Thanks to the Island finding fresher pastures, my enforced hunger strike let up soon after, and the vile slop that we were served was like ambrosia. In short, I found a fly in my soup and counted myself lucky.
Onager and Lucian were both curious about my excursion. I kept it to myself, still trying to work out what was going on. The Governor’s celestial obsessions, Trethowan’s manuscript, the sinister mistress, all these things turned in my head like the gears of a machine, never interlocking to any useful purpose. During the next day I wondered if I should push my luck with the Wardens. I thought that the Governor might have told them not to kill me, because of the service only I could render him. I never quite plucked up the nerve to try it, and possibly just as well. The next boatload of convicts could have been packed to the bilges with Academy drop-outs suckled on Old School Shorthand. Besides, you will have noticed by now that I am not the most courageous of men. Cowardice has been my lifelong companion. When I have let my innately craven nature guide me, I have seldom gone wrong.
Now I think about it, most of the serious mistakes in my life come from taking a stand. One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.
Of course, I had reached the limit of running away. I had the luxury of running ten feet in any direction. I had been forced, at this late stage, into taking a stand. If I had my way, it would be a stand behind someone larger than I was.
I met up with Shon shortly afterwards, in the brief lunch break between the punishing morning shift and the grind of the afternoon. Even he had heard that people in high places were taking an interest in me.
“Think you can do anything for me? You know how this place works,” he said idly. “Governor’s favour, you must be able to pimp in exchange for something. Better food, more space in your cell, sexual favours, whatever…”
“Sexual favours…” For a moment I thought of the strange woman, but of course Shon was talking about other prisoners. Again, all part of the local economy.
Shon shrugged. “No worse than goes on back home,” he opined.
“You’re obviously a man of the world. Were you a career criminal?”
He laughed at that. “Depends on who you ask,” he said. “I was a lawyer.”
I looked upon him narrowly. “No,” I decided.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I worked for a big shady merchant cartel with a lot going on. I went in and talked to the representatives of other big, shady cartels. We made alliances, contracts. Sometimes I appeared in the Courts to defend cartel leaders. It was a living. It paid well.”
“You strike me more as a man of action,” I said dubiously.
“Well, when deals like that go bad, they go bad all at once and usually when you’re right in the middle of them. That’s where I got this scar.” He traced the thin ear-to-chin mark. “The other side went for me with an electric knife just as we were about to sign on the line. Or there’s some third party who doesn’t want any kind of deal to come through, and they always go for the advocates first. That’s how come I’m here. Someone set me up for bad debts, contraband and taxes. I’d at least have liked to be sent here for something I did.”
It was almost a disappointment to discover that Shon was something so pedestrian. A lawyer, even a brawling lawyer who looks like a pirate, is at least within spitting distance of my own estate.
“What about Peter?” I asked idly. “Was he a lawyer too?”
“Who’s Peter?”
“The Warden who killed the snake. I thought you might know him, from the way you looked at him.”
“Oh.” Shon nodded. “I bet on him once. He was a duellist. This is a good few years back but I won a lot of money, so I remember him. Not a show duellist, either.”
Two kinds of men fought for the amusement of a crowd. Show duellists were cheats, basically. Their moves were mostly worked out in advance. They fought to surrender or sometimes first blood. It was easy entertainment for the masses. The other category, into which Shon was placing Peter, was that of the blood duellist. They fought for real and usually to the death. It was a profession nobody stayed in long. The successful retired and, of the failures, what needs to be said? I wondered what had driven Peter to choose such a desperate course, and how it had led to this distant exile. Lunch break was over, though. The Wardens were kicking us back to work.
*
That evening I sat with my hands about my belly and tried to wish it smaller, so that it would not complain so much. Onager had decanted about half of my portion into his own bowl, with my forced permission. To add insult to injury, Lucian was in a more than usually talkative mood.
He had his one customary topic of conversation, which was his departure. To hear him say it you would think that he had a place reserved on the next boat home. Lucian had plentiful, generous and wealthy friends back in Shadrapar who were even now working to have him freed. They would petition the President. They would cry to the Justiciar’s office. They would make a great nuisance of themselves until the word was cried from the valleys to the mountains that Lucian Corek must be released. He also talked of how he would live when he returned to the city: turning a new leaf, setting up an honest trade, rewarding his friends. He talked of freeing Onager and myself. In his wildest moments he even suggested taking up a position as the Island’s next Governor, instituting a sweeping series of reforms to end the tyranny of this place forever.
When I had first heard this tune I had been impressed, because I was naive then and did not know that Lucian had been in the Island for almost seven years. Lucian, however, could never be persuaded that freedom was not just around the corner. He lived from day to day in the assurance that the days of captivity before him were numbered and few. If seven years in the Island could not dent his confidence, what good could a few rational arguments do?
He was just beginning to enumerate the high public officials who knew him by name and would surely be pining for his company (there were seventeen of them, and by then I knew them by heart) when a Warden stopped outside our cell. He was not alone. It was the stone-faced, hostile man that had conveyed me to the Governor, and there was a big shape in greys behind him. Lucian went quiet, and all three of us looked up as the key was turned in the lock.
“Company,” the Warden hissed. His hand was on his knife again and he was standing so that he could keep an eye on both us and the newcomer. He hauled the door open and said, “In.” The stranger lumbered into the doorway, and practically filled it. The door was shut and locked the moment that the newcomer was out of its way. The Warden beat a quick retreat.
Onager stood up and measured his height against that of our new companion. He was perhaps an inch or so taller but several stone lighter. Our new cell mate was solid and broad enough that the floor creaked with every footfall. Lucian and I chose opposite corners and resolved to stay well out of the way.
Onager threw his shoulders back and took the step or two needed to confront the newcomer. With customary speed and accuracy his rock-hard fist slammed into the stranger’s face with a dull sound. The stranger fell back a pace and then slapped Onager across the side of the head so hard that they must have heard it up on the Wardens’ level. That was when things got interesting. The slap had been mostly reflex and Onager got in two or three more good blows before the newcomer had really worked out what was going on. One went to the head and might have done some good. Any strike to the body was surely wasted. There was so much padding there that Onager’s punches failed even to make a sound. Then the stranger decided to up the ante and smashed a fist solidly down across Onager’s jaw, staggering him. He kicked out and hit his opponent solidly in the stomach, a futile gesture. The newcomer waded forward a pace and backhanded him flatly across the face, knocking him into the bars.
I will say this for Onager: he was determined. He bounced straight back and laid at least four hard fists on his antagonist, mostly around the face. He received a meaty palm that struck under the chin and hurled him into the wall again. Both of them had bloody noses by now, and they would surely have every colour of bruise once the morning came. The prisoners across the way and on one side were cheering, mostly for Onager. On the other side, Gaki watched narrowly, hunched like a spider in the corner of his cell. As for me, I have never seen violence as a spectator sport, and this was violence of the crudest and dullest kind.
There was more of the same, and Lucian and I had to run ourselves ragged about the little cell to avoid catching any of the fallout. In the end there was no real winner, although I would say Onager got the worst of it. He ended up sitting in one corner, panting and bleeding and spitting out the occasional tooth. The new arrival, on seeing that he had mostly given up his attack, sat down across from him. A pair of small, beady eyes, mounted in a fat, flat square face, fixed on Lucian and myself.
“So,” came the voice. “Either of you two boys want to try anything?”
There was a long silence from everybody. Even Onager stopped spitting and looked up with a horrified expression on his face. The spectators in the other cells gave us an appreciative hush.
It was clearly a woman’s voice. The stranger was massively built, huge and sloped like a mountain, sporting a flat face with small features, threatening as a fist. And besides, we were all, to a man, men. Nobody had even considered the matter to be in question. And yet that voice, though low for a woman, left no room for doubt.
Lucian and I assured her that neither of us had anything we wanted to try.
“We’re both the quiet type,” I explained nervously. If she had slapped me lightly across the cheek she would have put my jaw out of its socket. “I’m Stefan Advani, and this is Lucian Corek. The gentleman you were fighting goes by the name of Onager.”
She stared at me for longer than I was comfortable with. “You’re having me on. Nobody really talks like that.”
“I’m having you on?” I said before I could stop it. It was true, though, that I had been unconsciously been giving her my very best Cultured Tones, brought out when I was particularly frightened by something. Her ill-tempered stare bore into me. To break the gathering tension and defuse any attempt on my life, I offered, “So, what should we call you, Miss?”
I think the Miss was a mistake. I probably came closer than I ever knew to getting stuffed through the cracks in the floor. After a glowering moment, however, she said, “Hermione,” and then, “Something amusing you?” with deliberate provocation, because my face must have been a picture. I shook my head silently.
There followed an hour without conversation as both Onager and Hermione nursed their wounds. After that, the big woman wanted to know when we were being fed, and I plucked up the courage to explain to her how things worked around here, which went a way towards bridging the gap between us. In any other place I would fear repercussions, but Onager had been dethroned, and until he was reinstated he would not be in any position to order Lucian and myself around. Thankfully, Hermione was new to the Island and we guessed that she would not understand that she would be expected to bully us in his place. We had a few weeks’ grace, we decided, before we were under anyone’s yoke again.
There was another lengthy silence of readjustment, as all four of us reset our mental parameters, and then the question that was burning in my mind finally forced its way out of me.
“I’ve got to say I’m surprised,” I said. “You’re only the second woman I’ve seen on the Island. It begs the question.”
This drew a fair amount of speculation, because for most of my audience, Hermione was the first woman they had seen there. Hermione herself turned a surly scowl on me, an expression that her face was tailor-made for.
“I wasn’t good enough for them,” she said sourly.
“For whom?” I enquired politely.
“There was me, and there was another woman, and they took us up to the top level, and we stood around for hours while the men got put away, and then this bitch came out to look us over. You could tell straight away there was something wrong with her, like she was poison. She had some kind of eunuch with her, some flabby little baldy man. They both looked us over, and the other woman got taken in. This bitch looked at me, and she said all kinds of things that I wouldn’t take from anyone. If there hadn’t been guards there I’d have had her. I’d have put her through the wall…” She stopped, thinking. Her face, when not being actively used for speaking or scowling, simply relaxed into a characteristic sullen brooding. No trace of her thoughts (and Hermione’s thoughts were complex and deep) ever showed on it.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have,” she eventually conceded. “There was something about the bitch that I wouldn’t have wanted to touch.”
Of course I recognised both ‘bitch’ and ‘eunuch’ from my own encounter.
“She said that I wasn’t a woman in her book. I was…” She stopped again, obviously unwilling to repeat the criticisms. “She said that if I looked that much like a man I should go and live with the men.”
“So there are other women prisoners on the Island?” I pressed. I had the full attention of everyone in earshot. Hermione just shrugged, though, and Lucian took the chance to put in that there were certainly women on the Island, only not very many, and they were all kept separate at the top, for the personal pleasures of the Wardens.
“I suppose I’m for the personal pleasure of the prisoners, then,” Hermione said with grim satisfaction. “I’ll take personal pleasure in breaking the neck of anyone that tries.” She was clearly getting the hang of the way things worked.
I learned later that there were about fifty women on the Island at any one time, which worked out to around five per cent of the inmate population. I have three theories to explain this: women are genuinely less prone to criminal activities; alternatively the crimes they commit are not generally covered by laws or punished by exile; thirdly they are as venal and nasty as men, but just get away with it more often. I leave you to make up your own mind.
The general conversation in the surrounding cells had turned to the subject of how lucky the Wardens were, what with women on tap and capital punishment at their fingertips, when a new voice spoke up. It was Gaki’s.
“I am afraid the Wardens have no more access to the fairer sex than you do,” he said airily. “The women here are the personal property of the Governor’s mistress.”
Hermione gave Gaki a level look. “How do you know, then?”
“Oh, I hear things,” he said, idly. “I get around.”
“Who’s the Governor’s mistress?” someone asked, and Gaki pointed out that Hermione had already described her.
“She is known as Lady Ellera,” he said softly, although his voice must have carried six cells in every direction. “She is the one person in the Island that I would not like to have as an enemy. Perhaps I keep quiet and cooperate with the Wardens to avoid attracting her notice and displeasure. The women are her domain. She has uses for them. She is a scientist of the flesh, you understand. She is one of those whose study is themselves.” He saw my twitch. “Yes, Stefan, I see you have met others of the trade. Her work requires materiel, to provide for her treatments, and that materiel is kept penned above for when she needs renewal and refinement. She may have insulted you, and despised you,” he said to Hermione, “but I am sure that you will live far longer here, in misery, than you would in comfort up there. Lady Ellera’s women slaves are treated with all kindness. It is often so with sacrificial victims, or so I am told.”
There was a chill silence after Gaki’s words. Only Hermione, who did not yet know his horrible reputation, looked him in the eye. She was the only person not to find something terrible in his gaze. Fear was absent from her make-up.
She was imprisoned for the simple crime of murder. She had killed her employer, his foreman and two jeering onlookers after some minor dispute about pay. It was not that she was short-tempered, anything but. A woman with an ogre’s strength and looks, she had taken a thousand blows until the thousand-and-first had finally triggered her deep-buried anger. Within the bizarre and artificial structure of the Island she fitted perfectly.