The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

CHAPTER 18


Jezreel on Ischia

“I’m Giorgi,” said the man who’d held the door of the Elder’s House when the delegation entered. “My father said you wanted to see Jezreel?”

Daniel clasped hands with him. They were much of an age, but Monfiore was taller by a head and probably didn’t weigh—Daniel thought ruefully—any more than Daniel did.

“I’d like to get out of here,” Daniel said, making a minute gesture, his hand close to his body, toward the locals clumping to chatter in the street outside the Elder’s House. “And frankly, I’d prefer to see some of the countryside rather than houses. Even very nice houses don’t interest me very much.”

A number of the locals were watching them intently. A woman looked as though she were about to join them, but Giorgi’s glare thrust her back.

She wore a floral bonnet and sashes of red and green crossed over a dull yellow dress. The cut of the garments was closer than those Daniel had grown up with, but the color sense of Jezreel residents was identical to that of Bantry peasants dressed in their “best” clothes.

Daniel glanced at Hogg, who shrugged and said, “Guess I’ll look around some on my own. There might be a poker game somewheres.”

“Shall I get the aircar?” Giorgi said. “It’s around the back.”

“I don’t think we should go any distance,” Daniel said, “but if we could wander down to the riverbank, that would be relaxing. From here it looks remarkably unspoiled.”

Giorgi laughed. “Above the town, yes,” he said as he took them toward the head of the street. “The shipyard is three kilos downstream, and that isn’t so pristine. Though there hasn’t been much construction recently, so even that isn’t a waste pond.”

He walked at a swinging pace which did as much to fend off would-be companions as the hard look he gave those they passed. Daniel kept up without difficulty. There wasn’t much room for walking on the Kiesche, but he and Hogg had been tramping the whole of the Bantry estate since he was six years old. Climbing the rigging to view the Matrix kept him more fit on shipboard than he was after staying in Xenos.

They left the road for a path slanting down toward the river. Short logs or in one case a squared stone block reduced the slope in a few places, but it was still meant for pedestrians moving in file.

“I noticed that you weren’t carrying a gun when we arrived,” Daniel said as they neared the river. A similar path bordered the water in both directions. “I gather Hogg noticed also, which is why he didn’t stick with me.”


Giorgi grunted. “Because he didn’t think that I could kill you with my bare hands?” he asked without looking over his shoulder.

“Because he thought you weren’t stupid,” Daniel said. They’d reached the riverbank. “I suppose he meant it as a compliment.”

“Sorry,” Giorgi said. He stopped and met Daniel’s eyes. “It wasn’t father’s idea but he went along with it. Schweitzer said that we needed to put the fear of heaven into you right at the start or you’d run roughshod over us.”

“Let’s walk upstream,” Daniel said, gesturing. The current was slow, in part because the dam and pool had raised the level above it as well. “But you didn’t agree with Master Schweitzer?”

“I captain the freighter Bird Girl,” Giorgi said. “She’s there in the pool.”

He gestured. The six Ischian ships were indistinguishable from this angle, but that itself was sufficient identification.

“I was on Tumbler when the Heimdall landed in the naval harbor on her way to join Admiral Peterson’s fleet,” Giorgi continued. “I guess if you’re not afraid of a battleship, we’re not going to scare you with small arms.”

Daniel laughed. “I bloody well was afraid of the Heimdall!” he said. “I was in the cruiser Milton at Cacique, and I don’t know any cruiser captain who wouldn’t be ready to foul himself trading salvoes with a battleship.”

He cleared his throat and said, “But no, a group of armed civilians weren’t going to affect my negotiations.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Giorgi said, his eyes lowered. “I told father we’d be making fools of ourselves, but he hasn’t been off-planet since before I was born. He’s not stupid, but he thinks in terms of—”

He spread his arms in a double gesture.

“—this valley and maybe Ischia. He doesn’t…well, he’s seen your record, but he didn’t see the Heimdall, and he doesn’t know what the record means. I’m glad things worked out like they have.”

Daniel squatted. Bright green plants rose out of the water and grew on the boggy margin of the path. The stems were five-sided, and the oval leaves sprang from each side in turn as they spiraled upward.

Attached to an outcrop thrusting into the river was what looked like a small version of the “sponge” he had seen in the pond in front of the Manor in Brotherhood. Daniel set his left palm on the rock and leaned his weight onto it.

“Careful there!” Giorgi said. “That pinkie-gray firepot there will give you Hell’s own bite. Your whole arm’ll be swelled up for a week, and you’ll feel it in your joints every time the weather changes for the rest of your life.”

“They’re local here?” Daniel said. He lowered his face-carefully—toward the water to peer closer. He thought he could see bronze specks the size of wheat grains, junior versions of the parasites on the sponge on Corcyra.

“Anywhere there’s fresh water,” Giorgi said. “They’re a nuisance if you’re going to be swimming or watering your stock, but other than that they’re not a problem. The shellbacks keep them down.”

Standing behind Daniel, he leaned over also. “There’s one, you see?” he said, pointing to the upstream side of the rock.

A darkly iridescent oval the size of a man’s palm rubbed close to what was here a firepot. Daniel had taken it for the top of another rock until Giorgi called it to his attention. Scores of legs—Daniel saw mostly the motion through a foot of flowing water—rippled along the edges of the creature. The shellback wasn’t doing anything immediately obvious, but the adjacent patch of the sponge’s body was bare of cilia.

Daniel stood up in two stages, making sure that Giorgi had enough warning to move back. “I sometimes think of becoming a naturalist when I retire,” he said, smiling broadly to his guide. “But that’s a long time to come, I hope. And I’m not really organized enough to do a proper job of that.”

Though if Adele should retire at the same time, there’d be a chance for some rigorously reported, first-rate field work on planets which nobody else had given more than a glance at!

“Captain,” said Giorgi, turning to face Daniel. For a moment he seemed on the verge of saluting. “I want you to know that I opposed the whole idea. Like you said, we Monfiores are spacers, traders. We’re not pirates.”

He balled his fists. Daniel listened with a friendly smile, ready to react if Monfiore got carried away and swung at whatever happened to be closest.

“My father said that sometimes an Elder has to make hard decisions to save his people,” Giorgi said. “I say that if being Elder means being a criminal, then somebody else can have the job! I’ll go to Pleasaunce and sign on as wiper on one of their ships.”

Daniel thought of the decisions he made regularly, as an RCN officer and as a man. Many people had died because of those decisions. Some of the dead were his own personnel, and some were innocent of anything except being in the wrong place when Daniel Leary had a task to accomplish.

Daniel continued to smile. “It’s over,” he said. “At least I trust that it’s over. I think that the deal offered is fair, and I’m sure that your fellow citizens will see that it is.”

“I wouldn’t bet…,” Giorgi said, smiling also. “That a General Meeting of my fellow citizens would be able to agree on what day of the month it was. But I’ll swear to you that I’ll do whatever I can to end our descent into piracy.”

A siren began to wind from the tower on the roof of the Elder’s House. Giorgi glanced up and said, “Speaking of General Meetings, that’s the call. Most people will be taking part by computer, but I need to get back to the hall. By heaven, we’re going to accept your offer or I’ll know the reason why!”

“I certainly hope you do,” Daniel said, following Giorgi up the path as quickly as they had come down it, regardless of the slope.

And if you don’t, I’m confident that the same offer made to a consortium of three or four neighboring clans will convince them to attack you and I’ll get the prisoners back that way. It was what Corder Leary and his distant Leary ancestors would have done if it were necessary to accomplish a mission.

***

Adele shut down her data unit and rose from the table in Councillor Louis Holper’s kitchen. Cazelet and the four Ischian officials remained seated. Tovera smiled sardonically; she stood against the concrete outer wall between the door and the window, a casement with six panes.

Through the door to the sitting room—it didn’t have a table for the locals to place their large data units, so the negotiators were in the kitchen—Holper’s wife Mitzi nervously pretended to dust knickknacks on egg-crate display shelving. It was a pleasant little home for the two of them, and surprisingly neat given that the decision to adjourn here had been spur of the moment.

“Do any of you see a reason that I should remain with you?” Adele said. Her tone and the fact she was standing made her own opinion clear, though she was quite willing to make it more clear if someone pressed her.

“I can’t imagine that we will, Lady Mundy,” Cazelet said before the locals could offer an opinion. “The rest of the business should be quite straightforward. Shall I call you at the ship if something comes up?”

The only thing Adele could do that Cazelet couldn’t was to kill everyone in the house. That shouldn’t be necessary, though if Adele had to endure more drivel abut freight rates, it was a possible result. All the more reason for her to leave.

In other circumstances Adele might have worried about leaving her agent unsupported in a room with four opponents, but Cazelet’s background made him far more sophisticated than the Ischians. Nor were they going to browbeat one of Captain Leary’s officers.…

“No, I think I’ll visit the prisoners,” she said aloud. “Master Holper, could your wife guide me, please?”

“What?” said the councillor. “What? Mitzi! The lady here wants you to take her up to the lodge. Can you do that or should I get—”

“Get who, Louis Holper?” his wife snapped, stepping into the kitchen. She was already untying the strings of her apron. “I guess I’m not crippled up yet, and I’ll thank you not to tell her ladyship that I am!”

She turned to Adele and half-curtsied, half-bowed. Stepping to the outside door, she said, “If you’ll come this way. It’s just up to the top of the ridge.”

They went out in file, Mistress Holper in the lead and Tovera closing the door behind them. A score of locals, men and women both, waited in the street talking nervously. When they saw Holper and her companions, one called, “Mitzi? What’s going on?”

“That’s for the people whose business it is, Susey Lainz,” Mistress Holper said. “Which isn’t you nor me either one. You ought all to go home. I’m taking our visitors up to the lodge. And we don’t need help doing that!”

Adele wondered how much political say women had on Ischia. That the Elder and Councillors were all men might be chance—four was a small sample. Still, she’d noticed in the past that the farther you got from the centers of civilization, the less likely you were to find gender equality.


That didn’t bother Adele particularly; it was simply data. In addition to taking a detached attitude about most things, she was always aware that the pistol in her pocket gave her the power of life or death over anyone who came within fifty yards of so of her.

She smiled. There had been times where that was a surprisingly comforting thought.

Stone steps at the back of the house led up to a track as substantial as the one from the harbor. It was wide enough for two, so Adele chose to walk beside their guide.

“We use the lodge for gatherings, you know,” Mistress Holper said as she trudged briskly upward. “Weddings and the like, parties. It’s a nice place. We treated your friends just as good as if they was our own.”

She breathed deeply and looked at Adele. “Your ladyship?” she said. “Is it going to be all right? I know it’s not my place to ask, but we’ve all been so frightened when we heard that Cinnabar was coming down on us! We should never have done it, we know that, but it looked like the only way and that know-it-all Schweitzer, he kept saying it’d be fine, it’ll be fine.”

She spat. “And where is our Darrell now?” she said. “Hiding in his own root cellar, I hear!”

“Captain Leary’s offer is very fair,” Adele said. “So long as your community wants peaceful trade, that’s what you’ll have.”

She wondered if she should have explained that she and Daniel didn’t represent Cinnabar. Quite apart from the fact that the mistaken assumption was to the benefit of Daniel’s position, Adele herself had the authority of the Leary enterprises. That wasn’t precisely “the Republic of Cinnabar,” but Adele suspected that Corder Leary could move the Senate in any direction he chose in dealing with worms like the Monfiore clan of Ischia.

“Oh, that’ll be a blessing,” Holper said. “You can’t know what a blessing that will be.”

Because of the steep slope near the top of the ridge, they had been unable to see the lodge for some minutes. The paved track ended in a stone staircase to the right. When Adele started up the steps beside Mistress Holper, the lodge rose into view ahead of them.

A husky man got up from a wicker chair as they approached. “Hey, Mitzi,” he said. A long baton leaned against the side of the building, but he didn’t have a gun. “Are you spelling me?”

“These are the envoys, Phil,” Holper said. “Heavens be praised, I think we’re shut of this filthy business.”

“I’m Lady Mundy,” Adele said, since it didn’t appear that their guide would think to introduce her. “With my aide. We’re here to see the prisoners.”

The lodge had waist-high stone walls and louvered windows—closed at the moment—above them to the roof of structural plastic. It would be simple enough to break a couple windows and crawl out, but it couldn’t be done without enough noise to alert the guard with the riot stick.

“We treat them nice as you please,” Holper said as Phil opened the padlock closing the chain which bound the handles of the double doors. “You’ll see if they don’t say that!”

“There isn’t much reason for them to break out, is there?” said Tovera, eyeing the situation with her usual amused detachment. “Do they even know what planet they’re on?”

“Look, this was none of my idea,” the guard said. “I’m just up here because I’m a citizen, you see?”

He threw the door open and stepped aside, turning his face away so that he didn’t have to meet his visitors’ eyes. Mistress Holper said, “I’ll wait here with Phil. Take all the time you want.”

“I’ll wait out here,” Tovera said, to Adele as she entered the building. Her smile might have been described as pitying, though pity was as difficult to associate with Tovera as love would be.

“I’m Lady Mundy from Cinnabar,” Adele said, addressing the hostages. They must have gotten to their feet when they heard the door rattle. “My colleague Captain Leary and I are here to secure your release. The details are being worked out now.”

The Monfiores must by now realize how badly they had miscalculated. Nonetheless, they were going to benefit from their piracy, their kidnapping.

Adele had never been concerned about fairness: she had been born to privilege, then had spent a comparable length of time in abject poverty through no fault of her own. Both those states were facts. Fairness and justice were matters for philosophers to discuss. Not for librarians, and certainly not for politicians.

“Well, we’ve waited long enough!” said the rather pretty young man who must be Penning Almer, aide to Mistress Tibbs of the Regiment. The woman in a Pantellarian naval dress uniform, rather the worse for wear now, would be Lieutenant Angelotti of the Freccia, while the heavy-set man of fifty was Colonel Bourbon, despite his civilian clothes.

Bourbon was the only one who mattered, so it was to him that Adele said, “I’m afraid, Colonel, that the delay in our arrival is less surprising than the fact that we’ve arrived at all. Colonel Mursiello, as he now calls himself, was something less than enthusiastic about getting you back.”

“That bastard,” Bourbon said, but he sounded more bitter than angry. He ground his right fist into his left hand, as though he were pulverizing something in a mortar rather than smashing it with a hammer. “I didn’t trust him, not a bit, but I thought it was safer to leave him in charge on Corcyra for a couple weeks than it would have been to put him together with the Junta ruling Karst.”

“You mean it’s your fault that we’ve been stranded here for three months?” Almer said. As with Lieutenant Angelotti’s uniform, Almer’s swirlingly loose civilian garments had been pulled and wrinkled during captivity. Whatever the fabric was, it lost its sheen when it stretched. “A couple weeks indeed!”

“When can we go?” Angelotti asked Adele. Her hands were pressed together unconsciously, making Adele wonder whether the lieutenant had a personal reason to want to be back on Corcyra.

In Angelotti’s case and in most cases involving women of childbearing age, “personal reason” generally meant a sexual relationship. With men of a similar age, greed was an equally probable cause.

“As I say, there are details to work out,” Adele said. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to get your luggage together now, because I’m sure that Captain Leary intends to leave as soon as we’ve made the arrangements.”

She supposed another person would have said that it would only be a short time. Logically that was true, but there was no lack of evidence that most people behaved illogically at least some of the time.

“Luggage!” Almer said. He tugged out the legs of his pantaloons with a theatrical gesture. “We have nothing but what was with us in the hostel on Dace! We weren’t allowed to get our baggage from the ship, meager as even that would have been.”

Almer turned to Colonel Bourbon. He said,”You were probably right. The Junta would have been more than willing to put Mursiello in power on Corcyra if he offered them enough. And from what I’ve seen of Mursiello, he’d offer everything anybody else on Corcyra had to get power himself. You and we have had our differences, Bourbon, but as between gentlemen.”

Almer is a fop and a petulant little prig, Adele thought. But he isn’t a fool after all. Her respect for Mistress Tibbs, who had sent the young man as her agent, went up.

“Speaking for myself,” Bourbon said, grinning wearily, “I’d just as soon that Mursiello had been cooped up here for the past two months. On the other hand, I would have tried to get him back, and who knows where that might have led?”

“You’ve been successful in arranging for the missiles, then?” Adele said.

“Oh, yes,” Bourbon said. “The price is steep, but we’ve spread the payments out over twenty-five years and the Junta finally agreed to take the payment in exemption from transport tariffs as soon as Corcyra is at peace again. While the Pantellarians are on the planet, we’ll have to pay in copper delivered to Karst at our own expense, but I hope that a year or at most two will end that. After the missiles arrive, of course.”

“If I may ask, Lady Mundy?” said Almer with an unpleasant smile. “You said you and Captain Leary were from Cinnabar. What is Cinnabar’s involvement on Corcyra?”

Not at all a fool. “The Republic is not involved,” Adele said crisply. “My colleague and I came to Corcyra in our private capacities on behalf of the Transformationist community. When we learned of the situation regarding yourselves and the war more generally, we volunteered to negotiate your release ourselves.”

Almer pursed his lips. Before the question he was framing could reach his tongue, Tovera said loudly, “Good afternoon, Elder Paul.”

“That’s the leader of the gang!” Angelotti said, turning to the door as Adele opened it.

Paul strode in, looking exultant. “Colonel,” he said to Bourbon. “I apologize to your and your colleagues. We have wronged you, I have wronged you, but I hope that some time in the future we will be able to make it up to you. For now, let me say that you are free to go. Captain Leary’s ship waits in the harbor to carry you home.”


Colonel Bourbon picked up a small fabric case. He paused in the door long enough to clasp hands with Paul on his way past. Neither Almer nor Angelotti showed that courtesy; but then, the Monfiores weren’t really owed it.

Adele and Tovera followed the former prisoners down the track. It would be good to leave Ischia, but Adele didn’t feel the urgency that the Corcyrans seemed to.

“If we get off safely,” she said to Tovera, “I’ll consider this a job well done.”

“If we don’t,” said Tovera, smiling again, “perhaps I’ll have a chance to kill a few people. I win either way.”

“I’m glad you’re showing a positive attitude,” said Adele. They were both joking, in their fashions.