Authors: Nicholas Anderson
Working his way
around to Elias’s front, Rawl ran his hands over the priest’s torso until he
found the knot. His efforts to untie it were wasted. His body was
pleading for air and his fingers could not unravel it. For the second
time he wished for his knife. He knew in the time it took him to retrieve
it and return, Elias would be dead.
If he was not
already.
From the knot,
Rawl felt his way down the length of rope. Here Elias’s design favored
him. For the rock anchor lay inside the boat, which rested on a cradle of
seaweed on the bottom, and had not, as he’d feared, ploughed into the muck
below. This time Rawl wasted no time searching for the knot. He
worked instead to slip the rope from around the rock without untying it.
Tilting the rock on its side with one hand, he yanked on the binding with the
other. At first nothing happened. Then, little by little, he began
to work the rope up the sides of the rock. He dug his fingers under the
rope, scraping and mashing them horribly against the stone. He yanked
upwards. The loop pulled free. Tilting the rock on its smaller end,
Rawl freed the rest of the rope in several tugs.
Using the rope
as a guide once more, he worked his way back to Elias. Locking his arms
under those of the priest, he kicked for the surface. This time there was
no sudden resistance; only the cumbersomeness of Elias’s deadweight as Rawl
kicked the yards and yards towards life. It seemed he’d never reach
it. His kicks yielded little and with each one he felt his strength
departing. Light danced across his entire field of vision now. But
it was somehow different from the bursting stars. Then he realized it was
not on his own eyes that the lights were dancing but above them. Close
above them. The light he saw was the moonlight skating on the
surface. He kicked once, twice more, and broke through. Nothing had
every felt so good or
so
intense as those gulps of
air. They were a burning agony-ecstasy to him. He leaned back,
holding Elias’s head on his shoulder, his own lips scant inches above the
water. He heard Josie shout and then Paul as well.
All Rawl could
think about was air and breathing.
Rawl felt
Elias’s body being pulled suddenly up and out of his arms. Paul had
climbed back into the boat and was helping Josie to haul the priest into the
boat. They tossed Rawl a rope which he clung to half-heartedly.
Then they were pulling him out as well. His bare belly rubbed against the
rough sides of the boat but he hardly noticed. He flopped over the side
and
lay
leaning against the gunwale. Josie was
there, laughing, crying, holding his face, running her hands through his
hair. “Are you alright?”
His breathing
was the only answer he could give her; but there was a kind of laughter in
it. She kissed him on the forehead and turned back to Elias who lay in
the center of the boat. Paul was doing something, pressing his mouth to
Elias’s and pumping his chest. A great deal of water erupted suddenly
from Elias’s mouth and he coughed. Paul sat back with a hand on his
head. Josie laughed and cried harder. The two rolled Elias on his
side and thumped him on the back as he spat out more water.
But something
was wrong. Although he was breathing, Elias did not open his eyes.
His breaths were not loud and greedy as Rawl’s had been, but soft, so that Rawl
had at first thought he was not breathing at all. They could feel the
beat of his heart at his throat and wrist but it was slow and slight. His
skin was terribly cold.
“We need to get
him to Leech,” Josie said.
Paul climbed
over Elias to the rowing bench. Rawl, glancing over his shoulder over the
prow of the boat, looked at the shore for the first time since giving the oars
to Josie. He blinked. He sat up straighter and shifted his body to
look more steadily at the shore. At first he thought he was seeing only
the shadows of the trees that lined the rear of the beach, but the more he
looked the more he knew this was not so. The things he was looking at
stood out from the shadows and the trees behind them not because they were
lighter but because they were darker. It was as if spaces had been cut
out in the beach and against the backdrop of trees, or as if holes in the
shapes of standing figures had been made that were like doors that opened on
perfect pitch black.
A door into night itself.
A door into nothing.
“What are
those?” Josie said, slipping up beside him. Her voice was only a whisper
but even so it seemed too loud.
The dark things
were standing all along the edge of the beach, very near, but not touching, the
water. Rawl thought they looked like men standing with their hands at
their sides, which is to say they looked like columns. But these figures
seemed both thinner and taller than any men Rawl had ever seen. He did
not doubt they were nothing human. He was sure they were watching them.
“We can’t get
back now,” Paul said.
Rawl did not
know why, but it never occurred to him to challenge this idea. His only
thought was to wait until dawn and hope the dark things retreated with the
night. But what would become of Elias in that time he did not want to
guess.
“Paul,” Rawl
said. “Swing close to the left shore and I’ll jump out. I’ll
distract them while you drive for the beach and get Elias back to the fort.”
“That won’t
work,” Paul said.
“Sure it will,”
Rawl said. “If they get too close I’ll take to the water again.
They seem to be afraid of it.”
“No, I mean I
don’t think they’ll follow you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s
him they want,” Paul said, nodding towards Elias. “They’ve come for him.”
Josie nodded.
“Then what are
we going to do?”
At that moment,
drifting to them from over the water behind
them,
came
the most welcome sound in the world. To Rawl and Paul and Josie, who had
lived their lives by the sea, it was unmistakable. It was the sound of
oars splashing in the water and creaking in their locks. And with it came
the sound of men’s voices. They turned their eyes from the shore and the
creatures that waited there, and for a moment all their worries were forgotten
and they almost laughed for joy. A ship was coming towards them through
the mouth of the harbor.
Dane’s ship.
They hailed it
loudly but there was no need; the men on board had already spotted them.
Within minutes they were hauled on deck by eager hands. They lifted Elias
up first in a cradle of ropes with the three supporting him from below.
Everyone was as happy to see them as they were surprised. Even Bax seemed
in a good mood. Dane told Forsythe to continue for the dock.
“But, sir,” Rawl
said. “We can’t dock here. The beach is crawling with…”
But at that
moment he looked again on the beach and could not believe what he saw. He
rubbed his eyes and strained them to scour the shadowed beach. It was
deserted.
It occurred to
Rawl, and probably the others, that the things could be hiding in the woods
between here and the fort. But he felt they had no choice but to risk it.
They docked the
ship. They made a stretcher from oars and cloaks and carried Elias
through the woods. They made it to the fort unmolested.
The men on the
walls were as excited (and perhaps nearly as surprised) to greet the returning
party as Dane’s party had been to encounter the group in the rowboat.
There was laughter and slaps on the back and shaking of hands. People
(and dogs) came out of the barracks and various buildings to greet them.
Dane, carrying the stretcher with Bax, did not see Mirela among them. He
increased his pace to the infirmary.
Mirela was
sitting up in bed when he arrived. She looked pale and worn, but he was
so grateful to see her alive and looking better than she had when he
left. She smiled at him, and it seemed an exertion, as he came in.
They laid Elias
in the bed across from hers, which was the other bed closest to the
hearth. Bax slipped out, but not without Dane noticing. Dane and
Forsythe got Elias into dry clothes while Rawl, Paul, and Josie told Mirela
about their adventure.
“He’ll be
alright, won’t he?” Rawl asked when they were finished.
Mirela rose and
crossed to Elias’s bedside. She set her hand on his brow and combed back
his hair. “He is strong, Rawl,” she said. “And he did what he did
thinking of all of us and not himself. He may yet pull out of this.”
“But you can
help him, can’t you?” Paul asked.
“Like you helped Owen
and the others.”
Mirela
frowned.
“With Owen, and even with Markis and Franklin,
the darkness they carried was something given them by another.
It
never had their permission to inhabit them, so I, or anyone, could command it
to leave. But Elias has chosen this for himself. And he himself
will have to choose otherwise if he is to recover. We cannot make that
choice for him.”
“So we can do
nothing,” Rawl said.
Mirela looked at
him. “We can keep our hope, Rawl,” she said. “And I would not call
that nothing.”
As they talked,
Dane felt Josie’s attention shift to him. He had not had a chance to tell
her of his journey to Tira since pulling her out of the sea. He knew he
owed her the telling of it like he had never owed anyone in his life, but he
was dreading that conversation more than any other he had ever had. He
saw no point in delaying. He caught her eye and nodded toward the
door. Bailus might kill him for not divulging his counsels to him first,
but Josie had waited long enough. Then again, Josie might kill him for
what he was going to tell her.
“What did they
tell you?” she asked him as soon as they were alone.
“They didn’t
attack the colony,” Dane said. “I can promise you that.”
“You knew as
much before you left,” she said.
He sighed.
He might as well get it over with. She was too shrewd to put up with
circling the point.
“We’re leaving
in the morning,” he said.
She looked at
him.
“For where?”
“For home.
There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“Nothing more we
can do? We haven’t done anything yet.”
“The Tirans
thought I’d be better off leaving you all and sailing straight home from their
island.”
“What did they
tell you that got you so scared?”
“It’s more what
they didn’t tell me,” Dane said.
“So they were no
help. They were worse than no help.”
“They wanted to
help. My father always thought the Tirans never talked about this place
because they wanted to hide it from us, to protect it. Now I realize they
never talked about it because they wanted to protect us.”
“But they told
you nothing about what happened here?”
“They
couldn’t. For the Tirans, to speak of a thing is to call it into
being. They would sooner sail here themselves than speak of the darkness
of this place in their own homes.”
“So that’s
it? You’re content to just walk away with no answers? Without
having learned a thing?”
“Haven’t we
learned enough?” he said. “We know we’re facing an enemy that can turn
our own friends into deathwalking killers. Do you want to be here when they
do the same with the bodies of your nieces?”
She slapped him
across the face and turned so that her whole body faced him. “My nieces
are still alive, and I will not leave this island until I have found them or
proven otherwise.”
“I will not
leave anyone here,” Dane said. “I’ll have Bailus tie you up and sit on
you the whole way from here to the mainland if that’s what it takes.”
“I will hate you
for the rest of my life,” she said.
“I know,
Josie. I know.
Because I’ll hate myself just as
long.
I failed you. I failed you, and I’m sorry. I
failed your sister, and I failed your nieces. I failed everyone.
But I would rather admit that now when half my men are still alive. And
even if you’re going to hate me for the rest of your life, I’d still rather you
have a long one.” He paused. She had crossed her arms and turned
her body slightly away from him and would not look at him. “I’m sorry
about your sister. I never meant to hurt her. I’m sorry about
everything.”
He said no
more. He just stood there feeling hollow. She did not say anything,
but by her sighs he thought that she was thinking. Perhaps she was
thinking on his words and how to respond. Perhaps she would have even
accepted his apology. But he never got the chance to know because at that
moment their silence was interrupted by the scream of the watchman.
Dane
turned. The crier was Dirk Ridder. He was standing on the south
wall above the gate, but he had turned to face the courtyard and was shouting
with his hands cupped to his mouth. At first Dane did not understand his
meaning, not because his words were hard to understand or because there were
competing noises, but because Dane had no context to place them in.
“Fire,” Dirk
shouted again, and the compound sprang to life.
And in that
instant, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, Dane understood everything all
too well.
Dane wasted no time. He
ordered everyone to assemble at the south gate except the sentries and those in
the infirmary. He left Bailus, still not quite himself, in charge of the
compound. Rawl and Paul nearly ripped the door to the armory off its
hinges in getting it open. They tossed out shovels and pails in heaps and
the men scooped them up and ran for the gate. No sooner were the men gathered
(and Josie and Molly with them) than the gate was open and they were running
toward the beach.
Dane had not
even taken the time to scale the wall and see what had alerted Dirk to the
fire. He knew it must have been large for the glow of it to be visible at
such a distance. Even so, it was worse than he thought. As they
came out of the tree line and onto the beach, the heat smote their faces and
Dane’s worst fears were realized.
The ships, all
of them, the three left by the colonists and the
Bloodwake
, were blazing brightly.
Even the
youngest of them knew it was hopeless from the beginning. A few of the
men dropped their shovels and pails and collapsed on the beach with a
moan. Dane, even though he had known it was the ships the moment he had
understood Dirk’s call of ‘fire’, was too stunned and wearied by the sight to
give any orders.
The ships sat
two on each side of the dock, the
Bloodwake
on the rear, west side. Its mast, yard, and furled sail were burning; the
gold-red flames licking around their slender forms. It seemed to Dane
like the garish spectacle of some pagan rite. Flames also danced along
the edges of the gunwale, making an oblong wall of flame that seemed like a
fire circle in some dark ritual. As of yet, the deck was mostly free of
flame.
“The ballista,”
Rawl shouted. He broke away from the group and ran for the ships.
Dane shouted and
started after him. Rawl had just reached the dock when Dane tripped over
something halfway down the beach. There was something warm and slick on
the gravel where he fell but he took no time to think on it. A dark
figure, headed for the dock, passed him at a run as he got to his feet.
Looking to the
Bloodwake
, Dane saw Rawl spring over the
gunwale and onto the deck. The dark figure was only a few paces in front
of Dane but holding his own. The two runners reached the dock. As
of yet, the flames had not spread to the dock; it was an aisle between the
inferno. Halfway down the dock, the man running in front of Dane turned
to block his way. It was Bax. At that moment, the yard and sail
fell with a cracking whoosh, catching Rawl on the shoulders and pinning him to
the deck. Dane came forward. “Get out of my way,” he said.
Bax, shorter and
stouter, used his momentum against him, catching him by his clothes and
spinning him forward and off the side of the deck. Dane landed in nearly
chest deep water between his ship and the one before it. As he hauled
himself back onto the dock, Bax leapt over the burning gunwale and onto the
Bloodwake
. By the time Dane had
his feet on the
dock,
Bax had shifted the burning yard
off of Rawl and was dragging him towards the opposite side of the ship.
Putting his arms around Rawl from behind, Bax toppled backwards into the water.
Dane jumped into
the water in the place Bax had just shoved him off and half-swam, half-waded
between the two ships. Rawl was conscious but Bax still held him by his
clothes. They were walking towards the shore.
“How many times
tonight are you going to make me rescue you?” Bax was saying.
Rawl looked back
over his shoulder to watch the wooden frame of the ballista go up in flames
with the rest of the deck.
Back on the
beach, Bax and Rawl were greeted with shouts and laughter. From the
reception, you’d think the two men had just saved the entire fleet.
Instead, Rawl had only narrowly avoided having his fool ass reduced to
ash. Dane sensed a note of hysteria in the carryings-on. He had to
give the order to return to the fort several times. It seemed some of the
men wanted to stay and watch the ships burn down to nothing.
Back at the
compound, Dane took Bax and Rawl to the infirmary immediately. Bax’s
hands were badly burned. Mirela cleaned and put ointment on them.
Dane had the strangest feelings watching Bax sit there, quietly, patiently,
almost bashfully, as Mirela gently worked on his hands.
“Do you want me
to bandage them now?” she asked.
“Yes, please,”
Bax said with a grin. “I’m sick of looking at them.”
Bailus, a man
Dane greatly admired, couldn’t sit this still or talk this civilly to Leech
when the man was treating his wounds.
And how to
explain his actions on the beach?
Cutting off Dane’s efforts
to save Rawl and launching his own. Bax was always doing things to show him
up, but never when it came at the cost of pain to himself.
Who was
this man who sat before him? Why had he chosen now to be genuinely
charming and to the one person on earth he was least compelled to be charming
to? Why had Bax waited till they were stuck in hell to become an angel?
Rawl stood close
by, watching Mirela work.
“And look at
you, not a scratch on you,” Tipper said, coming up beside Rawl.
Rawl had been
lucky – plain dumb luck. The part of the yard that had pinned him down
had not been burning long and Rawl’s heavy vest of boiled leather had protected
him from the worst of it.
“You are one
lucky little punk,” Tipper said.
Paul slapped his
brother on the back of the head.
“And one stupid
son-of-a-.”
Rawl clapped him
on the mouth before he could finish. “Don’t talk about your mother that
way,” he laughed.
Bax lifted one
bandaged hand and gave it a quizzical grin. “This reminds me of the last
time I tore my hands up.”
Oh, please
don’t
, Dane thought.
“You remember
that, Dane? That day we snuck into the officers’ brothel in Felcrist
country?”
Dane gave no
indication he had even heard Bax.
“Ah, he
remembers,” Bax laughed. “Anyway, I knew it was a bad idea from the
start, but I couldn’t hold Dane back. Rumor had it there was this redhead
from Parcia working there, and you know what they say about Parcian redheads.”
“I don’t,” Paul
said. “Maybe you should tell me.”
“That’s enough,
Bax,” Dane said, but so quietly that hardly anyone heard him.
“So he had his
mind set on wooing this woman. We didn’t have any Felcrist uniforms to
dress in, so we just put on all the blue and silver we owned, those are
Felcrist colors, you know. We wanted to take the best horses, but have
you taken a serious look at the Hallander stables? The nags we rode
up to the place on were no better than cart horses. We looked ridiculous,
I’m sure.”
“But they let
you in?” Paul asked.
“Oh, sure.
We just acted like we knew what we were
doing. Dane’s always been good at that.”
“So what
happened?” Tipper said.
“What I knew
would happen all along. Dane went upstairs with his redhead and, not five
minutes later, Torin Felcrist and a whole squad of his junior officer buddies
rode up.”
“You think
somebody recognized you and tipped them off?” Paul asked.
“I think it was
just bad timing,” Bax said. “But at any rate, Torin and his friends would
have been sure to recognize us. I was still downstairs, at the bar.
So I start working my way to the door, trying to keep my back to Torin
and Co., who
have
just come in. I make it about
halfway across the room when I see, in the big window in front of me, Dane drop
out of a second-story window with his pants around his ankles and run for the
hitching post. I picked up a chair and hurled it through the window and
then jumped through myself. Except I wasn’t thinking about the glass
shards stuck in the frame. I put my hands out as I sailed through the
window and cut them all to ribbons. My hands were bleeding so bad I had
to hold the reins in the crooks of my elbows as we rode away.” He
laughed. “But that’s not the best part. I get to the hitching post
and Dane’s just standing there, not actually standing but walking among the
horses. And Torin and his friends are out the door and after us.
Dane doesn’t even seem to notice them. He just unties two of the horses
from the post and hands me the reins of one. I say, ‘Dane these aren’t
our horses.’ I’m like, come on, you spent all this time looking at them
and you still don’t get it right? But he doesn’t even say anything; he
just nods towards Torin and his friends, who are almost on us by now. And
that was that. We got into the saddle and off we rode.
Me with my bleeding hands and Dane with his belt buckle loose and
flapping against his horse’s flank.
Except it wasn’t his
horse. It was Torin Felcrist’s charger.”
The younger men
laughed. Rawl turned towards Dane and the smile fell from his face.
“Sir, are you
alright?”
Dane did not
know what he meant. Then he looked at his hands. They were streaked
with dried blood. He looked himself over. His shirt had a large,
odd-edged dark brown stain across the front of it. “I’m fine,” he said,
but with his voice rising as though asking a question. “I’m not hurt.”
“Then whose
blood is that?” Paul asked.
All at once Dane
remembered tripping over the object on the beach. The warm slick his
hands had slid in. “You three,” he said to Tipper, Rawl, and Paul, “Get
some torches and a stretcher and follow me.”
He led them to
the beach. The thing was right where he had left it. In the light
of Rawl’s torch he saw it clearly enough. It was a man’s body. Dane
would have said the body was
laying
facedown, except
that it had no head. Blood, shining in the torchlight, had pooled around
the stump of a neck. The men laid the stretcher by its side and rolled
the body onto it. Tipper and Paul moved to lift the stretcher.
“Wait,” said
Rawl. He unbuttoned the bloodstained shirt and parted it over the
chest. The chest was dark with blood but Rawl washed it with drops from
his canteen. “No birthmark,” he said. “It’s not Fletch.” He
stood up and backed away from the body and Tipper and his brother bore it back
to the fort.
News of the
unexplained blood on Dane’s clothes and his trip back to the beach had spread
so that a crowd greeted them at the gate. Dane, leading the
litter-bearers, pushed through the onlookers to the infirmary. The crowd,
and even the gaze of the sentries on the walls, followed them, and for moment
no one thought to close the gate nor noticed the shadowy figure that stole
through it behind them and into the compound.
Dane left the
covered body in Leech’s care and called an assembly. Someone had finally
noticed the gate and shut it. Dane ran through the roster. No one
else was missing.
“Who’s on the
litter?” Tanlin Hall called.
“We don’t know,”
Dane said.
“Maybe
it’s
Fletcher,” Fish, the cook, said.
“It’s not
Fletcher,” Rawl said.
“Then
it’s
Rundal or one of the men who went with him,” Tanlin
said.
“Serves him
right,” Dirk Ridder said.
“I don’t think
so,” Dane said. “I think we would have found them all together and we
found no other bodies even after searching the beach.”
“Then who is
it?” Pratt asked as if the answer had been found in the scant seconds since
Tanlin had first asked this.
“I’ll tell you
who it is,” Josie said, stepping out of the door of the infirmary.
Everyone turned towards her. “It’s one of the colonists.”
“But this man
was killed within the hour,” Tipper said softly beside her.
“I know,” Josie
said. “They’ve kept some of the colonists alive. And now they’re
killing them and leaving them for us to find.”
“But why?”
Paul said.
“Isn’t it
obvious?” Josie said.
“To mock us.”
***
A few minutes
later, Dane was back in the infirmary. The crowd had broken up with
Josie’s words. Bax departed but told Mirela (he called her Mara) to spend
another night in the infirmary under Leech’s care.
Who is this man and
where did he come from?
Dane wondered.
The body was
wrapped in a thick shroud and laid on a bed where it would wait for dawn and
burial. Bailus had returned to the barracks.
Dane thought
about Josie’s words. Somehow he knew she was right. The
idea that there were still colonists alive but being held like
hostages (or worse) made his blood boil
. He wanted to lead another
search party that night but knew it would only be madness.
A number of men
were still hanging around outside the infirmary talking about the body.
Dane had allowed them to look at it if only to satisfy their curiosity.
He knew nothing was worse in this kind of business than rumors and
conjectures. Sitting down for the first time since returning from Tira,
he noticed how tired he was.
Tired and thirsty.
He realized then he had done nothing for his men after their dash to the
beach. He asked Josie, Rawl, and Paul, who were sitting with Mirela and
watching Elias, to fetch some ginger beer from the cellar.
Paul led the way
to the cellar, his crossbow slung across his back. Rawl walked beside
Josie in silence. He wanted to speak some words of comfort but he didn’t
know what to say. He knew she was thinking about her family that had
called the colony home. The thought that they were still alive and that
their deaths were impending and that there was nothing they could do about it
and they could only guess when they might stumble upon their corpses seemed far
worse than the previous assumption that they were already dead.