Ison of the Isles

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  “I can’t!”

  The bond hadn’t yet broken; she felt like her body was lashed to his. There was still hope. Somehow she had to calm him, help him to surrender. But her mind was a battle of exhaustion and fear—fear that she had failed after all.

  People were crowding around them, thinking it was all over. Someone reached between her and Harg and she screamed a curse. Hands took her wrist to bandage the cut; voices tried to calm her, thinking she was only maddened by his pain. She had to get away, to be alone with him. “Harg, come closer,” she cried out.

  Someone helped her to her feet, but it was not Harg. She tried to fight them all off, afraid the dhota bond would break. Then Harg was touching her again.

  She wrapped her arms around him. “Don’t leave me,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he picked her up and carried her down from the platform and across the square, through the noisy, turbulent crowd. All around was confusion and frenzy; people were pelting them with flowers. Spaeth tried desperately to ignore it all, to concentrate on the dhota bond, clutching it like a lifeline.

  At last there was quiet. She was lying on a bed, and Harg was sitting beside her. She put her arms around him, pulling him against her. She could feel his heart beating against her chest. Her hunger for him was desperate. “Now,” she whispered. “Now you can give it all to me.”

  His face was a mask of tension. “Spaeth,” he said. “It’s my self you want. I can’t give you my self.”

  She stroked his scarred back, trying to make him relax. The intensity of her love was maddening. “All that pain isn’t you,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “That’s what I am.”

  “No. There is another you underneath it all. You need to let him free. It’s that Harg that is Ison.”

  For an instant she thought his grip was loosening; but he pushed her grimly away, then rose unsteadily to his feet. As if pulling against a strong force, he made his way to the door. Spaeth could feel the bonds between them stretching, as if her skin were being pulled away from her body. He stood at the door for a moment, breathing hard; then he opened it and went through. The bonds stretched and stretched, till the pain was unendurable. Spaeth screamed, but he kept on going.

  There were voices around her, people trying to soothe her. She was doubled over in torture, the part of her that was him a blazing mass of raw, ripped-open nerves.

  For the second time in her life, dhota had failed.

  9

  The Boundaries of Forgiveness

  Outside the Pavilion gate, the city was in a state of exalted relief. The long night spent standing as witnesses had worked a metamorphosis on the people of Lashnish. It had been an ordeal for all. Hour after hour they had watched as their Ison suffered and was purified for them, healed in their stead. Now they all felt a tender affinity for him, as if they owned him, as if his body were theirs as well. They collected in the Isonsquare, touching the bloodstained stage, milling around under the Pavilion windows, hoping to catch a sight of him, wanting to express their feeling of kinship, the way they had shared his experience.

  Only the Pavilion was quiet, its gates closed against joy, its corridors hushed with secrets.

  Nathaway had gotten as far as the cloister before running out of resolution. He hadn’t been able to cross the boundary into the world of hopeful ignorance.

  When he had woken on his bed with a splitting headache, it had been night outside, but the light from the bonfire and torches in the Isonsquare had led him to the window. In one glance he had seen it all, and his hand had gone to his chest, where the Emerald Tablet should have been hanging against his heart. Appalled at Spaeth’s betrayal, he went to the door, but it was locked, and his pounding drew no response. The Pavilion was deserted; he could have set his room on fire and no one would have noticed. There was nothing he could do but go back to the window and watch.

  It had been a strangely compelling drama, considering that nothing visible had happened. The tension and sensuality of the two entwined bodies glued his unwilling gaze to the firelit stage. At times they seemed to be wrestling with each other, at other times supporting each other through some unfathomable pain. The sexual energy of their embrace had seared itself into Nathaway’s eyes. They were sharing a kind of intimacy he would never know. It would have been mesmerizing if only they had been two strangers, or any people he loved less than he loved these two. As it was, he had rebelled at the sight, and couldn’t look away.

  It was morning, and the ceremony had ended, when a panic-stricken young Lashnura woman had come to his door to let him out. “You must come, sir, something terrible has happened,” she said. It seemed to Nathaway that something terrible had been happening all night, but he allowed her to lead him, morose and unwilling, down the stairs to Harg’s room, where a hushed conference was going on outside the door. When Agave saw him, guilt and anxiety flooded her face. She reached out to grasp his hand, a sign of her distress. Lashnurai almost never touched anyone but each other.

  “Ehir, you must help us, help her,” Agave said. She opened the door. When he hung back, she said, “Go in.”

  Reluctantly, he stepped alone into the bedroom where all the city thought the Ison and the Onan were consummating their newly forged bond. Spaeth was kneeling on the bed, hands over her face, a picture of desolation. Of Harg there was no trace.

  When she heard the door open, she looked up in feverish hope; then, seeing it was only Nathaway, she gave a wrenching cry of disappointment. He turned to leave.

  “Nat, come back,” she cried out. “Don’t leave, please don’t leave me.”

  He stopped, his hand on the doorknob. His feeling of betrayal was almost evenly balanced by sharp sympathy at her pain. She had chosen another man over him; was it not just that she should suffer the consequences? Betrayal was balanced by betrayal now; they were even. Then she said his name again in such a desperate tone that compassion tipped the scale, and he went to her side. Hungrily she caught onto him, pressing her body against his. He could smell the sweat on her skin and clothes, her own and her new lover’s mingled. Blind with instinct, she kissed him on the mouth. Then, with a cry of frustration, she pushed him away, as if it sickened her to touch anyone but the man she needed.

  In the next moment, she seized his hand. “Nat, we’re bandhotai, you have to help me,” she said. Her hair was in wild disarray, her eyes red and desperate. “You have to get him to come to me. He’ll die if he doesn’t. We’ll both die. You have to help us.”

  His self-respect was wounded, but not dead. “I’m not going to be your pimp,” he said, pulling his hand away from hers. This time, he ignored her pleas and left the room, shutting the door behind him. To the strained and expectant faces in the hallway he said, “Damn you all to hell.”

  He left then, intending to go down to the harbour and find a boat that would take him away from Lashnish, back home, anywhere but here. He had gotten no farther than the Pavilion gate when the sight of the reverent crowd outside had stopped him cold, and he had retreated to his secluded bench in the cloister to stare at the ground and feel burningly sorry for himself.

  He didn’t hear or see anyone approaching until Auster sat down on the bench beside him. He glanced at the Grey Man, then away. He didn’t want to talk.

  “We made a terrible mistake last night,” Auster said quietly.

  “We?” Nathaway said the word bitterly.

  “We Grey Folk. Not you. We should have listened to you. We should have trusted Goran’s judgment.”

  Nathaway wasn’t sure what this meant, but he let it drop. “What went wrong?” he asked in a toneless voice.

  “We’re not sure. She wasn’t the person who should have performed the cure. She didn’t have the maturity, the force of will. All she had were passion and devotion, and they betrayed her. She risked too much, and failed. Now, two peo
ple have been terribly damaged. No, three.” He laid a hand lightly on Nathaway’s, where it rested on the bench.

  Nathaway straightened up, as if to show his resolution. “I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Don’t,” Auster said.

  “I never should have come to the Forsakens. Everything I’ve touched here has gone wrong. Now, all I want is to go home.”

  Once, when he had first come to the Isles, he had thought he knew who he was and where he was going. But the ideas of justice and law that had lit him then with such a pure flame of commitment, now dissolved when he tried to take a stand on them, as if his entire moral landscape had been made of mist.

  Auster was silent for a while, and when he spoke, it seemed like he was changing the subject. “You know, we Lashnurai have played a part in the rise of all the great civilizations of this land, and yet none of them has been ours. For centuries we have propelled other races to greatness. We have stood behind all the famous leaders, feeding them strength and resolution. And yet, we have accomplished nothing on our own.” He looked sideways at Nathaway then. “It may be you are like us. You are bound up with two people who cannot be what they need to be without you. They can never return to you all that you must give to them. It is a hard position to be in. You can only meet it with serenity, by giving yourself up. We Grey Folk have a saying: Strength is in surrender.”

  He reached into his pocket then, and brought out something. For a moment his hand closed over it, as if reluctant to let it go. Then he held it out to Nathaway. It was the Emerald Tablet. “This is yours, I think.”

  Nathaway took it. He turned it over once, looking at it, then slipped the cord over his head. It made him think of Goth, who had set all of this in motion. Give yourself up, Auster said. Perhaps that was what Goth had meant him to do. To give up all power, all control, all self-regard, till he became a mere vessel, transparent to the world. Did Goth have any idea how difficult it would be?

  In his heart, he didn’t really want to go back home, back to comfort and complacency. He had travelled too far for that. The Forsakens had ensnared him now, in their net of ambiguities and contradictions. The Isles had invaded him, embattled him. He had caught them like a disease. Or a seduction.

  *

  Harg poured a pitcher of cold water over his head and stood dripping into the basin. He was surprised the water didn’t hiss and steam. His body felt like a glowing ingot, and his mind was racing down an endless flume of thoughts. Three times he had fallen exhausted onto the bed, only to wake from dreams where he was running for his life through burning streets.

  It was his eyeballs that were aflame now—both the real and phantom ones. He looked in the mirror, and flinched away. The scar had grown worse, reinfected by dhota gone wrong. Even old bruises from the war had awakened, like cankers buried in his body, festering.

  Outside in the city, he knew he had become Ison Harg. Already the room around him was cluttered with relics he had inherited with the title. There was a tarnished metal cup with a pointed bottom that wouldn’t stand up, a glass-and-enamel phial with a lock of hair preserved in liquid, a flaking shell disk. All were so ancient no one knew what they were or what they signified. Every Ison had owned them, he was told. So must he.

  And people had been bringing him gifts. Fruitcakes, wood carvings, skis, scrimshaw, embroidery, hats. He wanted none of it, but couldn’t turn it down. Every gift was woven through with unwanted expectations. Their love would bind him as surely as dhota. And if they ever discovered he was a fraud, his name would be another word for treachery.

  There was a knock on his door. Tiarch had been sending messengers over to mend fences with him, now that she was risking nothing by it. Through the door he growled, “Piss off.”

  A familiar voice said, “Don’t you talk to me like that, Harg Ismol.”

  It was Tway. Harg groped for the patch to tie over his eye, then pulled some pants on. Odd, he thought, that he had wanted to hide his face first.

  He was still searching for a clean shirt when she knocked again. “I’m not dressed,” he said irritably.

  “I think my heart can take it,” Tway’s voice answered.

  He undid the bolt, and she came in. The sight of her was like the smell of spring rain: earthy, rooted in childhood memories. Feeling anchored as he hadn’t for days, he hugged her close. It made him feel like Harg again.

  “Harg, it’s so good to see you,” she said, then pulled back to study him. “How are you?”

  “No worse than three weeks ago,” he said. It was a confession: three weeks ago he had been a wreck, and now he was supposed to be cured.

  “I wish you could go out into the streets with me,” she said. “The city is ready to float away with joy. They love you, Harg. They would sail into the other circles for you.”

  He turned away, unable to keep up the charade in front of her. She knew him too well; she would see through it.

  “You don’t have to hide,” she said quietly. “I know something went wrong.”

  It should have released some of the tension, but it didn’t. “Who told you?” he said. “The Grey Folk?”

  “Not them,” she said acerbically. “They didn’t even want to let me see you. They’re guarding you like cats around a fresh kill.”

  He gave a humourless laugh. “You’ve got that right.”

  “Nathaway Talley told me.”

  “Perfect.” Of all people to know his most personal secret, an Inning. The brother of his worst enemy, the lover of his bandhota. “Who else knows?”

  “No one. The Grey Folk, him, and me.”

  “Tiarch?”

  “No. But Harg, what are you thinking? You can’t hide it. You should see yourself. Just looking at you makes me hurt.” She came up to him and stroked his arm soothingly. He put his hand over hers. What an underrated thing kindness was, he thought. His nerves could almost relax in her presence. Almost.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He didn’t want to talk about it, so he shrugged to belittle it. “Spaeth and I just botched it. Both of us together, but mostly me.”

  “But we watched, all night—”

  “Yes,” he said, the memory vivid. Spaeth had not been gentle with him; she had been too close to the edge herself. Now his mind felt like a desecrated graveyard, all the buried things dug up and toppled from their coffins onto the trampled ground, stinking. “All night, for nothing.”

  “Oh Harg,” she whispered, “you poor man.”

  He didn’t answer, because a newly disinterred memory had just erupted into the forefront of his mind: the time in Drumlin, shortly after Jory’s injury, when he had led a landing party to destroy a Rothur powder magazine. They had never reached their objective, and had settled for burning a crowded hospital instead. Out in the street, by the light of the flaming building, Harg had hacked off a Rothur man’s head with a cutlass. His lieutenants had had to drag him away from the bloody remains. On that night, he had turned into a frenzied animal, all for Inning.

  “Harg,” Tway said at his elbow. He started as if he had been shot. For a horrified moment he thought she might have seen what he had been thinking.

  Firmly, Tway said, “You have to do something about this.”

  She was right, he had to get control. He drew a shaky breath.

  “Harg, the dhota-nur didn’t fail,” Tway said. There was an air of certainty about her. “Neither of you botched it; you just didn’t finish. There is one more step to take, and it’s not too late. You need to go to Spaeth and do it now.”

  For an instant, his sleepless brain yearned for the sweet oblivion of Spaeth’s touch. All he had to do was go to her, and he would have the life he had glimpsed, a life without remembered pain.

  No. That was just what the Grey Folk wanted. They needed him pacified, so he could be their tool. They wanted the
Adaina back as they always had been, bedazzled by Lashnura sacrifice and goodness, under their thumbs.

  A fevered thought came to him that Tway was not here for his sake; she was here to lure him back to Spaeth, so the Grey Folk could finish what they had started. They had turned his oldest friend into their accomplice.

  “Her Inning will be happy to comfort her,” he said. He picked up a shirt and started to pull it on with quick, jerky movements. It stuck to his back; he was covered with sweat.

  “Nathaway’s not the one she wants now,” Tway said. “It’s not right for you to keep yourself from her. They can die, you know.”

  It felt so familiar, this manipulation. “I can tell she’s Goth’s kin,” Harg said. “She suffers so convincingly.” Soon everyone would be sure he was utterly in the wrong.

  “This isn’t about Goth,” Tway said. “This is about you.”

  “What is this, the Auntie Patrol?” he said. “We’re not on Yora any more, Tway. My life isn’t your concern.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “It always has been.”

  “Well, get unconcerned then,” he said. When he saw her face, he knew he had hurt her, as he hurt everyone around him, everyone who cared. It made him blazingly angry at himself. “Get away from me!” he said. “Go on back to Yora. Go marry some fisherman and have a dozen babies, and get fat and placid. That’s the world you’re meant for. Not this one.”

  Her face was white. “All right,” she said. “If that’s the way you feel.”

  It wasn’t, but he couldn’t say so.

  She turned to the door without another word. It was the last he would see of her, he thought. He had severed himself from the past. He had to go forward now, into a world where no one would forgive him.

  He could hear the echo of guns in his brain.

  *

  When Harg entered Tiarch’s office, he found Captain Dev there, incongruously seated on a spider-legged chair. Tiarch rose at once, but Harg deliberately turned to Dev first, reaching out to grasp his arm firmly in greeting. They hadn’t seen each other since Vill. But instead of the old camaraderie, the look in Dev’s eyes was part awe, part unease, as if Harg had traitorously metamorphosed into a thing of mystery. It made Harg feel like a visitor in his own body.