They dragged us all out into the morning to look at it, because it was a vital part of breaking our spirits. Here was our new home, and our mass grave.
To a citizen of Shadrapar, the Island was nothing but an idea. It was where criminals go, and most people thought that this was a good thing. I had thought so myself, before I began to hold opinions unpopular with the state. The details were not known to the general populace. The understanding that the Island was a long way away in the jungles of the east; that no escapee has ever made it back to trouble the law-abiding; that it killed off prisoners as fast as it received them, and was thus never full, these facts were as much as anyone wanted to know. I had never speculated how such a place might work before my fall from grace. Even when I hid in the blighted Underworld, companion to beggars and beasts, I gave it little thought. On the boat, when they had finally caught me, I tried to envisage my destination and found that, after such a long period of avoiding the question, my imagination failed me. I would never have been able to hit upon the truth.
The jungle was more of a swamp now, and the water spread on all sides, a glistening wetland choked with reeds and knotted trees. The air was rank with flies. The boat moved slowly through what must have been the only channel deep enough to take its draft, and ahead of us the water broadened out into a lake. It was half mud, and strange plants thrust out from its shallows at intervals like the hands of drowning men. At the heart of this lake was the Island.
Everyone’s first glance at the Island was the same: one took it for its namesake. In the middle of this lake, you assumed, there is a hill, and the hill has been covered by the structure. The Island was roughly square, with the top two floors of decreasing size and the lower three all of the same dimensions. It was made of wood and cane, as though the entire building was a barred cell. The higher levels had a few spaces of solid wall, so that the staff could steal a little privacy. The lower levels were all of reinforced slats, cane bars and a vast webwork of rope that held it all together. It was possible to see clean through the Island, if one picked the correct opening. The eye’s path took you through a dozen intervening slatted walls and out to the foul waterscape on the other side, past a hundred sullen inmates. As the boat approached we could see a few of those inmates, shadowed figures behind the bars. They gave us a sense of scale. The lake was larger than we thought. The Island was far larger than we thought. It was larger than any castle, and the prisoners within must have numbered over a thousand. We would vanish in that mass of the deprived and the lawless, and never surface. Our faces would be lost to the powerless mob.
I pride myself in thinking that I was one of the first to make out the last demoralising thing about the Island. I saw that it was misnamed. As the boat chugged closer, finally breaking onto the open waters, we bobbed in the swell that troubled the lake. I watched as we rose and fell against the line of trees, and saw that the Island, too, rose and fell. It was a moment before I could separate real movement from the illusion caused by our own, but then I knew. The Island was afloat, however impossible that might be. Either there was some great portion of it below the water, and the lake was far deeper than I had guessed, or… I knew the truth, I think, even before we pulled closer and heard the dull and muffled thumping of machinery from the nearest corner. Some constant effort was keeping the whole construction afloat, and I could foresee even then how that would shape the lives of those aboard. It was not an island at all, but the most perilous of boats.
Some of my fellow prisoners swore, and some cursed, but most just stared. From this moment, so we all saw, there would be no privacy, no dignity, no escape from the flies or from each other. The hold of the prison boat would be like a palace to us. There were about twenty-five of us when the voyage began. Now one was dead, another with a wound that would kill him. Before the year was out there would be less than twelve of us left. The Island was a living thing worse than the jungle, and it ate humanity. It roasted men in its furnaces, sweated them in its machines, digested them in the swamp waters and ground up their bones.
The rivermen themselves were oblivious. Their attention was on the prisoners not the prison. All this was some part of their obligation to their employers. The new arrivals must be allowed to see their destination from the outside. It was an effective lesson for us to learn. Beyond the crew’s impassive faces and levelled weapons, I saw Peter. He was standing aloof from us, of course. From his bearing and his clothes he could almost have been the ship’s owner. I saw his expression, though, and it was not the face of a happy man. He might not be going under lock and key but he would be a prisoner of this godforsaken place as much as we.
There was a small boat coming round the side of the Island, a wide-beamed dinghy without oars or sail, but I heard nothing of the engine. At first I assumed that it was hidden beneath the sullen growl of our own but, as the craft drew nearer, I saw that there were crooked arms that reached into the water at sides and rear. A constant play of droplets hung in a mist about these devices, and every so often a fish would leap up out of the water and away from them. It stirred vague memories in me of things learned once and long forgotten, but by then my attention was taken with the craft’s occupants. There were three, including the steersman. They were all in black: jackets with grotesquely high collars rising almost to the level of their ears at the back; trousers belted with a club and a knife; boots and gloves of shiny rubber or plastic. Their hair was shaved close to the skull. The man at the prow also wore a headband that marked him out as a leader of men. Beneath it, he was almost bald, without even the stubble of the others. He had narrow eyes and a face that defied expression. In all the time I knew the Marshal – for it was he – I never saw any real flicker of thought betray itself on his face.
“How many?” His voice was very sharp and thin, a good fit for his slot of a mouth. The captain told him our number and never mentioned the dead man that the river creature had taken. Perhaps nobody mentioned him, and the Island went unaware that it was one life short. I feel sure that the Marshal would not have cared. He made his feelings about the prisoners quite clear from the start.
Our prison boat cut its engines a hundred yards or so from the Island and coasted most of the rest of the way. When it was close enough, a few men in convict grey threw ropes to the crew, who made them fast. We watched our fellows on the Island haul with aching arms to drag us the last few feet until the blunt nose of the boat touched the splintered timber. There was a kind of dock there, a wooden platform ringed with cane, with another handful of black-clad Wardens watching suspiciously. One of them was armed with some kind of gun that I did not recognise.
“Get your worthless hides off the boat!” the Marshal screamed at us, and the captain backed him up with, “You heard him, bastards! Move!” After a few blows from the clubs of the rivermen we began heading forward in a reluctant, uncooperative mass.
Although the boat had been secured, there was still a gap between it and the Island that changed size constantly as the swell rocked us. We were forced to jump across, with the water to catch us if we fell. I nearly did, but the man behind me caught my shoulder, so that I was able to make it across with a long step. The simple, wordless act of kindness surprised me. I had looked upon my fellow inmates with the horror of a well-bred Academy man. Joining the growing huddle of criminals in the square, I examined them with new eyes. They were not just a mass of grey-clad malice now, but individuals as nervous and scared as I. I took a good look at the man who had helped me as he joined us, dark and unassuming save for the mark that ran from one ear almost to the point of his chin. I thought it was a birthmark but later I discovered that it had been scored in by an energy blade during a fight. Whether he was lucky to have survived, given his current position, was an interesting philosophical point.
“Stefan,” I told him.
“Shon,” he replied. His eyes were on the guards and I could see that he, like Peter, was a man of action. He never tensed enough to make me think that he was going to try something, though. Where would he go? Aside from a dive into the water or onto the hostile boat, there was only one exit, a narrow, dark doorway that led into the body of the Island. We would go there soon enough without any fighting. There was no need to hurry matters.
I saw Peter get off the boat with a graceful little step and stand away from us, at the water’s edge. One of the guards went over to him and inspected his papers. The inmates who had tied the prison boat fast were now reappearing, carrying heavy sacks that they handed down to the rivermen.
“What do they make here? What can you export from a prison?” I whispered, but Shon just waved me silent with a hand that was missing most of its little finger.
The morning sun was rising from behind the trees like a bloated red mushroom. The mists that hung about the jungle were the colour of blood. I have heard that the sun is dying by degrees, swelling up with some illness and parching the land into the lifeless deserts you find to the west of the city. For the first time, in those jungles, I looked up and saw that it was true. In that disease-ridden place even the sky looked unhealthy.
We were kept waiting for some time beneath that relentless sun. A few tried to sit down but guards came with black, dense clubs and struck them until they staggered to their feet. I was beginning to feel slightly faint by then. The mounting heat of the morning was beginning to tell on me. I glanced again at Peter and saw him waiting still, standing as we were. He had no baggage, nothing but those slightly fancy clothes he stood up in.
There was a thump from behind me, and I turned to see that one of my fellows had fainted. There was a bruise on his temple that a riverman or a Warden had put there. I expected him to be kicked into either wakefulness or concussion, but the guards were ignoring him. They had other things to watch for. The Marshal had disembarked from his boat and was coming up to us. I learned later that he always escorted the new arrivals in: he was a man for whom control was an absolute and realisable dream, and it manifested itself even to such absurd lengths.
“Line up!” he shouted even as he appeared. We stared at him dumbly and the Wardens moved in. It only took a few blows to have us in two uneven ranks facing him. He was not a tall man, the Marshal: a few inches below me, and I am not the tallest. He stood before us like a drill officer, with a Warden on either side.
“I am the Marshal,” he said. “I command here. I am the Governor’s right hand. This is the Island. You will spend the rest of your lives here,” his voice rang out flatly. “In order for the rest of your lives to be any length you will need to understand the One Rule.” I could hear the capital letters.
“The One Rule is this,” he continued implacably. “You will always obey. If we tell you to work, you will work. If we tell you to sleep, you will sleep. If we tell you to bend over then you will get buggered. This is the only way it will be.”
He left a long pause, staring at us, looking for troublemakers. His gaze passed over me and I felt chilled. There was murder in those eyes. I could not imagine that any inmate of the Island would ever look as bloody and brutal as the Marshal did then. Of course, that was before I met Gaki, perhaps the only man alive who surpassed the Marshal in sheer bloodymindedness.
“I will show you why this rule is obeyed here,” the Marshal resumed. “It is a good reason, and a persuasive one.” He held out a hand to one of his subordinates, who passed him a stick perhaps three feet long, sheathed in metal to the midpoint and wrapped in layered leather below that. The men either side of me tensed instinctively, but the Marshal would have to take a good few steps forward before he could strike anyone. I noticed that Shon had changed his pose: from a loose acceptance of his situation he was abruptly like a taut wire. The few inmates still present after loading up the boat were rigid. They knew what was coming.
The Marshal stared at us with his lack of expression sitting heavy on his face, and then pointed the lance in a lazy kind of way. I thought I saw the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth before it went off. There was a crack, although perhaps it was just a light so bright and sudden that it seemed like a sound. The man on Shon’s other side was thrown backwards into the men behind, and when they got out of his way he was just a limp corpse on the floor. His face and chest were charred black. In the aftermath of that strike the air between us and the Marshal boiled and sizzled. That was the second time that random chance passed me by when there was a death to be doled out.
“I do not know who he was, nor do I care,” the Marshal said. Nothing in his hard voice had changed with the man’s death. “That was an example. You are less than nothing to me and my staff, and we will kill any one of you without a second thought. If you wish to remain alive you will do everything in your power to avoid angering us, and even that may not be sufficient. You have no rights. You are nothing more than vermin and the boat brings more of you every month. I could have the lot of you killed here and now, and not want for workers.” For a moment he paused and I thought that he was seriously considering it.
“You will be taken to your new homes. Answer to your names when they are called. Any man left when the roster is finished will join the example on the floor there, so if anybody is hoping to get it over with then they can stay behind. You may or may not get on with your cell mates. They may do my job for me and dispose of you themselves. If so, I will be delighted, because it will give me an excuse to kill them. The slightest excuse is all I ask. Remember that.”
He turned from us, dismissing us utterly from his mind, and walked over towards Peter, who had watched everything that went on as expressionlessly as the Marshal himself. One of the Wardens began to call out names.
“Jof Chodan!”
A big, bearded man shambled forwards and was taken away. I never saw him again.
“Kelroy the Thief!” The names were obviously in no order. The roster had probably been made man by man as we embarked for the voyage. Thinking on that, I glanced at the boat to see one of the rivermen casting off the ropes and then jumping back on board. They fended the Island off with poles until the boat’s nose was pointing halfway towards the direction we had come from. Then the deep cough of the engine started again, to underscore the dragging list of names, and the prison boat began its long homeward trek.
“Paulus Forestar!” the Warden called. Nobody answered. Presumably he must have been one of our casualties. I saw Peter nod and greet the Marshal, who was looking at him without pleasure. A moment later, a few words passed between them and the Marshal punched Peter in the stomach, hard enough for us to hear the impact and Peter’s surprised grunt. He doubled over and fell to his knees, and the Marshal clouted him hard across the side of the head, sending him to the ground. He stared up, angry and astonished. The Marshal was teaching him a similar lesson. He would brook no disobedience.
“Shon Roseblade!” the Warden shouted. Shon stepped forwards, with a brief glance for the dead man. He spared me a second too, with the faintest smile. A steadying hand and a few words. A chess game. How fragile are the foundation stones of our most important friendships? I first met Helman Cartier, one of the closest of my old city friends, because I was owed money. Now I had tenuous links to a Warden and a fellow inmate. In a place like the Island you took all the friends you could get.
“Julio!”
Peter was being led away by a Warden who was hopefully treating him more sympathetically than his fellows were treating us. I wished him luck, inwardly, and also prayed that he would feel the need for a game or two of chess in the near future.
“Stefan Advani!”
I almost missed my own name as I considered Peter’s fate. Just as the Warden was about to start on the next I stepped forwards. He regarded me narrowly. “Advani?” he asked. I nodded. Speaking to Wardens was probably a deadly offence in this place. I was not taking any chances.
Another of the staff gripped my arm hard enough to cut the blood off and dragged me away towards the dark doorway to the interior. He was perhaps twice my bulk, and he obviously enjoyed throwing smaller men around. Looking back, I saw the prison boat manoeuvre out of the lake, onto the river that led to Shadrapar, the home that I assumed I would never see again.
I made no vows. I swore no vengeance. I had no divine destiny, but I had unfinished business and an enemy yet living. These are the things that draw the fabric of the world together.
I would see Shadrapar once more, before the end.