Two of the three chandeliers had been lit, driving most of the shadows from around the edges of the throne room. Mother Rebecca sat, fur-draped as ever. There was no sign of Siân this time. Elizabeth would have felt safer knowing where she was.
Gwynedd was standing, pointing to a carved wooden panel where a window should have been; a design of interwoven snakes. Next to her, looking along her arm, stood a child. Elizabeth’s heart beat twice before recognition hit. Dressed in a yellow smock, hair clean and brushed out to its full length, it seemed the slight figure of a girl. Then it turned and she saw Tinker’s face staring back at her. He didn’t run to her and wrap his arms around her waist. But he yearned to. She could see it. And so could they. Gwynedd looked to Mother Rebecca, who nodded.
“We’ve been getting to know each other,” she said, as Gwynedd led the boy from the room.
No threat had been spoken. But no threat could have been more compelling.
“Where’s he being kept?”
“Here with me. On the Unicorn. I told you I’d look after your boy.”
“Is that why they’ve told me so many secrets?”
“Sit next to me,” Mother Rebecca said, gesturing to the stool on the right hand of the throne. It was the place where Gwynedd usually sat.
Elizabeth didn’t move.
The queen closed her eyes, fatigued it seemed. “When two crows meet, each becomes the other’s puzzle,” she said. “We hide our intentions. Yet we may be an answer, each for the other. This is my hope. The boy lets me say this. I know you won’t hurt me, when he’s in my care.”
“You’d harm a child?” Elizabeth asked.
The queen’s eyes opened. “I’d slaughter ten children if it saved a hundred more. Now sit!”
This time, Elizabeth obeyed, and from this new angle saw that a pistol rested on the furs in Mother Rebecca’s lap. The emblem of the turquoise leaping hare inlaid in the stock was unmistakable. It was Elizabeth’s own weapon, taken from her by Siân when they were on the Iceland Queen.
Mother Rebecca regarded Elizabeth’s gaze. “It’s a pretty thing,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“My father gave it to me.”
“You’re attached to it?”
“He told me to always keep it near. And to use it without regret.”
“Siân would say your father had selfish reasons for what he did. And Gwynedd would say there was good in him.”
“What do you say?” Elizabeth asked.
“That it doesn’t matter which is true. It only matters what people think. Did your father teach you to do magic in that circus?”
“Yes.”
“Real magic or tricks?”
“There’s no difference,” said Elizabeth. “It only matters what people think.”
Rebecca stroked the gun. The skin over her finger joints was cracked, as if it would no longer stretch with her movement. One of the cracks was weeping.
“Could your father catch a bullet from the air?” she asked.
“I never saw him do it. But he could make me disappear and my brother appear where I’d been.”
“You had a brother?”
“The audience believed so.”
“A brother, a father, a rich man who desired you – it seems your life was full of men. Did you have lovers?”
Elizabeth felt herself blushing.
Rebecca nodded. “I watch you, my child. I see you attracted by the freedom you could have with us. It pulls you. But I see you also attached to the world of men. You think to yourself, surely you could have both – that not all men are oppressors. You think of your father and your lover and hope that others might be so good. Don’t marvel that I know what’s in your heart. Understanding is the power that’s kept me here.” She patted the arm of the throne. “How else could I have done all this? My granddaughter, Gwynedd, thinks there are men who might be reformed.”
“And Siân?”
“Siân is of a different mind. She knows evil in the way a child knows to say the sky is blue. It is a learned thing. Believed but not understood. How old were you, Elizabeth, when you ran from your home?”
“Fourteen. But not all men are like that.”
“Some have a veil of civility. You’ve glimpsed behind it. But I’ve seen more than you. When I was fourteen, I lived behind that veil. I witnessed the animal nature of men – that part of them they might keep hidden. There are five of us still alive who saw what I’m going to tell you. The others wouldn’t believe it. I am the warrior queen. I am purity itself. They’d kill you if you tried to tell them.
“The Unicorn was once a floating brothel. This hall is where the men would come to choose a girl. They’d sit just where we are now, on this very throne, like kings. We were paraded out, each to take a turn across the floor. They’d choose and pay and we’d be taken and done with in whatever way they desired. One man ruled the Unicorn. All we earned went to him. He called himself the Crocodile and had crocodile skin tattooed all over his body. I don’t know what his real name was. He kept a twenty-eight gun frigate standing a hundred yards off. Girls were safer than piracy, he’d say. He didn’t need to chase the money. It came to him. Men wanted to hand him their gold.
“One day the Crocodile took me for his own pleasure. Afterwards, when he was asleep, I found the knife he kept hidden in his boot and I slit his throat with it. He tried to call for help. But I’d cut deep into his windpipe. All that came out were bubbles of blood. I watched him die. Then I took his pistols. When I pointed them at the guards, they just put up their hands. We had control of the ship. But the frigate was still there. It could have sunk us in one volley. The Unicorn was a hulk even then. The masts must have gone years before.
“So we cleaned and dressed the Crocodile, tied a cravat to hide the wound and sat him in a whaleboat – as if he were alive. Then we rowed it over to the frigate, just like it was him ordering us to pull the oars.
“It’s their weakness, Elizabeth. Their fatal flaw. They think us so far below them that we couldn’t do the things we’ve done. The sailors helped us up onto the deck. Imagine it. They reached down and lifted us on board. It was far from their dreams that we might be strong enough to fight them. And they, so complacent from years of drinking and rutting and taking money. I shot one of them in the fat of his stomach. It was a bad wound, Elizabeth. He rolled on the ground, screaming. They could have rushed us. We had three loaded guns between us and there were ten of them. At close quarters they would have had us. But their man is dying in front of them, and they’re all imagining it’s them next. They put up their hands and we had them.
“He kept screaming till there was no more strength in him. And after that he just looked from face to face of his crewmates, eyes wide. It took him five hours to die.
“That day, I told the others we’d no more be the property of men. That was the beginning. The first plan was to run the brothel for ourselves. But some of the men who came, they saw what had happened and they tried to take over. They held one of the girls under a knife and said to the rest that we should yield. I shot her through the forehead. And once she was down, I shot him too.
“I tell you so you’ll understand. This is how we knew that we couldn’t have men among us. There was a slave trader who’d come from time to time, bringing new girls. We sold him our prisoners. Men kept coming to us, thinking the Unicorn was still a brothel. Each one we took captive and sold them to the slaver. With that money we bought weapons, until we were strong enough.”
“Slaves,” Elizabeth said, horrified.
“Are you shocked?”
Elizabeth didn’t answer directly. Rebecca’s suffering and the barbarity of the brothel keeper so appalled her that her mind recoiled from picturing the events. But the story carried the power of sincerity. She had no doubt that it was true.
“I’m sad,” Elizabeth said, at last. “No child should see such things.”
“I was never a child. Besides, you’ve seen the same darkness.”
“I ran from it.”
“So would I. But there was nowhere to run. Nor for the others. That’s what the Nation is – a place for us to stand and face the enemy. I’ve built it with these hands, Elizabeth. And this heart. It’s taken all that I am.”
She reached out. Elizabeth took her hand. If Rebecca had been a slave trader, who in the same situation would have chosen differently? The other paths would have led to death or slavery for herself and her friends.
They sat that way in silence. The air had cooled and freshened over the days that she’d been on Freedom Island. But in the throne room a charcoal brazier radiated warmth, making the air stuffy.
Rebecca’s grip on her hand tightened. “The time of hiding will soon be over. We’ll announce ourselves. They’ll see us and quake. By the ferocity of their attack, you’ll know the depth of their fear. But we’ll be strong. There’s a ship coming to us – the beginning of a trade route. We’ll have new kinds of weapons. Then, should all the worlds of men combine, they’ll not be strong enough to defeat us.”
“Where will the ship come from?”
“From the metal works of Patagonia.”
Elizabeth suppressed a shudder. Contending claims by different member nations had prevented the southernmost stretch of South America from becoming part of the Gas-Lit Empire. Little was known of those lands, but they’d become bywords for barbarity.
Mother Rebecca bowed her head, as if to rest from the weight of the story she’d told. The skin of her hand felt like sandpaper. Elizabeth wanted to be rid of her touch but couldn’t bring herself to let go.
Even in the very centre of the island, it was possible to sense the motion of the waves. There was more sound to it than movement. A low reverberation creaked through the wooden hull of the Unicorn.
“Show me some magic,” Mother Rebecca said.
At last Elizabeth’s hand was released. She looked around the throne room. When it was a brothel there would have been playing cards and dice and cigarettes and wine glasses. All the usual props of the close-up conjuror. But after what Mother Rebecca had told her, it felt wrong to ask for any of them. Instead she stepped to the brazier and selected a charred twig from the floor.
“I’ll need a flame for this magic,” she said, reaching to twist a candle free from one of the chandeliers. “And I need paper. Any small scrap will do.”
Mother Rebecca shifted, sitting forwards and delving under the furs. Which is when Elizabeth set up the trick, dipping her thumb next to the candle wick and pressing a crumb of charcoal into the hot wax as it solidified on her skin.
It was done by the time the old woman had found a leaf of notepaper.
Elizabeth placed the candle on the floor between them. Then she took the paper, holding it up next to the charcoal twig for Mother Rebecca to see. “This is soul-reading magic,” she said. “I want you to think about an object or a person that is dear to you. Use your mind to picture it. Your thoughts will come to me through the flame of that candle.”
Mother Rebecca nodded, then closed her eyes. An expression of concentration formed on her face. “It is a person,” she said, then opened her eyes again. Her gaze was suddenly so intense that it took Elizabeth a moment to compose herself.
Moving deliberately so that Mother Rebecca could see what was happening, she positioned her hands behind her back. “The answer has come to me. I’m writing it now on the paper.”
After a moment of fumbling, pretending to do just that, she brought the paper around to the front of her again, holding it up in one hand so Mother Rebecca could only see one of the blank faces. With the other hand she cast away the twig. From thereon the trick was simple enough. She would ask the name. Then, having heard it, she would secretly write it with the grain of charcoal stuck to her thumb on the side of the paper hidden from her audience’s view.
“Who were you thinking of?” she asked.
Mother Rebecca said: “The woman who is to lead this Nation when I’m gone.”
“And will that be Gwynedd or Siân?”
“I do not yet know.”
Afterwards, Elizabeth would think about the change that had come over the guards; their new deference towards her. “You saw Mother Rebecca alone?” one of them had whispered as they descended the steps towards the boardway. Elizabeth hadn’t answered.
Her mind was turning over the strange interview, which had seemed as much courtship as inquisition. The revelation of slave trading had shocked her. But more shocking still was the understanding that, in Mother Rebecca’s place, pushed to such extremes and desperate to save her friends, she would have done the same.
Her thoughts shifted to the strange way in which the interview had concluded. It had been in Elizabeth’s power to write the name of either granddaughter. One of them was too eager for combat. The other, too prone to compromise. If Rebecca believed in the power of soul-reading magic, Elizabeth might have pushed her one way or the other. Siân would surely drive the Nation towards an outward-facing war. She would hunt down enemy ships until all men had been driven from the ocean. Gwynedd would compromise away the hegemony of the seas. Mother Rebecca had been right about one thing. The nations of men would strive to restore what they thought of as a natural balance. Gwynedd’s negotiation would become a whittling away of power. In twenty years who would remember what the Sargassans had built? The dream of a place where women could choose their own destiny would have been snuffed out.
But Mother Rebecca might not believe in magic. If so, any name that Elizabeth wrote would have been seen as a political statement. Indeed, the entire episode could have been another theatrical charade, a disguised test to determine Elizabeth’s true character.
All this had flashed through her mind as she held up the paper, her thumb poised to write. To act on impulse is said to be a weakness. But to be able to act on instinct is taken as a strength. In reality the two were the same. They could only be judged by outcome.
Elizabeth offered the leaf of paper. Mother Rebecca took it, turning it in her hand, over and over. Both sides were blank. There’d been a moment when Elizabeth thought she read sorrow in the creases of the old woman’s face. Then her expression had become one of terrible fatigue.
“I’m tired,” she’d said. The gesture of dismissal was little more than a tremor of her desiccated hand.
They’d reached the last narrow stretch of boardwalk leading to the cluster of huts when a messenger caught up with them. Panting for breath, she held out a slip of paper, which the guards took. Elizabeth watched their expressions change as they read. There was a moment when they each seemed to be waiting for the other to speak. Neither would meet her eyes. Then the one holding the paper said: “We’re to lock you in the stockade. I’m so sorry.”