The Face of the Waters Read online

  "The last straw, maybe," Lawler said. "The one that broke the camel's back."

  "Huh? What the fuck are you saying?"

  "Ancient Earth proverb. Never mind. What I'm saying is that for whatever reason, the diver thing pushed them over the edge and now they want us out of here."

  Lawler closed his eyes a moment. He imagined himself packing up his things, getting aboard a boat bound for some other island. It wasn't easy.

  We are going to have to leave Sorve. We are going to have to leave Sorve. We are going to…

  He realized that Delagard was talking.

  "It was a stunner, let me tell you. I never expected it. Standing there up against the wall with two big Gillies holding my arms and another one smack up in front of my nose saying, You all have to clear out in thirty days, you will vanish from this island or else. How do you think I felt about that, doc? Especially knowing I was the one responsible for it. You said this morning I didn't have any conscience, but you don't know a damned thing about me. You think I'm a boor and a lout and a criminal, but what do you know, anyway? You hide away in here by yourself and drink yourself silly and sit there judging other people who have more energy and ambition in one finger than you have in your entire-"

  "Knock it off, Delagard."

  "You said I had no conscience."

  "Do you?"

  "Let me tell you, Lawler, I feel like shit, bringing this thing down on us. I was born here too, you know. You don't have to give me any snot-nose condescending First Family stuff, not me. My family's been here from the beginning just like yours. We practically built this island, we Delagards. And now to hear that I'm being tossed out like a bunch of rotten meat, and that everyone else has to go too-" The tone of Delagard's voice changed yet again. The anger melted; he spoke more softly, earnestly, sounding almost humble. "I want you to know that I'll take full responsibility for what I've done. What I'm going to do is-"

  "Hold it," Lawler said, raising one hand to cut him off. "You hear noise?"

  "Noise? What noise? Where?"

  Lawler inclined his head toward the door. Sudden shouts, harsh cries, were coming from the long three-sided plaza that separated the island's two groups of vaarghs.

  Delagard said, nodding, "Yeah, now I hear it. An accident, maybe?"

  But Lawler was already moving, out the door, heading for the plaza at a quick loping trot.

  There were three weatherbeaten buildings-shacks, really, shanties, bedraggled lean-tos-on the plaza, one on each side of it. The biggest, along the upland side, was the island school. On the nearer of the two downslope sides was the little cafe that Lis Niklaus, Delagard's woman, ran. Beyond it was the community centre.

  A small knot of murmuring children stood outside the school, with their two teachers. In front of the community centre half a dozen of the older men and women were drifting about in a random, sunstruck way, moving in a ragged circle. Lis Niklaus had emerged from her cafe and was staring open-mouthed at nothing in particular. On the far side were two of Delagard's captains, squat, blocky Gospo Struvin and lean, long-legged Bamber Cadrell. They were at the head of the ramp that led into the plaza from the waterfront, holding on to the railing like men expecting an immediate tidal surge to strike. Between them, bisecting the plaza with his mass, the hulking fish-merchant Brondo Katzin stood like a huge stupefied beast, gazing fixedly at his unbandaged right hand as though it had just sprouted an eye.

  There was no sign of any accident, any victim.

  "What's going on?" Lawler asked.

  Lis Niklaus turned toward him in a curiously monolithic way, swinging her entire body around. She was a tall, fleshy, robust woman with a great tangle of yellow hair and skin so deeply tanned that it looked almost black. Delagard had been living with her for five or six years, ever since the death of his wife, but he hadn't married her. Perhaps he was trying to protect his sons' inheritance, people supposed. Delagard had four grown sons, living on other islands, each of them on a different one.

  She said hoarsely, sounding half strangled, "Bamber and Gospo just came up from the shipyard… they say the Gillies were here… that they said… they told us… they told Nid…"

  Her voice trailed off in an incoherent sputter.

  Shrivelled little Mendy Tanamind, Nimber's ancient mother, said in a piping tone, "We have to leave! We have to leave!" She giggled shrilly.

  "Nothing funny about it," Sandor Thalheim said. He was just as ancient as Mendy. He shook his head vehemently, making his dewlaps and wattles tremble.

  "All because of a few animals," Bamber Cadrell said. "Because of three dead divers."

  So the news was out already. Too bad, Lawler thought. Delagard's men should have kept their mouths shut until we figured out a way to handle this.

  Someone sobbed. Mendy Tanamind giggled again. Brondo Katzin broke from his stasis and began bitterly to mutter, over and over, "The fucking stinking Gillies! The fucking stinking Gillies!"

  "What's the trouble here?" Delagard asked, finally coming stumping up along the path from Lawler's vaargh.

  "Your boys Bamber and Gospo took it upon themselves to carry the news," Lawler said. "Everybody knows."

  "What? What? The bastards! I'll kill them!"

  "It's a little too late for that."

  Others were entering the plaza now. Lawler saw Gabe Kinverson, Sundira Thane, Father Quillan, the Sweyners. And more right behind them. They came crowding in, forty, fifty, sixty people, practically everybody. Even five or six of the Sisters were there, standing close together, a tight little female phalanx. Safety in numbers. Dag Tharp appeared. Marya and Gren Hain. Josc Yanez, Lawler's seventeen-year-old apprentice, who was going to be the island's next doctor someday. Onyos Felk, the mapkeeper. Natim Gharkid had come up from his algae beds, his trousers soaked to the waist. The news must have travelled through the whole community by this time.

  Mostly their faces showed shock, astonishment, incredulity. Is it true? they were asking. Can it be?

  Delagard cried out, "Listen, all of you, there's nothing to worry about! We're going to get this thing smoothed over!"

  Gabe Kinverson came up to Delagard. He looked twice as tall as the shipyard owner, a great slab of a man, all jutting chin and massive shoulders and cold, glaring sea-green eyes. There was always an aura of danger about Kinverson, of potential violence.

  "They threw us out?" Kinverson asked. "They really said we had to leave?"

  Delagard nodded.

  "Thirty days is what we have, and then out. They made that very clear. They don't care where we go, but we can't stay here. I'm going to fix everything, though. You can count on that."

  "Seems to me you've fixed everything already," Kinverson said. Delagard moved back a step and glared at Kinverson as if bracing for a fight. But the sea-hunter seemed more perplexed than angry. "Thirty days and then get out," Kinverson said, half to himself. "If that don't beat everything." He turned his back on Delagard and walked away, scratching his head.

  Perhaps Kinverson really didn't care, Lawler thought. He spent most of his time far out at sea anyway, by himself, preying on the kinds of fish that didn't choose to come into the bay. Kinverson had never been active in the life of the Sorve community; he floated through it the way the islands of Hydros drifted in the ocean, aloof, independent, well defended, following some private course.

  But others were more agitated. Brondo Katsin's delicate-looking little golden-haired wife Eliyana was sobbing wildly. Father Quillan attempted to comfort her, but he was obviously upset himself. The gnarled old Sweyners were talking to each other in low, intense tones. A few of the younger women were trying to explain things to their worried-looking children. Lis Niklaus had brought a jug of grapeweed brandy out of her cafe and it was passing rapidly from hand to hand among the men, who were gulping from it in a sombre, desperate way.

  Lawler said quietly to Delagard, "How exactly are you going to deal with all this? You have some sort of plan?"

  "I do," Delagard said. Suddenl
y he was full of frenetic energy. "I told you I'd take full responsibility, and I meant it. I'll go back to the Gillies on my knees, and if I have to lick their hind flippers I will, and I'll beg for forgiveness. They'll come around, sooner or later. They won't actually hold us to this goddamned absurd ultimatum."

  "I admire your optimism."

  Delagard went on, "And if they won't back off, I'll volunteer to go into exile myself. Don't punish everyone, I'll tell them. Just me. I'm the guilty one. I'll move to Velmise or Salimil or any place you like, and you'll never see my ugly face on Sorve again, that's a promise. It'll work, Lawler. They're reasonable beings. They'll understand that tossing an old lady like Mendy here off the island that's been her home for eighty years isn't going to serve any rational purpose. I'm the bastard, I'm the murderous diver-killing villain, and I'll go if I have to, though I don't even think it'll come down to that."

  "You may be right. Maybe not."

  "I'll crawl before them if I have to."

  "And you'll bring one of your sons over from Velmise to run the shipyard if they make you leave here, won't you?"

  Delagard looked startled. "Well, what's wrong with that?"

  "They might think you weren't all that sincere about agreeing to leave. They might think one Delagard was the same as the next."

  "You say it might not be good enough for them, if I'm the only one to go?"

  "That's exactly what I'm saying. They might want something more than that from you."

  "Like what?"

  "What if they told you they'd pardon the rest of us provided you left and agreed that you and your family would never set foot on Sorve again, and that the entire Delagard shipyard would be torn down?"

  Delagard's eyes grew very bright. "No," he said. "They wouldn't ask that!"

  "They already have. And more."

  "But if I go, if I really go… if my sons pledge never to harm a diver again…"

  Lawler turned away from him.

  For Lawler the first shock was past; the simple phrase We are going to have to leave Sorve had incorporated itself in his mind, his soul, his bones. He was taking it very calmly, all things considered. He wondered why. Between one moment and the next the existence on this island that he had spent his entire life constructing had been yanked from his grasp.

  He remembered the time he had gone to Thibeire. How deeply disquieting it had been to see all those unfamiliar faces, to be unaware of names and personal histories, to walk down a path and not know what lay at the end of it. He had been glad to come home, after just a few hours.

  And now he would have to go somewhere else and stay there for the rest of his life; he would have to live among strangers; he would lose all sense that he was a Lawler of Sorve Island, and would become just anybody, a newcomer, an off-islander, intruding in some new community where he had no place and no purpose. That should have been a hard thing to swallow. And yet after that first moment of terrifying instability and disorientation he had settled somehow into a kind of numbed acceptance, as though he were as indifferent to the eviction as Gabe Kinverson seemed to be, or Gharkid, that perversely free-floating man. Strange. Maybe it simply hasn't sunk in yet, Lawler told himself.

  Sundira Thane came up to him. She was flushed and there was a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her whole posture was one of excitement and a kind of fierce self-satisfaction.

  "I told you they were annoyed with us, didn't I? Didn't I? Looks like I was right."

  "So you were," Lawler said.

  She studied him for a moment. "We're really going to have to leave. I don't have the slightest doubt of it." Her eyes flashed brilliantly. She seemed to be glorying in all this, almost intoxicated by it. Lawler remembered that this was the sixth island she had lived on so far, at the age of thirty-one. She didn't mind moving around. She might even enjoy it.

  He nodded slowly. "Why are you so sure of that?"

  "Because Dwellers don't ever change their minds. When they say something they stick to it. And killing divers seems to be a more serious thing to them than killing meatfish or bangers. The Dwellers don't mind our going out into the bay and hunting for food. They eat meatfish themselves. But the divers are, well, different. The Dwellers feel very protective toward them."

  "Yes," Lawler said. "I guess they do."

  She stared straight into his eyes. She was nearly on eye level with him. "You've lived here a long time, haven't you, Lawler?"

  "All my life."

  "Oh. I'm sorry. This is going to be rough for you."

  "I'll deal with it," he said. "Every island can use another doctor. Even a half-baked doctor like me." He laughed. "Listen, how's that cough doing?"

  "I haven't coughed once since you gave me that dope."

  "I didn't think you would."

  Delagard suddenly was at Lawler's elbow again. Without apologizing for breaking in on his conversation with Sundira, he said, "Will you come with me to the Gillies, doc?"

  "What for?"

  "They know you. They respect you. You're your father's son and that gives you points with them. They think of you as a serious and honourable man. If I have to promise to leave the island, you can vouch for me, that I mean it when I say I'll go away and never come back."

  "They'll believe you without my help, if you tell them that. They don't expect any intelligent being to tell lies, even you. But that still won't change anything."

  "Come with me all the same, Lawler."

  "It's a waste of time. What we need to be doing is starting to plan the evacuation."

  "Let's try it, at least. We can't be sure if we don't try."

  Lawler considered that. "Right now?"

  "After dark," Delagard said. "They don't want to see any of us now. They're too busy celebrating the opening of the new power plant. They got it going about two hours ago, you know. They've got a cable running from the waterfront to their end of the island and it's carrying juice."

  "Good for them."

  "I'll meet you down by the sea-wall at sunset, all right? And we'll go and talk to them together. Will you do that, Lawler?"

  * * *

  In the afternoon Lawler sat quietly in his vaargh, trying to comprehend what it would mean to have to leave the island, working at the concept, worrying at it. No patients came to see him. Delagard, true to his promise of the early morning, had sent some flasks of grapeweed brandy over, and Lawler drank a little, and then a little more, without any particular effect. Lawler thought of allowing himself another dose of his tranquillizer, but somehow that seemed not to be a good idea. He was tranquil enough as it was, right now: what he felt wasn't his usual restlessness, but rather a sodden dullness of spirit, a heavy weight of depression, for which the pink drops weren't likely to be of any use.

  I am going to leave Sorve Island, he thought.

  I am going to live somewhere else, on an island I don't know, among people whose names and ancestries and inner natures are absolute mysteries to me.

  He told himself that it was all right, that in a few months he'd feel just as much at home on Thibeire, or Velmise, or Kaggeram, or whatever island it was that he ultimately settled on, as he did on Sorve. He knew that that wasn't true, but that was what he told himself, all the same.

  Resignation seemed to help. Acceptance, even indifference. The trouble was that he couldn't stay on that numbed-down level consistently. From time to time a sudden flare of shock and bewilderment would hit him, a sense of intolerable loss, even of out-and-out fear. And then he had to start all over again.

  * * *

  When it began to grow dark Lawler left his vaargh and headed down to the sea-wall.

  Two moons had risen, and a faint sliver of Sunrise had returned to the sky. The bay was alive with twilight colours, long streaks of reflected gold and purple, fading quickly into the grey of night as he watched. The dark shapes of mysterious sea-creatures moved purposefully in the shallow waters. It was all very peaceful: the bay at sundown, calm, lovely.

  But then tho
ughts of the voyage that awaited him crept into his mind. Lawler looked outward beyond the harbour to the vastness of the unfriendly, inconceivable sea. How far would they have to sail before they found an island willing to take them in? A week's journey? Two weeks? A month? He had never been to sea at all, not even for a day. That time he had gone over to Thibeire, it had been a simple journey by coracle, just beyond the shallows to the other island that had come up so close by Sorve.

  Lawler realized that he feared the sea. The sea was a great world-sized mouth, which he sometimes imagined must have swallowed up all of Hydros in some ancient convulsion, leaving nothing but the little drifting islands that the Gillies had created. It would swallow him too, if he set out to cross it.

  Angrily he told himself that this was foolishness, that men like Gabe Kinverson went out into the sea every day and survived it, that Nid Delagard had made a hundred voyages between the islands, that Sundira Thane had come to Sorve from an island in the Azure Sea, which was so far away that he had never heard of it. It would be all right. He would board one of Delagard's ships and in a week or two it would bring him to the island that would be his new home.

  And yet-the blackness, the immensity, the surging power of the terrible world-spanning sea-

  "Lawler?" a voice called.

  He looked around. For the second time this day Nid Delagard stepped out of the shadows behind him.

  "Come on," the shipyard owner said. "It's getting late. Let's go talk to the Gillies."

  5

  There were electric lights glowing in the Gillie power plant, just a little way farther along the curve of the shore. Other lights, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, could be seen blazing in the streets of Gillie-town beyond. The unexpected catastrophe of the expulsion had completely overshadowed the other big event of the day, the inauguration of turbine-driven electrical generation on Sorve Island.