Capitalising on my high stock within the Island, I chose my next scribing episode to put my cunning plan into operation. I was being watched over by Midds, who would at least probably not have me killed if he found me out. Midds was a man who tried to live each day with a minimum of effort. He had no zeal for his job and no great bitterness to take out on his charges. While I scribbled away he leant against the corridor wall and smoked his handmade herbal rollups. The vice was widespread amongst the Wardens. It brought calm and occasional visions, and was slightly addictive. The weeds themselves grew in the swamps, and boat-crews kept an eye out for them.
I worked away for about an hour, and then I called out to the Warden, who shambled in without much curiosity.
“Want me to sharpen your pencil for you?” he asked idly.
“Actually, I’ve had a thought,” I told him. True enough, although the relevant thought had been had some days before. “This is going to take me forever. I mean, look at this.” I showed him a representative page. Midds’ religious education had made him a fair reader, but Old School Shorthand was beyond him.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he said.
“I need someone for me to dictate to,” I told him. “If I could just read this out to someone, rather than having to do it all out longhand, I’d get this done in half the time.” Actually, I honestly don’t think that it would have made that much difference. It sounded reasonable, though, and Midds was not to know any different.
“I don’t know about that,” he said slowly.
“The Governor is very keen to read these. He’s been sitting on them for years waiting for someone to come along and translate them. Now I’m here he really doesn’t want to have to wait a moment more than he has to.” I wasn’t sure how the Wardens viewed the Governor, but he relayed his commands via the Marshal, who scared all hell out of them.
Midds looked at me suspiciously and I think he knew some trick was being pulled. As I say, though, he was not a man to exert himself needlessly. Getting me a copyist was easier than arguing it over with me, plus the outside chance of displeasing the Governor. I could virtually see the calculations on his face.
“Well, what scribe?” he said eventually. “The Governor wanted you, after all. He doesn’t want any old sod to write it down for him.”
“I know some of the other prisoners who have clerical backgrounds. They’ll be trained to write neatly and well. Better than me, to be honest. At the Academy we had people to copy down our writings; I’m not used to doing it all myself.” Any devious plan should be at least seven parts truth to three parts fabrication.
“Well…” Midds weighed the odds one final time and came down on the side of least resistance. “Who are you after?”
“Shon Roseblade. He has a scar from here to here.”
Midds did not know him, but he was already won over so it was a small step to convince him to accompany me to the machine room and the workshop. I found Lucian and asked directions, and was led to Shon, who was sweeping a floor. He glanced up warily as I approached with a Warden in tow.
“There’s a job for you,” Midds told him. “Got to be better than this. Come on.”
On the way back to my little study I explained the deal to him and he understood instantly. He grinned at me behind Midds’ back and acknowledged that an Academy education was clearly good for something.
The irony was that Shon’s handwriting was a good deal easier and clearer than mine. In the shadier end of the legal profession he had seldom been given access to secretaries and did most of his own writs. As I worked my way through Trethowan’s dense code, he put down my careful sentences in an elegant hand. Midds kept out of our way for most of the time, and actually left us for about an hour to go and find something to eat. Shon and I caught up on our respective histories. I explained to him about the Outing and the Great Disaster. He told me about a man on his stretch who had gone violently mad and killed a Warden. Everyone in that cell had been shot. On the upside, Shon had won three meals in an Outing of his own. Thusly we exchanged all the minutiae of prison life.
A day or so later I received a neatly written slip telling me that the Governor was pleased by the improved quality of my work. I kept the slip with my pirate copies of Trethowan’s work and my own burgeoning autobiography.
After the second successful demand for a copyist to help me, it became standard practice. Word got around the Wardens, and after a week or two whichever man was supervising me would just march me out into the machine room and let me pick my companion. I chose Shon a lot of the time, and Lucian occasionally, and Thelwel. All of these could write well and Lucian, the forger, had extraordinarily beautiful handwriting. He would have made so much more money by exploiting his talents legitimately. There were other copyists as well, mostly men to whom I owed debts from various Outings. I made sure that I only bet with men who had shown me their prowess with the pen. This was not hard. As soon as it became known that Stefan Advani could save someone a day’s labour, inmates were queuing down the halls to prove their calligraphy to me.
I finally seemed to have found my niche on the Island. Change, though, as Trethowan often stressed, is endemic in every situation.
*
I had another chess session with Peter soon enough, which was my cultural equivalent of a night at the opera. (This is a disputed subject, so I should make it clear that I am quite fond of the opera.)
“Has the Marshal got some terminal disease?” I asked him as we set the board up.
“Hah?” Peter glanced up.
“You’re whistling.”
“Oh, that.” He permitted himself a lopsided smile. “I’ve had a holiday.”
“Back home? I thought that you had… reasons for leaving.” I still had no idea what those reasons were and was always looking for an opportunity to bring the subject up.
“Oh, Shadrapar is quite definitely closed to me,” he agreed. “The world has other places, though,” he added loftily. He reached into his uniform tunic to produce his familiar flask and a couple of little metal beakers. “Try some of this,” he suggested. “One of the Wardens brews it. Evil stuff.”
I waited politely until he had poured us each a cupful of the sludge-coloured liquid. “So,” I prompted, but he was already lifting his cup and it would have been churlish not to join him.
“So,” I said again, after a sip, and then I coughed quite a lot and demanded to know what he had just poisoned me with. That drink was the Gaki of the alcoholic world.
“It depends on what Harkeri gets to ferment,” Peter explained. “This is a good batch, on the basis that we can still see.”
I recalled the balding, solid Harkeri, apprentice tinkerer. He had not seemed the type to be distilling moonshine. A sombre, studious man, I had thought, and said so.
“He’s a religious nut,” Peter explained expansively. “Have you ever heard of the Agrarians? Apparently, they have serious rituals for which getting solemnly and devoutly drunk is all part of it. They fiddle with their brains so they can drink forever without falling over. Harkeri’s the quietest drunk you ever saw. He says it gives him visions. It turns you blind, but then you’re supposed to be able to see something he calls ‘the Geometry of God’, all these weird lines and shapes. After coming here it didn’t take long for him to start peddling the stuff in exchange for whatever was going. He’s all right, once you get to know him. Tell the truth, I prefer the quiet ones.”
I took another sip, which probably did bring me closer to God, in the sense of accelerating my liver failure. “So,” I managed eventually, for the third time, “where were you travelling?”
Peter held out his hands with two pieces in them. “White starts,” he suggested. I knew full well that both pieces would be black, but could not be bothered to keep calling him on it. As luck would have it, therefore, Peter had the first move.
“I got myself boat duty,” he told me. “Don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. Not exactly safe, but worth it for the fresh air. I really didn’t realise I’d hate being cooped up with people so much. I might have stayed to face the music if I’d known. Anyway, you remember the Marshal’s little toy dinghy, when we were coming in? Well, the collecting boats are a bit like that, but much, much bigger. Most of that is the tanks: there are these great big empty tanks to suck the water into, plus some kind of machine to do the sucking. There’s three things that stick down into the water and make the boat go somehow. From what I’ve been hearing, you’re the new expert on things mechanical, so maybe you could tell me.”
I confessed that I had absolutely no idea and referred him to Father Sulplice.
“Anyway,” he said. “You’ve got all this, which takes up most of the room on the boat, and then you’ve got a kind of a plate stuck on the front of all the other machines which has about five different-coloured lights on it, and basically, what you do, is you cruise about the swamp until most of the lights light up, and then you take in some water into the tanks until the lights go off. I assume they’re detecting things in the water, but I really am happy in my complete ignorance of the subject. So, there’s me, and three of your lot. We’re out there on our own for at least a day and a night, that being how long it takes to get everything properly filled, at a minimum. Every so often we need to go somewhere overgrown and everyone gets out and clears the way with sticks. Then there’s getting food, where you basically eat what you find. They always send someone out who’s gone before and knows what you can eat and what you can’t.”
“I’ll bet it changes a lot,” I broke in. “I’ll wager the boat veterans find they have to keep changing their diet.”
“That’s right,” Peter acknowledged. “One of them was saying just that to me. How’d you know?”
“An education’s good for something,” I said airily, thinking of Trethowan. “Did you see anything out there? Anything unusual?”
“You’re thinking of those huts and things we saw on the way in,” he guessed, although actually I had nearly forgotten. “Web-children, was it? No, to be honest. I heard plenty of stories from the others. Tribes of gill-people, snakes with human faces, stones that could speak, all the usual. I think they were just putting the frighteners on me. The new guy, you know.”
“All quiet then?”
“Oh, plenty of things tried to kill me,” Peter assured me, as if to say that a day was not complete without at least one attempt on his life. He then regaled me with a story about something like a lobster, large as his boat, which had decided to make snacks of Peter and his crew. I was unsure how much to believe of this, because he was prone to exaggeration and Trethowan had never mentioned anything like it. On the other hand, the world was patently stranger than I knew, and apparently getting stranger all the time. Giant lobsters were surely not an unthinkable complication. In Peter’s tale, they dealt with the threat by backing the boat into it at top speed, whereby whatever mechanism propelled the boat proved unpleasant enough to the lobster to drive it away. As we skipped our pieces over the board he went on to tell of the lagoon he and his crew had discovered, uncharted by man. The eyeless monsters had raised their heads from the waters there and called to each other, washing their flippers through the waves, a waltz of the blind never before seen by human eyes. The land around the Island was filled with such secret wonders. The Governors of the Island had long given up mapping the boundaries of land and water, for such maps were never good the second time round. It was Trethowan’s promise: life was indefatiguable.
Peter made the expeditions sound very attractive, and I’d already had thoughts in that direction. I would get to see the sky, after all. I would get to see what Trethowan had been so impressed by. I made up my mind to at least give it a try: another deviation from my usual character. My life on the Island was changing me even as the world changed outside.
Peter then diverted me with further tales of what he had seen away from the island; huge amphibious monsters with man-size jaws that closed only on waterweed; swimming things like scorpions with paddle tails preying on fish caught in the suction of the punps; serpents wth fur, like limbless otters that had abandoned the land forever. It seemed to me, with my limited knowledge of the subject, that the world was casting up every design from its past to see what fitted best. Beyond this there were the tales which Peter himself doubted, told to him by prisoners who had been out many times. Cities drowned in the mire, so that a boat had to pick its way through the rooftops; places of death where invisible rays from ancient machines killed any living thing with blindness and sickness; and of course the endless tales of things in the swamp that built and spoke. The web-children, always the web-children. They were said to be like fish, but others said like frogs, and still others said that they could pass for humans if they tried, except for their eyes, too wide and never blinking. Peter thought they were probably a tribe of feral people, cut off from Shadrapar generations ago, perhaps even escaped prisoners. I was more hesitant in committing myself. Trethowan had pushed back a lot of horizons.
Picture me there, then. I am enjoying a game of chess with my friend Peter Drachmar. There is a drink to hand, which improves with the tasting. I have a life that breaks up the monotony with regular intervals of study, such as I enjoy. I have a few other associates whose company is tolerable. You might say that I had rather fallen on my feet, for someone condemned to lifelong imprisonment.
Needless to say, all this was to go down the pan in short order and I have only the finer side of my nature to blame. As I have mentioned, whenever my reluctant valour creeps from hiding, disaster almost always follows.
*
There was another Outing. That was where the trouble started. Needless to say I was better prepared for this one, and came to the great racing meet with stock in trade: to wit, three copying sessions and a lizard. The lizard had already bitten me three times, and so I hoped that it was a goer.
With a basic grasp of the proceedings, and no Onager, it was a pleasant occasion. Word was around that I was a hero of the Great Disaster, had the power to grant favours, was in with the Governor and had at least one Warden eating out of the palm of my hand. I was hailed as a close friend by a number of people I had never even met.
I had wanted to seek out Thelwel, but Hermione was already monopolising him. Instead, I found a race that was being organised and entered my runner, who bit me once more for luck. Whenever anyone tried to bet with me I first demanded proof of handwriting, which amused the other prisoners no end. The race did not go quite as planned in the offing, on the basis that my reptile decided to attack one of its fellows and ignored the bait completely. Not only did I lose the race, but one of the other prisoners was complaining that I had fixed his lizard by setting my own onto it. Shortly thereafter I lost my racer, whose form I had begun to doubt, on a side-bet. From that point on I decided to play the odds and try to make a few decent wins on other inmates’ beasts. It was surprisingly like playing chess with Peter. I sat there assured of my superior intellect and made the most calculated judgement calls, and I lost everything except my shirt. It was lamentable. There was obviously something missing in my analysis of the situation, because I was being inexplicably taken for a ride by men who would have been unable to master basic calculus. It began to eat into my good humour after a while, having lost three scribing sessions to people I was not overly fond of. One of them had not actually been all that literate, and I suspected that I would be doing the writing at that session, with an idle audience of one. That was when I went in search of better company. The wise man knows when to quit.
Better company was hard to find. Lucian was in the midst of a bit of scorpion-baiting, and Thelwel was still talking to Hermione. All would have been so different if I had just settled down to watch the races, but they irked me, and given that there was nobody I wanted to talk to who was free to talk to me, I decided to call it a night.
So, I was out of the storeroom, thinking that if the Marshal should make another appearance, at least I would be out of his way. I was not the only wanderer. Some men had gone for private liaisons of their own, others were just stretching their legs. Perhaps, I thought, I will talk to Gaki. At least he can keep up an intelligent conversation when he wants to.
That was when I heard the scuffling ahead. I froze, thinking it was the Marshal, and then unfroze, because I could see the flash of prison greys in the gloom. Just a couple of inmates having a disagreement, I decided.
As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light I saw that there were three there, and that the two larger were struggling to restrain the smaller. I recognised the two attackers as Tallan and his nameless, shock-headed friend. The lack of Onager had obviously not dampened their enthusiasm for bullying.
I was angry and tired: a good place from which to make bad decisions. Also, the attention paid to me by other prisoners, regarding the services I could provide, had gifted me with an inflated sense of my own importance in this closed-off little world.
Their victim started a renewed bout of fighting and Tallan slammed a fist in that drew a grunt of pain. The unfortunate was half the size of either of them, no bigger than I was. Then they had thrown the poor creature down, and it was plain to me that they meant grievous bodily harm at the least, murder at the worst.
And so, in strides Stefan Advani the avenger, less to see justice done than because I loathed Tallan and the other one, and I had the hilarious misconception that I could do something to help,
“Hey!” was my battle cry. “Stop that! Hey!” It struck fear into them, I’m sure.
I’d got too close already and Tallan turned, frowning, and backhanded me to the floor. His fellow took the opportunity to put the boot into their primary target, prompting a cry of pain that stopped all three of us for a second, a weirdly familiar revelation. This voice, from a more conventional vessel than Hermione’s, nonetheless also belonged to a woman. It was plainly the first that any of us knew of it.
Tallan spat contemptuously at me, dismissing my presence as both surplus to requirements and irrelevant, and his friend hoisted their victim up for a better look. All the little irritations of the night suddenly condensed within me and I was abruptly resigned to what I would do next. I lurched to my feet and focused my inner energies. When I had them in a tight ball in the centre of my mind, as I had done so many times before, I reached out and pushed with them. It brought a wave of nostalgia for the old times with my academic colleagues, when we used to practise this almost as a hobby.
I was used to exerting my mind against my friend Helman, who would be pushing back just as hard against me. It had been like punching a brick wall. He had been a man of extraordinary willpower, far greater than mine. When I pushed my energies onto the shock-headed man I just felt a horrible giving sensation as I smashed into his unprepared brain. It was like clutching a stone and feeling it crumble to mould under your fingers. The shock-headed man gave out a dreadful inhalation, a harsh gasp for air that would do him no good, and then he convulsed once and flopped onto his back.
Harro. His name was Harro. I remember now.
Tallan looked at his victim, at me and at his friend’s body, and then ran for it. I think that I must have looked quite imposing, with my face a death-mask and my body thrumming with guilt. All the backwash of my mental energies was coursing through me, and I was aware that I had killed. It was not as though I had run him through with a knife. That would have been circumstantial in comparison. I had felt his mind collapse beneath my touch. If you have never done this, you can never know just how hideous a feeling it is.
The next thing I knew with any certainty was that their erstwhile prey was standing before me. Possibly there were words but I was trying to keep my brain together and didn’t hear them. A moment later my eyes focused and I saw before me a woman wearing ill-fitting convict greys. She was small, dark, with a fashionably heart-shaped face and the expensive beauty of the rich, now her hair was not cast forwards to hide it. Possibly she was trying to thank me; possibly she was unsure whether I had actually helped her or just turned up in time to see Harro expire of natural causes.
The obvious ramifications were hammering into me. I was a murderer. Whatever I might say about false imprisonment, I had earned my place here now. All this recrimination stopped me paying much attention to whatever she was saying, and then it was too late.
The Marshal was there, at last, with armed Wardens. He was obviously unsure of what to make of the situation. He stepped forwards to take charge and then saw something in my face that he did not like.
“Take her,” he snapped, after an uncharacteristic pause. The woman was grabbed by two or three Wardens and dragged off. She did not even try to struggle, but she did look back at me.
The Marshal looked down at Harro’s body, upon which there was not a mark. I had come to my senses by then and started backing away. At every pace I thought he would call me back, perhaps even have me shot. Instead I got clean away, although I could feel him staring at me until I turned the corner.
When I rejoined the other prisoners, as we began to trek back to our cells, there was a difference. Tallan had been telling stories about me. He had no inkling of what it was that I had actually done, but he knew I had done it. Most of the prisoners gave me plenty of space, and did not meet my eyes.
That night, I was chased in nightmares by the sensation of Harro’s mind folding in on itself, collapsing like a house of cards.