Prisoner of Fate

by Tony Shillitoe

  The Ranu paid no attention to the ragged creature shuffling through the checkpoint into Port River. The tall, stooped woman, patchy dark and red-tinged hair matted and filthy, lean face streaked with dirt, watched them warily with her sad green eyes as she headed for the harbour, clutching her grey carry bag containing the two most precious items in her life. One was sleeping, enjoying the lazy motion and warmth inside the bag, curled around the second item—a chipped green jar.

  She was hungry, skin and bone, and exhausted from weeks of wandering from the west, skirting towns and Ranu troops whenever she could, sleeping in ditches and under bushes, begging from refugees like herself and from Andrak citizens who’d accepted the Ranu invasion stoically and were living normal lives as if the war hadn’t happened. Her memory of her suffering was as ragged as her clothes, so many days and nights spent drowning in grief, so many times howling at the sky, screaming her anger into the wind, lying curled like a foetus wracked with sorrow. She blamed Emma’s death on the Ranu soldiers and spent hours plotting how to kill them, how to make them feel the pain that she felt at the loss of her daughter. She blamed Tom and the young men whose lunacy infected her daughter and killed her, and she wanted to know how to make the dead suffer, how to torment their souls for the agony they inflicted on her. And she blamed herself for leaving Emma alone while she went on her own idiotic annual search for a son who was already long lost, long dead, and she wanted to kill the pain that was self-inflicted, the sharpest pain of all. Sometimes she wanted to embed the amber and wreak revenge on everyone, use the magic to root out every source of pain. But that she couldn’t do. The magic itself was the greatest source of her pain. It had destroyed her life. So there were also times when she contemplated burying the jar, dropping it in an abandoned well, casting it into the ocean, destroying it before it destroyed anything else.

  When opportunity gave her alcohol, she drank herself into a stupor. When she was offered local variants of Andrak drugs by people who also offered her food and lodging as she stumbled across the provinces, she smoked the mind-altering dried plants, glad to feel the world melting, desperate to enjoy moments of happiness in her ocean of grief. She woke some mornings, lying in the rain outside farms, lying in mud in roadside ditches, lying in shit in animal sheds, unable to remember how she came to be where she was. And always she woke to find the black rat sitting protectively beside her.

  She felt sorry for Whisper. ‘Why do you stay?’ she asked through an alcoholic hangover one morning, rising from a haystack. ‘What have I ever done for you but brought you trouble?’ Whisper looked at her, as if she was considering the question, before she went on preening, the question unanswered. The travel was taxing on the rat because she was always at risk of being killed as vermin by the Andrak and the Ranu, but she had an uncanny knack of vanishing whenever Meg mixed with other refugees, or approached people as she begged, and reappearing immediately there was no one nearby. The bag was Whisper’s refuge while they passed through populated areas. Meg was always afraid someone would demand that she open the bag, especially the soldiers, but no one did. The dirtier and more bedraggled she was, the more invisible she also became. People barely glanced at her. They were quietly disgusted when she approached for a handout, quickly throwing her food scraps and pushing her away with their abrupt comments and quick manners. Her bag was as unattractive as herself, so no one seemed compelled to look through it, especially as she clutched it fiercely to her chest wherever she went.

  She ignored the pain in her feet, the soles toughened from weeks of travelling without boots or shoes, as she headed purposefully along the cobbled streets of Port River towards the harbour. She ignored people’s brief stares as they stepped out of her way. She only glanced at a popping and hissing machine on three wheels that rattled by with two passengers clinging perilously to its steering arm and its brakes before she lowered her eyes and walked on.

  The harbour had changed since her only visit fifteen years earlier as an immigrant from Western Shess. The wharves were more open than she remembered and the slave sheds were gone, replaced by imposing red-brick warehouses. The ships were bigger, some with four and five masts as well as the familiar stern windwheels, and two very odd ships were resting in dry dock—odd because they were made of metal and neither had sails nor masts for sails. She took in the details quickly before she focussed on a group of men unloading large bales from a wagon. ‘Can anyone tell me where I can find the Three-breasted Harpy tavern?’ she asked.

  The men stopped and stared and one grunted as he turned back to his work, saying, ‘Must be for you, Harry. Too dirty to be mine.’

  The men laughed and one quipped, ‘I thought you liked them dirty, Tom?’ sending another ripple of laughter through the group.

  The men returned to their labour, except the second speaker who scratched his dark shock of hair and then rubbed his hairy chest as he faced Meg. ‘You don’t want to be going there, lady,’ he warned.

  ‘Just tell me where it is,’ she insisted.

  Harry spat and wiped his lips with the back of his hairy arm, before he said, ‘Straight along the road behind the Port Authority building. Turn left into Sea Urchin Lane and you’ll find it there.’ He chuckled and shook his head. ‘Hope you find what you’re looking for, lady.’ Meg didn’t answer. Heeding the directions, she headed for the tavern along the road behind the Port Authority.

  Sea Urchin Lane was a narrow, twisting remnant of older times, cluttered with discarded wooden crates and boxes and rubbish, an open sewer running down the centre of the cobbles. Five motley dogs greeted Meg with slack-tongued curiosity, pressing around her, sniffing, fascinated by her grey carry bag, and she had to kick at them to keep them at bay. Two men slouched against a wall in a doorway, and a third sitting on the doorstep watched her with hungry eyes. The sign of the Three-breasted Harpy tavern swung awkwardly at the end of a rusty chain and she headed for it, scuffing through the detritus littering the lane. She tried the door handle and thought that it was locked because it didn’t give. ‘You have to push harder, lovey,’ the man on the doorstep called and laughed with his companions. Meg put her shoulder against the door and pushed and it opened.

  The interior was dark, heavy with smoke, and tiny. A single wire-lightning bulb glowed above the bar, but the five tables for patrons were in shadow and the hearth was dead. Three men at one table, midway through playing cards, watched her, and another man, immersed in shadow, was slumped against the wall on the floor. ‘Can I help you, lady?’ a gruff voice challenged.

  She met the inquisitive gaze of the wiry, balding barkeep who stood at the corner of the bar, a cigarette glowing at the corner of his mouth. ‘Are you Alan Derry?’ she asked.

  ‘What if I am?’ the barkeep replied.

  ‘I’m looking for Captain Marlin,’ she said. ‘He said I could find out where he is if I asked here.’ She was conscious of the men at the table chuckling as they returned to their card game. In another room, a man coughed violently and spat.

  ‘If you’re one of his women, you won’t find him here,’ the barkeep growled.

  ‘I’m not one of his women,’ Meg brusquely informed him. ‘Where is he?’

  The barkeep seemed to be sizing her up as he considered his answer. Finally he said, ‘He’s in his room,’ and jerked his thumb towards a dark corner over his left shoulder. Meg glanced at the men at the table and the crumpled figure on the floor as she headed for the corner, but the barkeep grabbed her arm to stop her. ‘If you make any trouble, I’ll forget you’re a lady and throw you out like anyone else,’ he warned, his smoky breath making her wince. She unsuccessfully tried to shake his hold, surprised that the old wiry man had so much strength. ‘You get my meaning?’ he asked, glaring up at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed. He released her arm.

  She reached the door, her skin smarting from his grip, and knocked. For the first time she noticed a faint trace of daylight under the door. ‘He won’t answer that,’ the barkeep called. ‘
Go in.’

  As Meg turned the handle and opened the creaking door, she was struck by the room’s odour, a mixture of the rank stench of a rarely cleaned man’s room and a sweeter smell, one that teased her memory. A tiny glassless window, like an arrow slit in a castle tower, let a thin stream of daylight run across the centre of the interior. A wooden chair leaned against a squat table, miscellaneous shipping articles hung from the walls in a chaotic display, and reclined on a dishevelled narrow bunk was a white bloated-bellied figure, wearing only faded blue baggy trousers. ‘Who are you?’ he rasped, and coughed.

  She hadn’t considered the import of that question until it was asked. ‘Captain Marlin?’ she inquired warily.

  ‘Can’t be,’ the man replied irritably. ‘That’s my name, woman. I asked yours.’

  She hesitated, the words having been silent for a long time. She stepped into the room, closed the door and said, ‘Meg. Meg—’ but the second name was not a simple answer so she avoided it with, ‘You brought me here from Western Shess. Fifteen years ago.’

  Captain Marlin eased into a sitting position on the edge of his bed, wheezing, and squinted at her in the dull light. ‘Fifteen years ago, you say?’ he muttered and scratched the white tufts of hair on his bloated belly. ‘Fifteen years ago I was captain of the Waverunner. Proud and fine ship she was.’ He stared at her harder and a knowing expression eased across his face. ‘You had red hair,’ he said.

  ‘I changed it,’ she said, shifting her feet uncomfortably, conscious of the room’s confined space and the smell.

  Marlin coughed and reached for a wine bottle on the table. He swigged a mouthful and held it towards Meg. When she hesitated, he said, ‘Good stuff. Not ordinary wine. Euphoria. Started importing it ten years ago from your old country. Good money in it until the government made it illegal. Still get my supplies though. It makes life a lot easier to take.’ She stared at the bottle, the teasing memory of the sweeter smell clarifying into the evenings she had shared euphoria with Queen Sunset. She’d forgotten so much. ‘Go on,’ Marlin coaxed. ‘I got no ills you can get from the bottle. Just good feelings. Take a drink and then you can tell me what you want with an old has-been after all these years.’

  Meg gingerly accepted the bottle and sipped the contents. The alcohol had a biting taste, but it was quickly soothed by the effect of the euphoria. ‘More,’ Marlin ordered. ‘You won’t get anything from a sip, woman.’ Meg felt the light-headedness beginning to spread and remembered how euphoria always eased sorrow. She lifted the bottle and drank again.

  PART TWO

  ‘It seems that the human spirit is stronger than the human soul, because many times have I seen faith, the essence of the soul, waver in the face of adversity, while the spirit—that which defines us as human—endured suffering that words cannot describe.’

  FROM CONFESSIONS OF A HERETIC, SEER SUNLIGHT

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Crawling along the sewer wasn’t his first choice of a method of entry, but the guards were more vigilant of late and the walls presented far too many challenges to climb in daylight. He was only able to get in and out regularly because stealing from the king’s pantry was so audacious that no one expected anyone would actually try it.

  Besides, the palace guards expected assassins, not thieves, so they rarely patrolled the kitchens, and he knew two of the apprentice cooks who turned blind eyes whenever he briefly appeared and disappeared. His sister and her child needed good nourishment. The income from her trade barely paid the rent, and he couldn’t get a job of late, so he figured the king wouldn’t miss an occasional bag of groceries. Of course, he told no one of where he was sourcing his food. Only idiots and novices bragged about their exploits. Only idiots and novices ended up in the Bog Pit.

  He’d used the sewers three times previously so he knew where the pipes joined and where they narrowed. Scaling the cliffs from the ocean to enter the pipes was always difficult because the salty spray and sewerage made the rocks treacherous, but the danger meant there was even less chance anyone would suspect someone would be foolhardy enough to enter the palace that way. Only one section of the pipes was large enough to crawl through—a service line running through the centre from the outlet that came up inside servants’ quarters within the palace. The tricky moment was always climbing the metal ladder to ground level and listening for movement in the quarters. The servants were poor Shessians like himself, but he had learned long before he ever illegally entered the castle that their loyalties belonged to their Kerwyn masters. Palace servants turned in three of his childhood friends to the soldiers for stealing cloth in the markets. It wasn’t even their cloth, but they saw the theft, alerted the city guards and pointed out the boys involved. All three had their hands amputated in the Bog Pit. Only Stumpy Crossroad came out alive.

  Crawling blindly on his elbows wore him out, so he was relieved when his fingers touched the rough ridge work in the pipe that told him he was at the point where the vertical shaft led up to the servant’s quarters. He rolled onto his back, the liquid seeping through his shirt making him wince from the cold, took a grip on the first rung of the rusty ladder and began the climb.

  King Hawkeye Ironfist rested his elbows on the rough stone of the tower battlement, breathing in the salty air as he surveyed his domain. Seagulls wheeled across the midday harbour, their screeching cries echoing against the cliffs and the old dusty cream castle walls. A dozen ships rocked at anchor on the dark-blue water, vessels from different nations waiting to load produce from the Kerwyn factories and farms, while tiny fishing boats sailed between them. Across the bay, the solid stone silhouette of the Bog Pit, the infamous gaol built by the barbarian Shessian kings, dominated the bluff as a stark reminder of the fate of men who did not know how to be obedient. Hawkeye had sent hundreds to their deaths in the bowels of the gaol and hundreds more to repent their ways before their release back into society. Being king brought a weight of responsibility with which he had grown very familiar in the years since his father’s death. In the air above the gaol, ever-watchful, a red airbird floated, its rounded, hot air-filled, fabric balloon tethered by its basket to the earth by three long ropes. The airbirds were a useful piece of Seer magic, enabling his soldiers to watch over the city like hunting hawks.

  He straightened and glanced at his obedient guards at attention in their red uniforms, long thundermakers resting against their hips, and their attentiveness made him smile wryly. All ten would die for him. Their sworn oath—to protect him with their lives—comforted him and he scratched his sparse grey beard to ease an irritating itch as he gazed south-east. A brown haze hung above the Foundry Quarter, the product of hundreds of factory chimneys belching waste into the air day and night as they manufactured their wares. He hadn’t visited the Quarter for eleven years, not since he led troops there to personally quell a riot that dragged on for days because the factory workers demanded more pay. The rebellious leaders his men didn’t slaughter in the brief and bloody encounter had long since rotted to death in the Bog Pit.

  He was twenty-two years of age when his father, King Ironfist the First, swept the last Shessian Royal king from the throne and turned what was Western Shess into the southern province of the Kerwyn kingdom. His father’s troops slaughtered half the barbarian population during the two-year war before peace brought sanity and the realisation that the new land required a substantial population to defend it and make it prosper economically. The surviving Shessian people were assimilated into the Kerwyn culture, although most became the lower classes—workers in new factories and on farms. Kerwyn was the official language of politics and trade, but the Shessian people clung doggedly to their old language in their daily lives, cementing a clear barrier between the conquerors and the conquered.

  Only one element crossed the barrier—religion. His father’s decisions to embrace the barbarian belief in one god, Jarudha, and to encourage the barbarian priests who called themselves Jarudha’s Seers to extend their mission to all of the common p
eople, provided a bridge between the Kerwyn rulers and the Shessian subjects. The Seers were committed to teaching the people how to live peacefully in cooperation with their conquerors as an essential demonstration of their faith, and in return the Seers were accorded freedoms denied most citizens. The sky-blue Seer robe was recognisably the highest badge of office below the Kerwyn royalty, commanding respect and wielding authority that could only be countermanded by the king and his family.

  There was still much for King Hawkeye to do to maintain the kingdom’s future, but his health was failing and he knew he was running out of time. There was the matter of ensuring that his eldest, Prince Inheritor, was ready to take on the responsibility of ruling the kingdom. Hawkeye became king at thirty-three after his father fell from a horse, so at thirty-nine many in the palace believed that Inheritor was primed to be a good king—a just man with personal integrity—but Hawkeye knew his son’s weaknesses. Inheritor’s diplomatic nature could be catastrophic in a time of war when action, not talk, was needed. Across the western ocean, a powerful empire had spread north to engulf the old Vasilo Empire andwas turning its attention to the east. A future Kerwyn king would have to be strong to meet that threat and snuff it out ruthlessly so that it lost its impetus. Inheritor, he suspected, would negotiate with the very enemies he should simply kill, and that made Hawkeye uncertain of the succession.