they adjusted to the correct height. ‘Ah. That is one torture they neglected, happily, to impose on us.’ His fragile voice was threaded with distress. He took a deep breath and made an effort to control the quaver, and his cough. ‘You are in a square room just four paces by four. In one corner, to your right, there is a hole for the disposal of…um… anything. Doubtless you can smell it. At irregular intervals, the trapdoor is opened—it makes no difference to the darkness down here—and some food and water is lowered in. The amount is…just adequate; the taste and variety is better not dwelled upon. We never know when the next meal will be delivered, so it is best not to eat or drink it all at once. There is nothing more to tell you. No one has ever come for me since I was put in here, which was at the beginning of my imprisonment. Three months, you said?’ His voice trailed off. He sounded more than old: he was very sick.

‘I’ve only been here a day or two,’ Eylsa added. ‘They have not shackled me either.’

I went to sit with my back to one of the walls. I closed my eyes; it made no difference. The darkness was so close I felt as though I was wrapped in it. Sound seemed to have intensified. With nothing audible from outside, even our breathing seemed loud. My shoulders ached, my wrists were already rubbing raw, the chains at my ankles dug into my flesh no matter which way I placed my legs. I had already begun to realise that small aches could become large ones; in the hours ahead I was to learn that it didn’t take blood-demons to make agony real.

‘One of you is going to have to help us,’ I said. ‘We can’t even feed ourselves.’

‘Of course,’ Alain said quietly, his distress still palpable. ‘Would you like a drink now? We have water.’

We both drank; it was the first liquid either of us had had all day. I’m ashamed to say that we finished all the water they had.

‘You must try to rid yourselves of those poles,’ the ghemph said suddenly. It came across to Tor and I heard it rustling about, presumably examining the way in which he was manacled. There was a muffled bump and a ghemphic exclamation I didn’t understand. Then it said, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong: there’s an iron band around the pole about a handspan from either end. The pole seems to have been made narrower at this point so that each band is smaller in diameter than the rest of the pole. Each band is attached by a very short chain to a wrist manacle. The manacles have been locked on your wrists and are made to open with a key.’

‘Correct so far,’ I agreed. ‘I might add that the manacles are Mekaté-made which means that they are just about impossible to pick, even if we did have the right equipment. All the best locks come from Mekaté.’

‘Now that’s something every well-brought up lady should know,’ Tor said dryly.

I pulled a face in his direction. He would sense it, I knew.

‘If the pole could be whittled away, it could be pushed through the bands and you’d be free of it,’ Eylsa said.

‘We have nothing that could do that,’ Tor replied.

‘I have,’ said the ghemph. ‘I have the claws on my feet.’

We absorbed that in silence. Then Tor said, ‘The wood is hard. How strong are your claws? It would take weeks!’

‘You might have weeks,’ the creature replied with dry humour.

‘Start with Blaze then,’ Tor said.

I didn’t protest. I wanted to be free of that yoke too much.

‘Very well,’ said the ghemph and began there and then.

I don’t know how long we were in the oblivion. Days, certainly. But just how many I don’t know. When we finally got out of there I never did get around to asking anyone. I just wanted to forget the place. I never have, of course. You don’t forget that kind of hell easily, that combination of pain and fear, hope and despair, all against a background of total blackness and reeking foulness.

The lack of any routine was harder to take than I had thought it would be. Our bodies seemed to find it difficult to cope with being without any kind of daily rhythm. I found it hard to sleep and would wake in wild panics that left me sweating and upset. I craved water or food when there was none; at other times there seemed to be too much, too often. We tried to ration ourselves, but the food went bad easily and if we still had water left when the next lot was delivered, it was wasted because the container was just topped up. If we tried to hurriedly drink it before attaching the lowered rope to the drinkskin so that it could be hauled up and refilled, then the rope would be quickly withdrawn and we would be left without replacement food or water.

At first I hardly noticed the smell. It was only later that the foetidness of the air became a choking burden. With four people using the privy—no more than the hole Alain had said it was—the stench worsened as the days went by. We had no water to spare for bathing, of course, so our own body smells became stronger as well.

Then there was the ache of muscles pulled into unnatural positions across shoulders and arms, the pain of sores rubbed into open ulcers on ankles and wrist and back—agony I had to learn to live with. But it was the lack of light, not the presence of pain, that threatened to crush my spirit. I knew that if ever I was free again, I would never be able to pass a blind beggar without putting something in his bowl, never. No matter how little money I had. I now knew too well what it was to be without sight. That sort of total darkness: it overwhelmed, dragged me down, made me wonder if the world really existed or if it was just all part of my mind, found only in my imagination… I hated it.

And yet the oblivion wasn’t all horror, at least not in retrospect.

The three of them: Tor, Alain and Eylsa, they were the company that kept me sane.

Tor was my rock, my love. It was in the oblivion that I came to know him best—although, even then, he never told the whole truth. Perhaps, in the end, that was what made the difference…

I did learn about his childhood. About how he was born the son of a fisherman in the Stragglers but declined to follow a seapath after his father had drowned in a whirlstorm near the Reefs of Deep-Sea. ‘My father loved the sea; I just feared its moods,’ he explained. ‘Funny, but in the end, I think I’ve seen more of the sea than my father ever did. From Calment Major to the Spatts, I seem to have been through every passage, visited every port, sailed past the lamp of every lighthouse, and survived a Trench full of storms along the way.’

‘What were you doing?’ I asked. ‘Did you work as a sailor?’

‘No. I just travelled a lot,’ he said vaguely. ‘Working. Seeing the world. Actually, when my father died, I apprenticed myself to a scribe. I was about fourteen then.’ Scribes were letter writers, petition drafters: an essential job in places where not everyone could read or write. ‘When I was sixteen, my mother died and my sister married, so I used my inheritance to buy the tools I needed: portable scribe’s desk, pens, inks, parchment, seals. I added a sword and knife as a precaution, although I didn’t know how to use either, and headed off to earn my living.’

For eight or nine years he travelled the Isles of Glory, learning more about life and people in those years than in all the years prior. Finally he fetched up in the Calments just when Calment Minor, smarting under the rule of that bastard, Governor Kilp, was ripe for rebellion. More by accident than design he became a rebel. That was when he earned his Calmenter sword, made for him by a Calmenter metalsmith at the request of a man whose life he had saved. A gift in return for a blood-debt, just as my blade had been.

After the rebellion was all over, he found himself on the run from both the Keepers—who had given Governor Kilp aid—and Calmenter troops. He was without money and no longer had his scribing tools. It was then that he decided he had no real taste for war. He had seen too much of the sickening slaughter that followed the collapse of the rebellion, when Kilp’s troops ran berserk through the islands raping women and children, killing anyone who didn’t give a right answer to their questions.

I knew what he was talking about: I’d been there too. Appalled, I had walked away from Kilp’s offer of citizenship and a place on his military staff. Tor’s reaction was more radical: he’d sworn to himself that there had to be a better way of solving the problems of the downtrodden than resorting to the sword. He’d put away his Calmenter blade…

I had left Calment on a Keeper ship, my passage paid, money in my purse. Tor, penniless, finally managed to escape by working his passage to Quiller on a filthy whaler. In Quillerharbour he chose to lie low for a while. He was afraid to resume his old profession, as the Keepers knew the Lance of Calment had once been a scribe. Instead he became a reading teacher for a Menod community just outside the port. Although he wasn’t of their faith, they accepted him because they needed his skills. He lived with the Quiller Menod for three years before he moved on.

Things began to make sense to me when he told me that. I said, ‘That’s why you were able to talk to Ransom on religious subjects so easily.’

‘Yes. I learned the breviary from start to finish. They used to read from it at mealtimes. And if you wanted dessert, you had to sit through a sermon as well. As I was usually hungry…’ That deadpan dry humour of his again…I loved him for it. He added more seriously, ‘They were good people.’

When I questioned him about what he’d done afterwards, he became vague again. I thought he may not have wanted to detail his exploits in front of the other two, so I didn’t press the matter. But I wondered: was he some sort of agent provocateur, working against the Keeper Isles? A spy for some rebellious assembly? A writer, perhaps? One of those who produced the seditious handbills that surfaced from time to time, the kind that preached freedom and something called ‘universal franchise’. They often contained the sort of ideas that Tor gave voice to when he spoke with me, ideas that sounded all very fine, but I could not see them ever being put into practice, or indeed being successful if ever an islandom could be persuaded to try them out. My view of mankind was far more jaundiced than Tor’s, I think.
I thought that if everyone had a hand in government, we would end up with mindless anarchy. ‘Those with the loudest voices and the most memorable slogans would end up ruling,’ I said during the course of one discussion.

‘Education is the key,’ he replied. ‘Giving people the truth.’

Anyway, he never explained exactly what he did for a living. As far as I could see, he had worked in a number of different jobs, in almost all of the islandoms at one time or another, and much of what he’d done had been aimed at lessening the influence of Keeper traders and sylvtalents. He’d even lived on the Keeper Isles for a time, which is when he had first come across Wantage the shoemaker.

I supposed that it was his connection with the Menod of Quiller that gave him an interest in Alain Jentel. He certainly spent hours in the oblivion talking to Alain. They spoke mainly of religious matters, usually in low voices at times when I was talking to the ghemph. Alain, I gathered, was trying to convert Tor to his way of thinking, and they had a number of long discussions on dogma where Tor’s ideas and Alain’s seemed vastly different, although Tor’s knowledge of the Menod religion, as well as some of the older pagan beliefs, seemed to me to be the equal of Alain’s, and rather unusual in a layman. Mostly their talk bored me; I didn’t understand much of what was said, and all the quibbling on minor points of belief or behaviour seemed a ridiculous waste of time. Of course, by this time I was wondering if Tor was a Manod. He certainly seemed to believe in God, and I was a little surprised at how seriously he seemed to take it, but then I also heard enough to know that he could be scathing about Menod beliefs as well. For instance, he laughed at their emphasis on chastity for the unmarried, calling it an artificial invention of Man; an invention that God, having given us all our desires, would Himself condemn as unnatural. This kind of argument seemed unimportant to me, however correct, and I couldn’t understand why Tor’s beliefs upset Alain so much, but they did.

At other times, Tor would withdraw into himself. He seemed perfectly content to spend hours in silence, thinking. He remained equable, even cheerful, and calm. I, on the other hand, was like a caged cat. I prowled (as much as one could prowl while wearing a six-foot yoke in a cell the size of a ship’s cabin); I lost my temper; I railed against fate, against Morthred; I raged and shouted. Inevitably it was Tor who calmed me, who reduced my energy to more manageable levels. He had so much more inner strength than I did, yet he was careful never to shame me—although there were many times when I should have been shamed. I did not take my imprisonment well. Especially when I knew it would probably culminate in an endless hell of pain and torture.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ Tor would say when it was obvious I was reaching the limits of frustration. ‘Tell me about your life. I want to know everything…’

‘Do you remember anything about your parents?’ he asked once.

The oblivion faded and for a moment I was back in another world—the immediacy of childhood. A fleeting touch with a memory: a perfume, a face, a feeling, a never-quite-to-be-forgotten sense of warmth and safety. And then devastating betrayal when all that had disappeared. ‘Sometimes,’ I said slowly, ‘sometimes I have a feeling that I remember, that there was someone— And then it’s gone, and all I remember is being hungry and cold and frightened.’

‘Who looked after you?’

‘A couple of crazies in the cemetery of Duskset Hill. In a desultory sort of way. And the older street children living there did their best, sometimes. We looked after one another… I was later told that I’d been dumped there one night, wrapped in a blanket, on top of one of the graves. I think I was probably less than two years old at the time.’ His question had raked the ashes of memories I had deliberately doused: once they were rekindled, I had to go on remembering, talking. ‘I used to daydream all the time about how my parents would come for me, how it was all a terrible mistake. I’d obviously been stolen away from my true birthright… Silly, stupid dreams.’

I paused and the silence lengthened until Tor ventured into the void. ‘It can’t have been a safe environment for a child of your age. I am surprised you survived, let alone came through a strong and vibrant human being.’

I hardly heard the compliment, I was so submerged in memory. ‘It was a close thing,’ I admitted. ‘I almost went under a number of times… When I was about six or seven, for instance, one of the older boys started to molest me. He threatened me with all kinds of unpleasantness if I told. At first I just tried to avoid him as much as possible… Then, when he persisted, the crone who lived there with us said something I’ve never forgotten: “Child, you have to look after yourself. No one is going to do it for you.” After that, I stopped dreaming. I knew that there was only me, the halfbreed. I had to make my own life. Defend myself. And so I fought back. I made such a ruckus every time the boy came near me that the others started teasing him. In the end, he gave up and turned his attentions elsewhere. He was the one who started calling me Blaze; I think he wanted to mock me, but I delighted in the name. Up until then, I’d just been “the halfbreed”. —If ever I had a name, I’d long since forgotten it.’

‘Did you ever try to find your real parents?’ Tor asked.

‘Yes, I went to look through the birth archives in The Hub a few years ago. I looked for records of a halfbred Souther-cum-Fenlander. I never found anything. Possibly my mother never registered my birth. I suspect that she kept me for a while, but then, when I was old enough to run around and people could see that I was a halfbreed brat, she just abandoned me. Otherwise she could have been in trouble because of the laws on cross-breeding. They punish that with enforced sterility on the Keeper Isles.’

‘The Menod have worked for years to get rid of these antiquated ideas on island purity,’ Alain growled. It was the first time I’d heard him sound so irate. ‘It is iniquitous. We are all God’s children.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

Poor Alain; he wasted a lot of time trying to talk to me about God, to give me the faith to help me meet whatever it was that was in store for me, but I couldn’t accept what he offered. I couldn’t believe in his God of goodness or in his sky heaven for the faithful. I questioned everything. I couldn’t take anything just on faith. I couldn’t believe that, if there really was a God who wanted to be worshipped, who wanted us to live by certain rules, He would have made such a rotten job of telling us just how He wanted it all done, or just how He wanted us to behave.

I did like Alain, though. He was a gentle man. He was dying and he knew it, but he never lost his dignity or questioned his faith. He was always trying to give us most of his share of the food and water, saying it was wasted on a man who was coughing up his lungs. There were many times when he was greatly distressed by his inability to breathe properly, yet he always made light of it. If he was in pain, he never told us. He never seemed to resent or even be embarrassed by the personal tasks he and Eylsa had to do for Tor and me. He was everything a Menod patriarch should have been.