The Island (26 page)

“There, there, Jack. Have another drink and we’ll have another go, and you’ll feel better.”

Hizzoner leaned against a tree stump, sucking on a bottle of brandy and offering catechism to a sleeping whore. He asked questions, and, receiving snores in response, pronounced learned answers to himself. “Yes, you could become Magdalen,” he said thoughtfully. “But a question of theology remains. Is it enough simply to stop taking pay for your services, or must you stop rendering them altogether? If you give them away, are you Magdalen or Samaritan? Or wanton? I must consult the Scriptures.” Hizzoner consulted the brandy bottle, and rambled on.

Nau sat in front of his hut, alone, drinking rum from a pewter chalice. His eyes monitored the behavior of the company, but he did not interfere—not when voices rose, curses were exchanged, bottles broken. Evidently, his presence was sufficent to maintain a certain order.

“Ah, scribe,” he said when he saw Beth and Maynard. “Come to chronicle the downfall of Rome? It’s rare we have a day worth celebrating thus.” Nau noticed that Maynard was not tethered. He spoke sharply to Beth. “Where is his leash?”

Beth bent down and whispered to Nau, who smiled and nodded and said pleasantly to Maynard, “Come sit by me, then, and share a glass.”

Maynard put a hand on Beth’s arm. “What did you tell him?”

“Only . . .” Beth looked away. “Only that you are trustworthy.”

Maynard sat down. Nau filled the chalice and passed it to him. “You might have been a trump, in another time.”

Maynard drank. Behind him, in the hut, he heard a slap and a giggle and a high voice squealing, “Oh, you rogue!” He raised his eyebrows at Nau.

Nau chuckled. “The doctor is having his way.”

Windsor’s voice, petulant: “You’re a nasty tease, and I won’t have it!”

The sound of another slap came from the hut, and then a sigh.

Suddenly, Nau seemed to sense something wrong amid the crowd, as if an undrawn line had been crossed. A voice yelled in anger. There was a slap, and a cry of genuine pain.

“Hold!” Nau commanded.

The crowd quieted. Basco Tom was on his feet, his dagger poised above a cowering whore.

“Basco! Leave it!”

“I’ll cut her, l’Ollonois. You’ll not stop me.”

“No,” Nau said evenly, “I’ll not stop you.”

The crowd waited.

Basco prepared to strike.

“But as you cut,” Nau said, “bid farewell to your hand. I’ll have it off myself.” He stood and took a knife from his belt.

Basco paused.

“Lay on,” said Nau. “Cut her. It will be a costly cut, but you’re a man who knows the worth of things. If a cut’s worth a hand, so be it.”

Basco said, “She offended me.”

Maynard saw the muscles in Nau’s back relax. “It must have been a mighty offense.”

“It was.” Basco was responding to Nau’s sympathy. “I offered her good value to see her naked, but she refused.”

The whore, too, felt the tension ebb, for she spat in the sand and said, “Good value! A stinking kiss and a tin of peas!”

“It’s fair value! I had no designs to touch you.”

“I’m a prostitute, not a picture! A
man
doesn’t feast only with his eyes!”

Nau said to the whore, “What do you deem fair value?”

She got to her feet and dusted off her smock, prepared to negotiate. “Well, seeing that I’m not in the business of window-shopping, I offered him proper feast. And all I asked . . .”

“All!” Basco shouted.

The whore continued primly, “All I asked was his pretty locket.”

“Too dear for an ogle.”

“I promised more than an ogle.”

Nau said, “What locket?”

Basco’s expression dissolved into dread. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I was in error.”

“No great prize,” said the whore. “A pretty little thing . . .”

“What locket?” Nau held out his hand.

Maynard saw Hizzoner stir from his religious reverie and rise to his feet.

“A bauble,” Basco said, smiling lamely. “A trinket.”

“I’ll have it.” Nau’s hand was still extended.

“Of course!” Basco stopped at the rum pot and dipped his cup. His hand shook as he raised the cup to his lips.

He stood before Nau and reached into his pocket, but there his hand froze: Nau had the barrel of a pistol pressed against his forehead.

“Leave it.” Nau glanced to the side. “Fetch it, Hizzoner.”

Hizzoner dug into Basco’s pocket and came out with a double-barrel percussion derringer.

“Well!” Nau said.

Now Basco was terrified. “The locket’s in there! I swear!”

“I’m sure. And well protected, too.”

Hizzoner found the trinket and passed it to Nau. It was not a locket, but a gold ankh on a gold chain.

“How long have you had this?” Nau repeated.

“Years! A keepsake.” Basco’s eyes were crossed, focusing on the pistol barrel.

“How long have you had this?” A third time.

“I swear . . .”

“How long have you had this?”

Basco knew very well what was happening. Sweat poured down his face.

Maynard looked at Basco and knew—analytically, matter-of-factly, without shock or chagrin—that the man was dead. Whatever Basco had done (Maynard assumed theft) had been heinous enough by itself, and Basco had compounded the offense by lying, not once but three times. Maynard had become so inured to carnage that he wondered only how, not if, Basco would die. And, he noted idly, a new part of his brain, or of his humanity, must have atrophied, for he no longer even cared about not caring.

“The drink, l’Ollonois,” Basco said. “The battle . . .”

“You took this from the woman,” said Nau. “This is why she bit you.”

“I . . .”

Hizzoner said, “He kept a secret from the company.”

“A trinket!”

Nau said. “We were boys together, Basco.” Then he pulled the trigger.

The top of Basco’s head exploded in a shower of splinters, and he fell to the sand, an uncapped bottle.

Nau put the pistol back in his belt and tossed the ankh to the whore. Two men dragged Basco’s body out of the clearing.

Slowly, arduously, like a steam locomotive pulling away from a station the revelry regained its momentum.

Nau refilled his chalice, sipped from it, and passed it to Maynard. “How would you write that, scribe?”

Maynard shrugged. “Another death. Here one minute, gone the next. That’s how you treat it, isn’t it?”

“Basco was a friend.”

“Were you sad to kill him?”

“I will miss him, but it had to be done.”

“There’s no forgiveness, even for friends.”

“No. Forgiveness is weakness. Weakness becomes a crack; a crack becomes a rent, and soon there is riot. They expected no less from me.”

There were footsteps behind Maynard, and he heard Windsor say, “I heard shrill notes of anger, and mortal alarms.”

Windsor stood in front of the hut, cinching his trousers. He had a half-empty bottle of scotch under one arm. His face was flushed, his eyes glassy. He was followed by the lithe blond catamite with the black leather codpiece. The catamite posed by the doorway, smug and narcissistic.

“Basco has gone home,” Nau said.

“The crime?” Windsor sat in the sand.

“The covenant,” Hizzoner explained.

“Ah,”
Windsor nodded. “Most serious.” He drank from his bottle.

“I might not have known,” Nau said, and in his voice there was a touch of rue, “if he hadn’t been squabbling with that.” He gestured contemptuously at the whore, who had removed her blouse and was admiring how precisely the ankh fell between her breasts.

“He died for
that?”
the catamite sniffed. “My! He
was
a man of meager taste.”

“Be quiet, Nanny,” Windsor said.

The whore had heard—if not the words, the tone and the direction. “Say again, capon,” she callenged.

“Hear
her,”
said the catamite. “Hide your dreary dugs, dearie, before they’ve dug another grave.”

“Nanny . . .” Windsor cautioned.

“Hey, pullet,” the whore crowed, “what’s stuffing your pouch tonight? Mangoes?”

There was laughter, especially raucous from the other whores, and the catamite blushed.

“Look, ladies, how he reddens!” continued the whore. “He sprouts a coxcomb, but that’s as close to a rooster as he’ll ever be!”

Another whore called, “I bet his pouch is full of eggs.”

“Aye,” chimed a third. “He lays himself.”

Outnumbered and outvolleyed, the catamite burst. Vaulting Windsor, he screamed, “Bitch!” and sprinted into the clearing and slapped Basco’s whore across the mouth.

Her lip split against her teeth. She raised a hand to wipe blood from her mouth.

The catamite kept his eyes on the raised hand, ready to defend against a punch. He didn’t see her other hand ball into a fist, her thumb extend, her long, pointed thumbnail drive, with all her weight behind it, deep into his navel and gouge at his backbone.

He shrieked and tumbled backward, and she followed him down, stabbing with other nails on his plucked armpits.

He lashed out with his legs. A knee hit her in the temple and knocked her off him. He rolled on top of her and gnashed at her breasts.

The crowd laughed and cheered. The whores were partisan, but the others were neutral: They applauded each telling blow, each new draw of blood, and they roared equally unbiased approval at the loss of the whore’s nipple tip and the catamite’s earlobe.

“Worried, Doctor?” Nau said. “Your dandelion loses his petals.”

“He’s all sinew,” Windsor replied. “She’s no match for him.” From his jacket pocket Windsor took a box of bullets and placed it on the sand in front of Nau: a wager.

Maynard recognized the box: He had hidden it in his bureau drawer at Chainplates.

Nau reached into a small leather pouch he wore around his neck and removed a sapphire earring, which he set beside the box of bullets.

Windsor noticed Maynard’s quizzical expression, and he explained, “Something has to be saved out, else there’d be no games. It all shakes down eventually.”

The catamite and the whore were at a standstill, their hands and legs locked, teeth snapping at air.

“A draw?” Hizzoner said.

“No!” cried a voice from the crowd.

“Break it, then.”

A man staggered to the center of the clearing and aimed a kick at the catamite’s head.

Dodging the kick, the catamite lost his grip on one of the whore’s hands. Her fingernails raked his face. He rolled free, and she sprang after him. He fended her off with a flailing punch to the chest.

“How long have you been part of this?” Maynard asked Windsor, as they watched the sweating, bleeding bodies wrestle in the sand.

Windsor’s eyes did not leave the fight. “Thirty years. My boat broke down, and I swam ashore here.”

“They let you live?”

“They never caught me. I saw them first. I was about to seek their help, but there was something, a feeling, an aura—I credit my background in anthropology for recognizing it—that told me they were not the sort to welcome visitors. So I swam away.”

“You
swam
away?”

“Floated. I killed a pig and stopped up his bum and his mouth and used him as a float. For two days I floated on him, and then the sharks got him, and for another day I swam. A conch boat picked me up.”

“But when you got to shore, how come they didn’t send someone back here?”

“I kept my counsel; I never opened my mouth.”

“What?”

The combatants were on their feet now. Blood streamed from bites on the whore’s breasts and from scratches that crisscrossed the catamite’s chest and back. The whore screamed and charged. The catamite yanked at her hair, deflecting the charge. A patch of scalp came away in his hand.

“A handful of pain, Nanny!” Windsor shouted. “There’s a lad!”

The whore ducked and charged again. Her claws tore away the leather codpiece. Two lemons fell to the sand, and the crowd erupted in catcalls and guffaws.

The enraged catamite lashed wildly at the whore, who danced nimbly away, pointing derisively at his small shaven genitals.

“He’s bought it now,” said Nau.

“No, sir! Behold!”

Keeping his distance from the whore, the catamite delicately poked his testicles up inside his groin and tucked his penis between his legs.

Nau was amazed. “It’s gone!”

“See Achilles hide his heel!” Windsor laughed.

The whore tackled the catamite, rooting for his vulnerability.

Windsor drank from his bottle and said to Maynard, “They fascinated me. Either they were some exotic religious group, in which case they had a right to their privacy, or—and I didn’t dare dream this—they were . . . well, what they are. I knew what would happen if I told the authorities. In a week, they’d have been extinct; Civilization’s solution would have been to save them by extinguishing them, and these people would have co-operated by fighting to the death. Oh, a few might have survived, the children, to be reprogrammed. They’d be actuaries now, or salesmen, free to be the same as their fellows, free to worry about auto loans and pyorrhea.”

“How did you join them?”

Windsor smiled. “Carefully. I approached them as I would the Tasaday or the Jivaro or any other anachronistic society. I stood well at sea and sent things ashore on the tide: rum and powder and—silly of me, but I had no way of knowing—glass beads and costume jewelry. I always sent a message along, professing friendship, explaining that I meant only well, assuring them that I alone knew they existed. When they finally permitted contact”—again Windsor smiled—“l’Ollonois told me that for a year I had driven them crazy. They never saw me, couldn’t catch me. In the end, they agreed to speak to me—in the ocean, armed boat to armed boat—only because they were fearful that I would become discouraged and expose them.”

A surge of outrage welled in Maynard’s chest. It was a hot feeling, and welcome. “Do you know how many lives your little experiment, your fascination, has—”

“Tush!” Windsor ignored the rebuke. “When civilization has blathered itself into oblivion, these people will still exist. Everything is reduced to the simplest, most basic, incontrovertible virtue: survival. Morality, politics, philosophy, all aim to that one end. And that’s the only end worth aiming for.”