The Silent Isle

by Nicholas Anderson

  "You promise," she said and sighed, she spun on her heel and in half a moment she was out the door.

  After dinner and conferring with Elias, Dane went to his room. Perhaps it had been an office for the colony’s original occupants. It formed part of the ring of buildings built against the inside of the palisade. It housed a desk, a shelf, several chairs, and a fireplace. Bailus had ordered Dirk and Tanlin, the young men who had manned the ballista while Dane’s party stormed the beach, to move in a bed and start a fire. The fire had mostly burned down by the time Dane entered but he did not bother to build it back up. He sat down on the bed and looked out the single window into the night. The reflection of the flames on the glass gave the impression the world outside was burning.

  Burning. Burning? Why hadn’t the settlement been razed and the ships burned? Why did this mission make him think of collecting duck eggs for his father’s table? Thinking of eggs made him think of food, and with the thought of food the words of that maniac voice sprung into his head again. Not that they’d ever left him alone. They had plagued him all afternoon. During dinner he found it hard to concentrate on his conversation with his soldiers. Once he’d stopped midsentence while giving Forsythe instructions about tomorrow as the words jumped into his mind again. He saw them as though they were painted there across the inside of his skull. Painted in blood.

  The voice. The words. They were things one heard in a nightmare. But he had heard them while wide awake. How was it no one else had heard them, then? Had he only imagined it? He had hallucinated once, when he was half the age he was now and nearly dead of fever. But that had felt surreal even then. This had been different. It had been clear and sharp, as simple and real as the cold light of day. His men had heard him call for help, heard his fists pounding the door. But they had not heard the voice. Impossible. Unless. Unless the voice had been in his head. In his head, but not of his head. Someone else’s voice inside his head. Was it really so unbelievable?

  The enchanters back home did a brisk business in bindings, spells to give you control over another person. Get that girl to fall in love with you. Influence the way your father writes up his will. All it took was the right spell and the right amount of gold. Was not the basic idea to plant a thought in someone else’s mind? By extension, could someone be so powerful in this art they could project whole sentences, scream whole sentences, into your head?

  Is that what they had done to him? But why? To what end? What kind of conqueror left the homes and belongings of his victims untouched and instead threw his boast into the head of their intended deliverer? How would you find such an enemy? How would you fight him?

  If the goal had been to make Dane feel unprepared and inadequate to meet his enemy, their enchanter had more than earned his fee.

  A rap on the door made Dane nearly jump off the bed. He opened to Elias. The priest began talking before he even entered. “You piqued my interest when you related Kenzie’s comments about the rats.”

  Dane only nodded.

  “So I checked out the storeroom.”

  Dane’s stomach tightened involuntarily at the mention of the place. “Did you find anything?”

  “There’s a strange draft in there. Gave me the chills, in more ways than one. But that’s not the most interesting part.”

  Goosebumps tingled the tip of Dane’s spine.

  “I suppose it’s not news to you that there’re spells at work here,” Elias said. “Most of the men feel it, even if they’re not aware of it. It makes some of them quiet; it makes others jumpy.”

  You can count me among the jumpy, Dane thought.

  Elias continued. “But that’s not all. I took the time to read the energies. There’s a faint bit of magic spread over the items in the pantry, as though all the food had been dusted with it.”

  At this point, Dane interrupted. “Fish was afraid the food may have been poisoned. But he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.”

  “That’s the strangest part,” Elias said. “The magic is benign. It’s actually a preserving spell. It’s gentle magic, but I feel something deeper and darker beneath the surface. White magic from a dark source. Rather like a word of praise spoken in a caustic tone. It’s jarring, unsettling.”

  You can say that again, Dane thought.

  “I’m sorry,” Elias said. “I’m not making much sense. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “No,” Dane said, and with a sinking feeling he knew why this mission made him think of stealing duck eggs for his father. “It makes total sense. My father had the same idea. He had his carpenters build nesting boxes for the wild fowl in the marshes. Then he eats the eggs as fast as the birds can lay them. Whoever did this to the colony was hoping we’d come. They blessed the food and they left the buildings standing because they wanted to make sure we could move right in when we got here. We’re right where they want us. These walls aren’t a fortress. They’re a trap.”

  VII

  The Rangers

  The morning dawned cold and cheerless.

  Forsythe left with his crew before dawn and Dane and Bailus and their squads assembled by the rear gate. They had gone over a map the night before. Dane would take the mountainous west side of the island and Bailus's squad would take the lowlands to the east. Each party consisted of five men and a dog.

  "Regardless of how far you get, turn back by noon," Dane told Bailus.

  "We're prepared to overnight it."

  "No," said Dane, glancing at the forest which rose darkly just beyond the gate. Night still slept under its branches. "I don't want anyone left outside the walls by dark."

  Dane’s squad was Bax, Joseph, Owen and Wink, and Rem Bodkin. Dane glanced at Bailus’s squad. Tipper and Dioji, Edric Embries, Markis Evans, and Franklin Moore. Franklin’s dog, Blackthorn, was chained up in the courtyard; and none too happy about it, judging by the racket he was raising. Franklin had complained, but it had been an obvious choice. Blackthorn was scrappy, always picking fights with the bigger dogs, and a piss-poor tracker to boot.

  Dane wondered if it was a mistake to send Edric, along with Markis and Franklin, his two closest friends, out on patrol. But Bailus had chosen them and they were excellent woodsmen.

  Dane had heard Edric talking with Markis and Franklin on their second night underway. They had been reclining against the port gunwale and Dane had been lying beneath his blanket on the starboard side. Maybe Edric had thought he was asleep. Maybe he didn't care. "This mission is such bull," Edric had said to Markis and Franklin.

  "Lord Hallander wouldn't send his own son on it if there wasn't a good reason," Franklin had said.

  "Don't you get it?” Edric had said. “The nonsense of it is the reason he's here."

  "How’s that?" Markis had asked.

  "Well, why do you think they only sent thirty of us?" Edric had asked his companions.

  "Because of how stingy Lord Hallander is with his fighting men," Franklin had said.

  "Would you stop calling him ‘lord’? It's not like he's god or something. Maybe he says he owns the land we live on, but out here we should at least be able to talk like men. And think about it - if he was really so stingy with his fighting men, why would he send thirty of us, including some real soldiers like us, into this god-knows-what kind of mess on Haven? If he really cared about his troops, he would have either sent no one, or an army big enough to really deal with whatever’s going on on the island."

  "Death and glory, I suppose,” Markis had said.

  "No," Edric had said. "We're here because of him." And though Dane had his eyes closed, he knew Edric had motioned towards him. "This is daddy giving junior one last chance to prove himself again after he screwed up Loshōn."

  "Then where do the thirty of us come in?" Franklin had asked.

  "Look, if you want to survive this thing, you've got to stop thinking about the thirty of us and start thinking about the three of us. But I'll tell you. There's so few of us because Old Man Hallander wanted to give his son an imp
ossible task. If he succeeds, than no one can deny he's the stuff of kings, maybe even gods. If he fails, well then, small loss - his failure of a son fails to come home; and the rest of us – well, we were just the expendable part of the experiment to begin with."

  At this point, Edric’s cousin, Aaron, who had been sitting nearby in silence, had entered the conversation. “Eddie, you should just quiet down.”

  “But, Air, you can’t argue I’m not right.”

  “You may be right and you may not. But it’s not the kind of talk that does anybody any good.”

  The men were silent for a moment. Franklin spoke first. "I don't think he'd take the loss of his son so lightly.”

  "Has it never occurred to you," Edric said, "That, after how he folded at Loshōn, someone like Arvis Hallander might rather have no heir at all than an heir like Dane?"

  Dane had lain there, feigning sleep through the entire conversation. He thought of interrupting Edric, of promising the men he would do everything in his power to ensure they returned safely to their families. But what was the point? They knew the odds as well as he did. And as for the other things Edric said, well, what was the good in arguing with someone you know is right?

  Aaron had offered to take Edric’s place in the excursion. He was older than Edric and, though only a cousin, felt some kind of fraternal or nearly paternal duty to him. Dane and Bailus had denied him. Aaron was a good soul but wasted as a ranger. The man couldn’t find green on grass. Dane and Bailus would have preferred Aaron to Edric for many other reasons, but this trip had nothing to do with their preferences.

  Bailus cleared his throat, bringing Dane back to the present. The senior soldier hefted his war-hammer in one hand. Actually, hefted is too heavy a word for the way he wielded the hammer. Dane had suggested Bailus take a crossbow like the rest of the men. Bailus had picked one up and then set it down, complaining it was too light. It had looked rather like a toy in his hand. Bailus turned to his men. "Alright, you bunch of apes, let's move."

  Bailus’ little party filed out through the gate to the sound of Blackthorn’s howls. “Breaks my heart to leave him there,” Franklin said, looking back over his shoulder. “I never chain him at home.”

  “That spoiled, overgrown rodent of yours will be here when you get back,” Edric said. “As long as one of the night watchmen doesn’t kill him for interrupting his beauty sleep.”

  The men were soon lost from view among the trees. Dane's party followed, turning left out of the gate to head west. Bax brought up the rear. Dane wondered if Bax guessed why Dane had chosen him. He couldn't change how Bax treated Mara, but he’d do what he could to keep them apart.

  The little bit of sleep he’d gotten the night before hadn’t changed Dane’s feelings about the situation. The sense of dread had been growing long before his realizations yesterday. As soon as Ben Cross arrived with his branded forehead, Dane had known someone, or something, was trying to lure them to the island. Now they were here. Dane knew they were playing right into their enemies’ hands, but he tried not to think about it. The fact was, there was no other way to play it. They had no other choice. He gave himself no other choice. He would not order his men off the island until they’d learned what had happened to the colonists and done what they could to avenge it.

  The one thing that comforted him was being able to go on the offensive. Even if all that meant was a blind walk in the woods. Maybe the settlement had been left intact for no other purpose than to serve as bait. Well, now he was here and he wasn’t leaving. But he’d be damned before he spent all day sitting around waiting for these bastards to come to him.

  Dane tried to guess who they would find hiding in the forest first, colonists or enemies. The uncertainty weighed on him, gnawed at him. For days he had dreaded this mission would end quickly and violently on the beach yesterday. Now he almost wished it had. He had told himself if he could just get his men through the first day on the island, the worst would be over. He realized now the hard work was just beginning.

  Dane's party found themselves moving steeply uphill. The ground was slick with pine needles and they often had to use their hands to pull themselves up. They climbed between rocky outcroppings which stuck out from the hillsides like jagged teeth. The going was tough enough for trained soldiers in their prime and Dane could hardly imagine women and children fleeing this way. But he imagined if he had to lead a band of refugees to relative safety and shelter, he would bring them here, to the high ground.

  No one talked. There was no sound but the crunch of the forest litter beneath their feet and the breathing of the men and the panting of the dog and the swishing of branches as the men pushed past them and the rattle of their bolts in the quivers at their thighs. No birds sang overhead. The men fingered the triggers of the bows and glanced about, distrustful of every shadow, as they moved deeper in the forest.

  Every now and then they came to a bare rocky ledge and Dane was able to look back southward and see the harbor, though not their ships. Once he even caught sight of the settlement. Small and vulnerable it seemed, surrounded by the dark woods. Every time he looked back, he was surprised at how high they'd climbed. Owen’s dog, Wink, kept up well. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He ran on ahead sniffing and then came trotting back to the men to rub his head against their legs or, even better, to present his head to be scratched by any willing hand.

  For Dane, there was something comforting in the dog's presence. The simple joy it took in exploring. The companionship of another creature. He had yet to see any other living creatures on the island.

  Their path took them back and forth across the course of a little stream which wound down the hills. After they had forded the stream the second time, they came to a little hill that climbed steeply between two large rocks that sat like squat towers. Passing the rocks, Dane spotted something white sitting in a nearby tree just above eye level. Coming closer, he saw it was the skull of a bird. A rather large one. A crow or raven judging by the size and the shape of the beak.

  Dane realized it did not rest there on its own but that hung by a nail. Arrayed behind the skull was a fan of black feathers and from the lower rims of the eye sockets dangled dark beads on what looked like sinew. Dane thought it looked like a shaman's fetish. Bax stepped up beside him and reached towards the skull. Dane pushed his hand away. "Come on," he said.

  As they stepped past the tree, Dane couldn't help feeling they had crossed a line, a boundary. They were now on someone else's turf. The skull left him with a vague unease about his present theories about what had happened on the island. But he couldn't say just why.

  ***

  For Bailus's party, the beginning of the journey was much the same. Apprehension, anxiety. But their path ran quickly down into swampy ground where the trees thinned out and were replaced by large grass-like bushes. For Edric, bringing up the rear of Bailus's party, the excursion soon became boring and then miserable. His feet slipped several times into foul-smelling puddles until his boots squished and sloshed with every step. Bailus, their mad captain, seemed to take Dane's command to keep a straight path to an extreme. He walked right through swarms of biting insects, through knee-deep mud that smelled like a latrine, through plants whose blade-like leaves would cut you if you gave them half a chance (nasty little razor-fine slits which itched and burned), and through other plants which left little barbed pods in your clothes that poked you with every step.

  Edric kept his eyes on the path directly in front of him, trying to avoid the worst of the sinkholes. So it was that it was not until they stopped to drink from their canteens that he noticed the smoke. A long, thin trail of pale smoke was rising above the trees off to their northwest, towards the center of the island. "Look," he said, signaling to the others.

  Bailus looked darkly at the smoke, then slung his canteen back over his shoulder and said, "Let's go."

  To Edric’s surprise, Bailus kept blundering forward on the same blind path he'd been on all morning. "What are yo
u doing?" he asked.

  Bailus turned back to him slowly. "What does it look like? I'm continuing the search."

  "The search? What do you mean? Don't you see the smoke?"

  Bailus frowned and crossed his arms, cradling his hammer between them. "What about it?"

  "Are you crazy? That's the kind of thing we've been looking for. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and where there's fire, there's people."

  "Uh-huh," Bailus said, as though he were only humoring him. "And what makes you think these people will be anyone you want to meet?"

  "Who would it be but the colonists? They were attacked and they’re hiding in the woods and..."

  "If they were hiding in the woods, why would they be foolish enough to make a fire?"

  "Maybe they’re signaling for help."

  "And maybe it's a trap," said Bailus.

  "What, so now you're scared? What did all your worry get you yesterday? Just a bunch of false alarms and wasted time."

  "Dane told us to check this part of the island,” Bailus said. “I intend to follow orders."

  "He didn't tell us to blunder blindly through leech-infested swamps and ignore signs like this," Edric said, pointing to the smoke. "If you want to waste your time out here, fine. But, think about it. If there are any more colonists on the island, they won't be hiding in a miserable place like this."

  "Orders are orders," Bailus said. "Are you finished?"

  "Yes, I'm finished,” Edric said. “I'm finished with following you."

  Bailus uncrossed his arms and started towards him. "This is mutiny." Maybe he meant only to raise his fist to emphasize his point but with it he raised his hammer.

  Edric jumped back and brought his crossbow up, training it on Bailus's chest. "Maybe it is," he said, "But plowing through the swamp without looking into this is madness. And I've had it with this madness. I've had it with stupid old men telling me what to do. You (he jabbed his crossbow in Bailus's direction); Old Man Hallander. I'm making my own decisions now."

  "Put your bow down," Tipper Long said, holding out an open hand. Dioji stood beside him, snarling with his hackles raised. Tipper placed his hand on Dioji’s head and the dog relaxed, but only slightly.