Mark Newton - The Broken Isles

‘I think the people will be more than grateful,’ Lan said. ‘Now, I should really get back — there were a few fights over who should be evacuated first. You would have thought people could stick together in times like this. Anyway, I have to make sure more conflicts don’t break out.’

‘Excellent suggestion,’ Brynd said.

Lan touched Fulcrom’s arm, and he smiled back at her. She turned and jogged into the distance. Brynd noted those final tender gestures Fulcrom had made towards her, and questioned their status.

‘We are partners,’ Fulcrom confessed, ‘in more than one sense.’

Brynd nodded and thought no more of the comment. He was relieved simply to have met two decent individuals. The future would need people like them.

Hours later, sometime between midnight and dawn, the sea-vehicles returned to the shore. Someone clattered a crude copper bell and started shouting in an attempt to rouse people from their slumber, and for the next wave of evacuees to assemble. There weren’t enough craft for the job — people just had to wait.

Brynd didn’t think it was possible to sleep out here anyway, what with this breeze moaning loudly as it drifted along the coast. A salt tang lingered in the air, and smoke from wood fires was still pungent. He watched in disbelief as the immense horses approached the shore. On the back of one of them stood a much smaller figure, which he assumed was Frater Mercury.

Presently, civilians began surging towards the shore. The tide was out, and many began slipping on the seaweed-caked pebbles. Brynd walked over to a unit of senior soldiers nearby, where he gave orders for a few hundred of the Dragoons to try to organize the most vulnerable — the elderly, the very young, mothers — to evacuate first. Anyone who could last another night was ordered to stay.

There were impromptu farewells between families, and Brynd found the sudden, touching scenes actually moved him — which was surprising, given his recent lack of emotional engagement. Perhaps it was because he was back on Jokull, or perhaps because he had seen just how vulnerable a population could be.

Fulcrom joined him to confirm that all was going well with the next phase of the evacuation, and that any signs of trouble were beginning to fade.

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ Brynd asked.

‘Yeah, it’s certainly something,’ Fulcrom said with a wry grin. ‘Especially now it’s less of a burden and the responsibility’s yours I can finally enjoy the sight.’

‘The burden becomes less of an issue after a few years of doing it. You learn to filter out those kinds of thoughts, for better or worse. Besides, whatever we do someone will end up being hurt or angry with us.’

‘How do you know what the beneficial choices really are? Will there be democratic choices in this new society? We all know the Council elections were a joke.’

‘What would you have in its place? Tell me — you’re someone who has worked with the law for all your life. Where does it fail people?’ Brynd gestured with an outstretched arm towards the evacuees.

‘It’s not really my place to say, commander.’

‘I’ve spent a lot of my years listening to people who have no idea about how things work on the ground. You’ve been there, and seen a great deal of turmoil. You saw what happened in the last days of Villjamur. I’m only interested in an opinion, man — you won’t hang for it.’

‘This is a new regime then,’ Fulcrom replied. The rumel appeared to think about the question for a moment, but Brynd didn’t hurry him. Eventually, he said, ‘Ideally you’d have representatives for the people. I would say that, without a shadow of a doubt, the serious events in Villjamur would not have happened if people had had some say in the matters that affected them. You could have neighbourhood representatives, perhaps, especially if there are going to be communities of different species. All the law books in Villjamur were geared up around protecting land or property in one form or another; presumably when you’re drawing new lines on a map that won’t be so easy. They’ll need someone to champion their concerns. They’ll want land of their own, too, to make a living from.’

Brynd absorbed the sage words of the rumel investigator. Brynd’s time had been spent enforcing a type of law on people in far-off cities, and he had seen the difficulties and scepticism and failures first-hand; the investigator had experience of what happened when a society looked inward, which was the direction Brynd was now having to contemplate.

‘Forgive me for bringing this up, commander — our discussions are rather high level. I hadn’t expected to be discussing the future of the Empire — or whatever’s left of it. I always assumed the Night Guard’s concerns were military strategy. I think what I’m asking is, who’s leading us and who gets to decide how to run a new regime?’

‘Empress Rika,’ Brynd replied curtly.

Fulcrom nodded and appeared to contemplate her reclamation of the throne of the Empire. ‘You don’t seem too impressed with that.’

‘Your powers of observation are acute, investigator,’ Brynd said.

‘It always seems odd that our history is populated with kings or emperors — or in this case, Empress.’

‘She’s not strictly an empress any more,’ Brynd said, ‘for as you can see, there’s very little left of the Empire’s main structures.’

Dawn broke, shadows flittered away as the first light of day rose up from behind, lighting the remarkable view before them.

Eir, former Stewardess of the Jamur Empire, sister of Empress Rika, found herself in unusual settings for a lady of her status. The rooms weren’t exactly inviting — the structure had been built using large stones from a collapsed monastery, though apparently the architects had not thought about bringing many of the windows with them. Light came only from cressets, candles and fireplaces. Just a few decorations were littered about the place — a few religious trinkets and some donated rugs that gave off a bad smell, which was only disguised by the worse odours from dried blood or buckets of urine.

Using a cloth soaked in a water and oil mixture, she washed around a man’s wounds; they hadn’t become infected, thanks to the quick work of one of the nurses, so it probably looked far worse than it actually was.

The man smiled through the pain as she dabbed the longest wound that stretched up along his ribs. Water trickled down his torso and he shivered. One of the other nurses briefed Eir earlier: he had become injured in a fight when he intervened in a quayside skirmish. Two women had been assaulted by a gang of youths, and he had stepped in to scare them off. The youths overwhelmed him: two knife wounds under his ribcage had freed him of a lot of blood, but he had been incredibly fortunate to gain the attention of some people nearby, who knew about the hospital.

‘You have good luck on your side, if you managed to find yourself here,’ Eir said softly.

He looked at her, smiled, and then his gaze drifted to the wall behind her. ‘Well, miss, some might argue that my luck was not so good that I was knifed in the first place.’ He was one of the more polite patients here at the hospital — a pleasant-natured forty-year-old, who seemed honest and decent, and that was the most any nurse could hope for.

‘I don’t suppose it’s too much to hope for a few more logs in the stove?’ he asked.

‘I’ll see if one of the nurses can bring some more in,’ Eir replied.

He glanced up at her again. ‘I’ve not seen you around here much.’

‘No,’ Eir replied. ‘I don’t get the chance to volunteer that much.’

‘It’s nice that anyone can really,’ he said, and laid back on the bed. ‘You don’t look much like a nurse.’