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New Eden 33

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 8

Sven stabbed his spear into the surprised Low Fang's neck, ignoring the reproachful look in the eyes of the maltreated creature. All around him, militia members were fighting and dying as they exterminated the horde of Low Fangs that their battalion had been hunting down over the previous few days. Following his examination, he had been tossed some cheap leather armour to put on, and a spear had been pressed into his hand. Then they had marched off, always following the direction of the latest Low Fang sightings. Several times they had encountered columns of knights-at-arms, who had looked down on them with a mixture of disgust and pity, the heavy hooves of their armoured horses spattering the militiamen with muck. It was clear that the king's official troops did not take the irregulars seriously, but to Sven's surprise, this had only spurred on his new brothers-in-arms. He sensed a plan developing within him, whereby he could create a tapestry of death and subjugation by weaving together the contempt shown by the knights-at-arms and the lust for action of the militiamen. However, to achieve this he first had to draw attention to himself. He thrust his spear into the bowels of another irresolute Low Fang, who had sensed a higher servant of the dark god standing in front of him and made the fatal mistake of hesitating. With a look of contemptuous superiority, Sven slaughtered the creature, who until its last breath had not been able to comprehend the treachery of the miller's son. The High Fang then scanned the battlefield. Four dead militiamen and six wounded. Still over twenty Low Fangs alive. This was going to be a hard fight. For everyone – except for him. For a moment Sven considered if he should stand back and watch the horde tear the rest of the humans to pieces. He could then seek out another militia troop as the sole survivor and spin a yarn about his heroic feats. Sighing, Sven skewered another Low Fang, who had turned away from him, believing himself to be safe. He could hardly avoid rescuing as many of his fellow irregulars as possible if he were going to bring his new plan to fruition. He forced himself to think of the bigger picture and fought his way through the Dark Ones until he reached the captain of the troop, who was surrounded by four Low Fangs. If Sven was going to slaughter his inferior brothers and sisters, then at least he could do it in front of the eyes of his superior. 'Have no fear, my captain. United, we shall pull through!' he called out in his best imitation of a heroic voice. The fat old man gave him a grateful look before returning to the fray with renewed vigour, attacking the deformed unfortunate humans who had fallen under the control of the Adversary. Sven waited until the captain suffered a serious though not deadly wound, thanks to a particularly large Low Fang with ferocious claws, whom the miller's son then almost casually stabbed, the strength of his iron will extinguishing the creature's fighting spirit and tortured soul. 'Come to me! Come to me!' roared Sven, waving his spear. 'Our captain needs help!' Yelling their battle cries and with new hope in their eyes, the other militiamen gathered around Sven, who grinned at them, his face smeared with blood. Follow me, he thought wildly to himself, and the laughter in his head was so loud that only with some effort could he refrain from physically uttering it. All of you, follow me!

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 9

The voyage to the Crow's Nest finally came to an end the following day, and when the island came into view, Ahren had to peer for a considerable time before he could make out the misshapen outlines that gradually revealed themselves on the hazy blue horizon. The island known as the Crow's Nest seemed to stretch just under a league across and he had no idea how long it was. It was for the most part remarkably flat, with the odd low hill here and there. The landmass itself wasn't of much interest to Ahren, but rather that which was situated on it. Dozens of shipwrecks seemed to have been pulled up on shore where they jutted up at grotesque angles towards the sky, their bare masts resembling warning fingers pointing to the heavens. Rope ladders made with wooden planks stretched across from ship to ship at varying heights, like pearl necklaces. As the Queen of the Waves sailed closer, the young Paladin could make out openings, terraces, and balconies built into the hulls, as well as extensions hammered onto them by using the remnants of other ships. More than twenty jetties jutted out from the Crow's Nest onto the sea, where roughly half a dozen pirate ships were moored. Little figures could be seen scurrying hither and thither among the hulls, resembling a swarm of ants exploring the remains of giant sea urchins. 'Ugly but impressive, isn't it?' suggested Falk, who was standing beside him. 'The place has grown a lot since I was here last. In those days there was a collection of encampments on the beach, teeming with suspicious pirates. There were three shipwrecks which sold rum and food supplies, and where you could also purchase human company – everything at exorbitant prices, of course.' Falk scowled disparagingly. 'I suspect progress has a different meaning for pirates than for more civilised people.' 'I can see over forty shipwrecks on the piers,' said Ahren, flabbergasted. 'No wonder nobody is stopping us or checking us out. Attacking this place would be suicidal.' Falk nodded. 'And there is an armed truce in operation here. At least among the captains and their crews. But if individual pirates want to kill each other, nobody takes a blind bit of notice. Remember that when we go ashore.' 'Hopefully, one of the two fleet captains is on land,' said Khara, who had positioned herself in the rigging above their heads to get a better view of the built-up island. 'I wouldn't like to have to spend days or even weeks waiting here.' Uldini wandered over to them and leaned back against the bulwark. 'You needn't worry on that front. As far as I know, there are mediators here with whom we can negotiate. I have to agree with Khara, though. We should get our information as quickly as possible, buy as much protection as we can and then vamoose. If anyone here discovers what sort of a ship the Queen of the Waves really is, then there really will be trouble.' 'We could slow down our approach,' suggested Ahren ruminatively. 'That way we will only dock in the evening and be merely one shadow among many on the jetties. If we're lucky, we can be gone again in the morning.' 'I like the way you're thinking, Ahren,' laughed Trogadon. 'With an attitude like that, I could turn you into a real lady's man – if only your heart weren't taken already.' There was a whistling sound and a Wind Blade pierced into the deck right in front of the flinching dwarf. 'I do apologise. Moon must have slipped out of my hand,' said Khara sweetly as she hung above Trogadon in the rigging. 'What was that you were saying about Ahren and other women?' Trogadon pursed his lips and took a careful step backwards. 'Nothing, my dear,' he rumbled in embarrassment. 'No reason for you to use my own craftsmanship against me. That wasn't why I forged this weapon.' Khara jumped lightly down onto the deck, pulled the sword out of the wood, and put it away. Then she deliberately hooked her arm under Ahren's and gave him a warning look. 'But I didn't say a word,' he murmured in a low voice. He ignored Culhen's laughter in his head and decided to change the subject as quickly as possible. 'Should we look for information together or would it be better for us to split up?' 'There is no way that we are going to walk around the place in a group – we would attract far too much attention,' said Falk, shaking his head. 'You and Khara will pretend to be a lovey-dovey pirate couple on shore leave looking for stories of romantic legends concerning immortal couples – but do it without arousing suspicion.' Then he indicated to himself, Uldini and Trogadon. 'I will play the captain, Trogadon is my bodyguard and Uldini my servant.' The Arch Wizard snorted loudly. He had to play that role far more often than he liked. 'First, I will pretend that I want to attach myself to one of the fleets,' continued the old man, 'and only when we have found a suitable negotiating partner will I spill the beans and try to purchase protection for us.' Uldini scowled. 'That will be the dangerous part of our plan. We simply cannot afford for our request to be rejected and to be taken into custody. But I have a few tricks up my sleeve that will hopefully dissuade anyone from betraying us.' 'Take Culhen with you,' said Ahren, following a flash of inspiration. 'He's in urgent need of exercise anyway and he will add weight to your demands.' Falk mulled over the suggestion. 'Right then, we'll do that,' he said to Ahren. 'And if there's trouble, he can communicate with you, and you can do the same with him.' 'And what am I going to do?' asked Jelninolan, her hands on her hips. Falk hesitated. 'You'd best stay on board. There won't be any elves here, and I'm already going to attract enough attention with a dwarf and an enormous wolf. A beautiful woman should not wander around on her own on this island under any circumstances. We don't want to attract trouble – on the contrary. Anyway, Uldini can make contact with you if he needs you to send out the crew to help us.' Jelninolan did not look happy, nor did the sailors and marines, who understood from Falk's words that they wouldn't be allowed to go on shore to let their hair down. For a moment Ahren thought that the priestess was going to protest, but finally she nodded. 'Your arguments are persuasive. And to be honest with you, I'd rather not pay this place a visit. I can already smell its concentrated perfidy from here.' Falk frowned. 'Selsena says the same. The Crow's Nest is a dangerous mixture of worldly vices, greed, and bloodlust. She is diving in the off-shore depths at the moment, hoping no captain gets the idea of going whale-hunting.' The Queen of the Waves slowed down her approach once Falk had ordered Captain Orben to implement Ahren's proposal of reaching the island at dusk. As they slowly floated towards their destination, Ahren considered the warning words of his companions. The Crow's Nest looked exotic and scurrilous at the same time and seemed to be full of life and activity. Snatches of music and laughter dominated the other sounds, as if to contradict what Jelninolan and Selsena had picked up from the island. 'Ah, if any place has ever tempted me then it is surely this one,' said Trogadon, who was standing beside Ahren and looking eagerly at the mainland. 'If they have a first-class forge here, then you never know, I might settle down on the island.' Ahren raised an eyebrow and the dwarf gave a rumbling laugh. 'Alright, alright, I'm exaggerating a little. But can't you smell the entertainment wafting over from the island?' The warrior stretched out his powerful fingers as if he wanted to physically grab the Crow's Nest. At that very moment they heard the scream of a woman pirate echoing across the waves before it turned into a strangled bloody gurgling. This was followed by a loud bawling sound and the dwarf quickly pulled back his hand as if he had burned himself. 'Well,' he continued a little bashfully, 'the people may be a little rougher than they seem from a distance.' Ahren placed a hand on Trogadon's shoulder. 'You look after Falk and Culhen,' he murmured to the dwarf in an urgent voice. 'Your mission is far more dangerous than ours. Khara and I only have to check out rumours and legends regarding lonely, loving couples – you have to organise our protection and then even reveal your true identities. That could so easily go wrong.' Trogadon looked keenly into Ahren's eyes. 'Nobody is going to get the better of us, I can guarantee you that. But your vain wolf must not get too distracted by things.' He knows that I can hear him, complained Culhen, causing Ahren to smile. 'He's going to be rambunctious after being cooped up on this ship for so long. The best thing is if you let him run around on the beach for a while. Once people start admiring him, he will become more attentive and obedient,' said the Forest Guardian conspiratorially. I can still hear the two of you! snapped Culhen, and Ahren burst out laughing. The evening arrived more quickly than the increasingly nervous Ahren had hoped. The Crow's Nest had revealed its true identity as the ship had moved closer. The young Paladin calculated that he had heard at least two death cries coming from the bowels of the wrecks. Feeling tense and ready to draw his blade at the least sign of trouble, he placed his arm firmly around Khara's waist as they docked. Khara seemed serious and self-contained, with a strange look on her face, almost as if she were staring back into her past. 'Is anything the matter?' Ahren asked in a whisper. 'The atmosphere on this island reminds me of my time in the arena,' answered Khara absently. 'This mixture of incipient violence, excessive indulgence and ignorance regarding the wellbeing of others. That's exactly how the spectators used to sound when we had to fight for their entertainment.' Instead of answering her, Ahren planted a gentle kiss on her hair. He would have to be twice as alert tonight to prevent Khara from reliving some uninvited memories which might provoke her into acting rashly. 'I can go on my own if you like,' he suggested. 'Are you joking?' responded Khara angrily. 'They'll have you for breakfast in a place like this if you're not careful. You're just too friendly.' Ahren decided to take that as a compliment. The ropes were being thrown out and now the Queen of the Waves floated onto an empty jetty, hitting the wall with a low grating sound. Captain Orben had picked it out to avoid having other pirate ships as immediate neighbours. They walked down the gangplank and while Ahren tried to find his land legs again he looked around in the hope of gleaning some more information from their surroundings. For a pirate town consisting almost completely of dry wood, there were a surprising number of torches. The smells of cheap rum, sooty smoke and stale food almost disguised the less pleasant stenches created by hundreds of unwashed, drunken pirates in a place that had no sewers. The shore was littered with washed up rubbish, which presumably had just been tossed into the sea. 'Like a festering wound in paradise,' murmured Falk, and Ahren could only agree. Suddenly, Culhen scampered past them, before racing wildly along the beach. 'You two go on ahead,' said Uldini, gesturing to two brightly lit shipwrecks that had been hammered together into one large building. Loud, riotous music could be heard coming from within, almost drowned out by the ear-splitting sounds of laughing and shrieking. 'That must be one of the many taverns here.' Ahren nodded and went arm in arm with Khara towards the noise. I expect you to keep an eye on the others, he communicated to Culhen, who was in boisterous form. You can let off steam on the beach, but after that don't let Falk and the other two out of your sight. Understood? Half of Culhen's affirmative response sounded like a whimper of relief, and only now did the full force of the animal's suffering in the confines of the ship become clear to Ahren. He lessened his connection to the capering wolf to a minimum and concentrated instead on the confusion of noises, smells and colours that he and Khara were approaching. The room was filled with fifty pirates or thereabouts and almost the same number of barmaids. He glanced into the dimly lit corners of the room and immediately corrected his first impression when he saw what was going on. They weren't barmaids after all – or at least many of them weren't. He cleared his throat in embarrassment, pretending not to have noticed anything but continued up to a circular bar in the middle of the tavern with Khara on his arm. An enormous, half-bald, ferocious-looking fellow with a bristly beard and a scornful, down-turned mouth was standing behind the counter. His apron looked as if it had never been washed but would be thrown away and replaced once it had rotted completely. Unwashed tankards were stacked high behind the barman, who had just been given an order. He reached behind him, grabbed one of the dirty drinking vessels and filled it with a sour-smelling rum. Neither the condition of the rum nor its container seemed to bother the pirate taking the drink, but Ahren had to suppress a desire to retch. 'I don't see a basin for washing dishes anywhere,' whispered Khara in his ear as the Forest Guardian raised his hand to attract the barman's attention. He ordered a whole rum-skin, which cost an absolute fortune but at least meant them avoiding the tankards and picking up half a dozen assorted diseases. He and Khara gave the impression that they were taking large gulps of the bitter brew in order not to stand out while they scanned the crowd in search of anybody who looked a little less furious or drunken than the main body of pirates. Ahren finally spotted a barmaid with a black eye, who was sitting with a lost expression on her face in the corner of the tavern, and he steered towards her. 'Hey, what do you think you're doing?' hissed Khara in his ear, her hand firmly on his forearm. 'I'm going to talk to someone who looks as if she might have a halfway decent romantic story concerning this place,' he said reassuringly. The swordswoman snorted. 'There's nothing romantic about her work, dunderhead. I've already had three hands feeling my backside since we've come in here.' This bothered Ahren greatly and he quickly looked around to see if there were any other potential gropers he might have to deal with before approaching the woman. But then he walked on. After all, Khara was well able to look after herself. On the other hand, if she was refraining from inflicting her normal punishment for any unwanted physical approaches, then that showed him clearly how dangerous she considered this place to be. 'You keep watch – I'll talk to her,' said Khara firmly and stepped towards the young woman with the sad eyes. Ahren was left with no alternative but to nod and take occasional nips from his rum-skin, while his beloved and the stranger had a whispered conversation, during which several coins were handed over. Several pirates leered over at the two women, while others raised their tankards to Ahren, presuming that Khara was just arranging something for the three of them. The young Paladin tried not to think about it, hesitated, then asked himself what Trogadon would do in such a situation. Considering imitation of his friend to be the best policy in this environment, he grinned as lewdly as he could in response to the congratulatory pirates. Khara finally left the girl, shaking her head demonstratively for the pirates to see, and returned to Ahren. 'Thenia knows one or two stories about couples drowning together or stabbing each other, but nothing that brings us any further.' 'Charming,' said Ahren drily. It seemed that romanticism was a rare luxury in the pirate world, even in legends. 'She told me of an old woman – a pedlar – who has an endless number of stories. She gave me directions on how to get to her and I think we should try our luck there.' 'Do you really think she will open her door to us at this time of night?' asked Ahren doubtfully as he followed Khara, who was heading to an exit that led deeper into the island. 'Don't worry about that,' said the swordswoman drily, brushing off another groping pirate-hand. 'We'll have no trouble buying our way into any place on this island.' The Forest Guardian looked around the tavern, whose guests were following their urges unfettered and could only agree with his beloved. Their journey through the laneways of the Crow's Nest was like an odyssey through the depths of human depravity. They came across three dead bodies as they walked – a sailor who had clearly been poisoned, a woman who had succumbed to some disease or other, and a pirate with a curved dagger in his throat. Passers-by simply ignored the corpses, and if anyone stopped at all, it was only to filch the pockets of the dead for valuables. Ahren saw grinding poverty reflected in the drawn faces of filth-encrusted beggars spending yet another night of deprivation, cheek by jowl with riotously feasting pirates. He also saw slaves penned up in cages looking desolately out into the night. 'How could anyone do something like that?' Ahren asked angrily, pointing at the iron prisons. 'Even in the Eternal Empire, slavery is limited to the arenas, and trading in people is forbidden in the rest of the country. Khara gently stroked his cheek with her fingers. 'Oh, Ahren, do you really think anyone who does business here cares about the law? This place is full of people who want to try their luck outside the rules of normal society.' They walked up rickety, narrow planks which led around capsized shipwrecks, they crossed rope-bridges with creaky boards, and they followed a confusing zigzag course, which brought them into the heart of the island. It seemed as though the outer ring of the island was reserved for the lower instincts, while the centre of the Crow's Nest was dedicated to more normal business. There were more armed pirates here than at the harbour. They had tankards of rum in their hands but instead of drowning themselves in boisterous drink, they silently scanned the scene for danger. Here and there Ahren saw captains bargaining with each other, and from the snatches of conversation that he overheard, he could make out that they were wrangling over the distribution of booty, deciding whose patch of the ocean was whose, and discussing the sealing or breaking of alliances at sea. He saw all kinds of traders who had painted their doors in particular colours, making them easier to identify in the chaos of wrecks and riggings. A green door indicated a healer or seller of herbs and spices, a red one represented a weapons dealer. Behind blue doors you would find someone who traded in armour and shields, while on the other side of white doors could be found more general equipment. Some traders' doorways were multi-coloured, and the particularly wealthy merchants, as well as those who possessed a complete shipwreck for themselves, employed half a dozen fierce-looking guards for protection and did their deals at elegant tables, serving high quality drinks in golden goblets. 'Nobody seems to sleep here at all,' murmured Ahren, looking suspiciously at the hustle and bustle all around them. He almost preferred the loud, crude manner of the outer ring. At least you knew where you stood there, but here he had the feeling you could be dragged into a laneway and stabbed to death with a smile, only because you had overheard something you shouldn't have. 'It's more likely that they all get up late here,' said Khara equally quietly. 'That suits our purposes. At least the herbalist Polundra should still be awake.' The swordswoman pointed up at a green door with the image of a small leaf on it. 'That must be her shop.' Ahren looked up to where Khara was pointing. The surprisingly small wooden construction was a good ten paces above them. The Forest Guardian gestured to a narrow stairway leading up through the broken planks of a deserted-looking ship's hull to a wobbly rope bridge which ended at the shop door. 'I think this is the way.' Khara nodded and they began their ascent, the wooden planks creaking and bending under their feet. Something in the lightness with which Khara's fingers touched his back made Ahren stop. Then he heard her drawing her weapons and he did the same without hesitation although he didn't sense any danger. They continued their climb up the creaky stairs in the bowels of empty shipwreck when suddenly, five pirates with knives and swords sprang forward out of the dark shadows. They had emerged from the wreckage with practised moves and the couple found themselves surrounded. 'You really do have a nose for easy prey, Quinn. The third lot to fall into our trap tonight. And not a guard in sight,' said a tall, beautiful woman, dressed in leather and chainmail and holding both a sword and a dagger. The ruffian she had addressed shrugged his shoulders. 'I do what I can. I think we should scarper after these two, though. You know how they treat robbers in the inner ring of this place.' The tall woman turned to Ahren and Khara. 'You know the game. Weapons down and hand over the loot. Then you'll only have a bump on the head and a snooze until morning. Defend yourselves and you'll sleep forever. Which will it be?' This was followed by the robbers approaching in unison from above and below until they were close to Ahren and Khara, who were standing back to back. 'What do you think?' he whispered uncertainly. The pirates looked experienced and co-ordinated and they were in the majority. The only advantage he and Khara had was that the gang were too sure of themselves. 'We can't surrender. If we're found unconscious on the ground here, who knows if we will ever wake up again, or where we'll find ourselves if we do,' responded Khara hastily in a low voice. Ahren thought of the slave cages and swallowed hard. 'Then we'll fight,' he whispered, lowering his sword as if in surrender. Khara did the same and the pirates relaxed, their faces breaking into satisfied smiles. 'The first blow must be effective, otherwise our prospects will be bleak,' hissed Ahren. The swordswoman nodded and he sprang forward. There was no time for finesse – the young man simply dropped to his knees and hacked at the ankles of the woman standing in front of him. The beauty was surprised by his unusual manoeuvre, Sun slicing clean through her two legs even before she could open her mouth in shock and scream out a warning. Blood spurted out onto both the stairs and Ahren's face, his manoeuvre suddenly appearing not to have been such a good idea. From behind he heard two agonised cries and could only imagine that Khara had put both her blades to good use, decommissioning two of their enemies at the same time. While the leader was toppling off the stairs with a scream, a muscular pirate appeared from above, gripping his sabre with both hands and swinging it threateningly. The stairs were slippery from the dripping blood and Ahren was still down on one knee when the first blow came hurtling down towards him. Khara was fighting directly behind the Forest Guardian, so a backward movement was out of the question. Against his better judgement, Ahren decided to parry the pirate's first blow. Using his superior position and all his body weight, the man had swung the weapon downwards towards the young Paladin. Ahren tensed his arm as hard as he could to counter the impact, but when the blades finally collided, the young man's wrist felt as if it had just been submerged in icy water for half an hour. All feeling disappeared from his fingers and he could hardly hold onto Wind Blade as the enormous pirate, grinning wildly, raised his sabre in preparation for another strike, which would easily smash through Ahren's defences. The young Paladin was unbalanced, the blood on the stairs making every movement a lottery, and his attacker was taking special care not to step in the red liquid, but to maintain his advantageous superior position before finishing off the young man once and for all. The Forest Guardian could still hear Khara behind him, engaging in combat, so he couldn't expect her to help him. With the courage of the desperate, he drew his dagger with his right hand and flung it at the bandit, who was just beginning his second downward strike. With catlike reflexes that Ahren would never have expected from the burly pirate, the man changed the direction of his stroke, sweeping the blade away before it had a chance to enter his chest. But Ahren reacted just as quickly. He threw himself forwards, thrusting Wind Blade with as much force as possible in an upward direction. Sun slid into the scoundrel's body without much resistance, and the pirate dropped his weapon with a groan before collapsing. Ahren slipped on the step, the pirate's body landed directly on top of him, and the next few breaths were taken up with trying to manoeuvre himself on the bloodstained surface from underneath the man's heavy corpse. When he finally managed to free his blood-soaked body, Khara was already standing in front of him, her Wind Blades sheathed, and her arms crossed in front of her. Behind her lay the dead bodies of her enemies, and somehow, she had managed to remain spotlessly clean. Ahren pulled himself up onto his feet, taking special care not to slip on the blood again as Khara let out a sigh. 'Now, just look at you.' But then she paused for a moment, uncertain. 'That's not your blood, is it?' Ahren shook his head. 'I made the tactical mistake of going down on my knees without it being necessary. From then on, it was a battle trying to go back on the offensive,' he murmured in embarrassment. 'It won't happen again.' 'So, you immediately sank to your knees in front of a beautiful woman you'd never met before?' joked Khara, before becoming serious and clucking her tongue in self-reproach. 'My fault. We have always concentrated solely on sword-fighting techniques. It's time we started working on how to fight in adverse conditions.' She wiped the sticky hair from his face and smiled. 'You look more like a barbarian than a Forest Guardian,' she said mischievously. 'My Susekan,' she added gently with a smile. Ahren leaned forward to kiss her, but the woman pulled back. 'That wasn't a compliment. You're going to have a good wash before you come near me.' Ahren nodded in embarrassment before examining the scene. The wreck, within which the stairs led up, protected them from curious eyes, and if anyone had heard the fighting, then they had clearly decided to keep out of sight and steer clear of trouble. He scanned the area and then spotted his dagger in the darkness of the shipwreck to his right. With a groan he clambered over the split planks and sheathed his modest weapon, which had served him so well and so often. Then he returned to the steps and they walked up the stairs and across the rope bridge, arriving at the green door with its stylised leaf, behind which the pedlar Pulondra plied her trade. 'It might be best if I go in first and do the talking,' said Khara, looking pointedly at Ahren's blood-spattered clothing, He nodded and dropped back behind the young woman, who gently knocked on the pedlar's door. 'Mistress Pulondra? Are you still up?' she called out quietly. A grumpy cackle could be heard from the other side of the painted wood. 'You cannot be from here with your polite and orotund language, my dear,' said a weak old voice through the door. This was followed by the scraping sound of a bolt being pulled back. 'I usually only open the door for my regular customers at this time, but I'm curious to know who is uttering such highbrow words,' said the pedlar, chuckling. 'Open the door, but nice and slowly now.' Khara did as she was told and they peered into a room decorated with hanging herbs and algae, which to Ahren's eyes was a more melancholy counterpart to old Vera's cabin in Deepstone. This hut, too, had rows of little crucibles and jars on its squat shelves around the walls, but unlike the old healer's place from Ahren's childhood days, he could also see the preserved remains of diverse animal parts. Birds' feet and monkey's arms were among the more harmless exhibits, and Ahren decided not to look in any more detail. Polundra's appearance confirmed Ahren's first impressions. The old woman's grey hair was braided into tiny plaits which fell wildly over her head, revealing only glimpses of her wrinkled face. Ahren could see two intelligent eyes looking at him suspiciously as he stood behind Khara, and when the young woman raised her hands above her head, he noticed the large crossbow in the pedlar's bony trembling hands, its moist, glimmering bolt aimed straight at the swordswoman's stomach. 'Ye're a couple then, are ye?' snorted the old woman antagonistically. 'She utters the right words with her golden tongue so that both of ye can get in and then she leaves it to you to slaughter your victim.' Ahren swallowed hard and raised his hands above his head too. It could only be poison glistening on the tip of the bolt, and if it worked quickly, Khara would be dead before Jelninolan had a chance to come to their aid. He was beginning to hate this island with a passion. Even the traders presented mortal danger here. 'We've just had an altercation with bandits,' he said soothingly. 'If you like, we can put down our weapons.' Hardly had he spoken the words than Khara glanced angrily over her shoulder at him. The young woman was a warrior of the Eternal Empire and they almost never took off their weapons. He raised his eyebrows and gave her a pleading look, hoping she would play along. Finally, Khara gave a reluctant nod, but Polundra's response was to cackle scornfully. 'With or without weapons, you can easily wring my neck with your broad shoulders and powerful hands before I get the chance to scream for help. And if that really is a Warrior Pin I see in your companion's hair and she truly is a warrior of the Eternal Empire, then her hands are just as lethal as her weapons.' The pedlar retreated a step and sat down on a wide rocking chair, her crossbow placed at the ready on her lap. 'Come on in, close the door and sit ye down in front of me in such a way that I can see yer hands. It may be that I only get to shoot one of ye, but by the way ye keep looking at each other, I think yer fates are somehow intertwined.' The couple followed the old woman's instructions. Just as Khara began to present their case, Culhen's emotional world came crashing down over Ahren, burying the Forest Guardian as he was pulled away into the emotional maelstrom engulfing his soul animal. The black fur was speckled all over with dried blood, the red eyes stared at him defiantly. The female wolf was crouching in a pit, eight paces deep, surrounded by the bones and entrails of unfortunate pirates who had fallen victim to the merciless application of the basic local laws. Culhen stared down at the Blood Wolf in apparent shock, while she growled threateningly back at him, her eyes locked on his. Culhen! Culhen! Is everything alright? asked Ahren, disorientated by the abrupt change of perspective within himself. The wolf's spirit had never seized and wrenched his own in such a manner before. They have a Blood Wolf here, whimpered Culhen, his voice betraying confusion. She's eating the condemned pirates alive. And she's enjoying herself! The Forest Guardian could sense Culhen's attraction to the Dark One – Blood Wolves had originally been Ice Wolves, just as Culhen was – ever since Ahren had freed him from the dark god's spell. Culhen's mind was currently a riot of disgust, hostility, and lust, not to mention loneliness and pride, all mixed together in a storm of emotions and impulses. The contradictory impressions that his friend was transmitting were making Ahren quite dizzy. The she-wolf was in heat, and Culhen, inexperienced and unprepared, was ready to jump down into the pit to either mate with her or fight her to the death. Or perhaps do both. Ahren was dimly aware of the yelling pirates, standing around the pit and urging on his friend in the hope of observing a bloody spectacle involving the two enormous animals. Trogadon and Falk had dug their hands into Culhen's fur and were pulling in vain at the seemingly paralysed wolf, all the while speaking to him in comforting tones. A shudder ran through the wolf's body and Ahren transmitted all his willpower to his friend. Stop, Culhen! he ordered, gradually painting the calming images in his friend's head – something they had practised during the Void training. The wolf's whipped-up emotions slowly began to normalise, and when Falk finally manage to push his bearded face between the Blood Wolf's burning eyes and Culhen's, her power over the younger animal was broken. Culhen gave a low yelp before trotting away, the jeers of the disappointed pirates ringing in his ears. For the first time, Ahren had a clear view of the others' surroundings. Falk and his companions were standing in an open area, circular in shape and surrounded by well-tended shipwrecks, which seemed to contain high-class taverns or hostels. Captains and their bodyguards sauntered from doorway to doorway, and only the bloodstained pit in the middle of the space was a reminder of the depraved nature of the Crow's Nest. Are you feeling better again? he asked gently. Culhen emitted emotions of such fragility and loneliness that the Forest Guardian was on the point of jumping up and running over to his friend. Then he saw the crossbow again, which was still aimed at Khara's chest, and he quickly divided his attention in two, as he had only just recently learned to do in the jungle. Now he could see through both his own and Culhen's eyes, and he quickly checked to see how he and Khara were managing at the pedlar's. The old woman was speaking to the young warrior woman, who was clearly fascinated by what she was hearing, and although the weapon was still on the pedlar's lap, at least her finger was no longer resting on the trigger. Relieved, Ahren concentrated again on Culhen, who looked downcast and was trotting beside Falk and the watchful Trogadon. The old man was repeatedly patting him, and even Uldini placed a comforting little hand on the large animal's fur from time to time. You can't save her, can you? asked Culhen, whose voice sounded like that of shattered glass. The same way you saved me that time, or when you saved the Firesprays? Oh, Culhen, thought Ahren bitterly, feeling the tears welling up in his eyes. I would so much like to fulfil your wish, but the curse has become ingrained in her over a long time, you know. Did you see all those bones in the pit? She must have fed on at least twenty humans by now. He could feel his message getting through to the wolf, who shook himself, as though he were trying to cast off a bad dream. Ahren? he asked timidly. Yes, big lad? Can you teach me the Void? asked the wolf, to Ahren's surprise. I don't want to be conflicted inside like that again. Especially not in the middle of a battle. I'm going to be encountering Blood Wolves sooner or later. I need to…protect myself. But of course, my friend, thought Ahren quickly. And we others are here too to keep an eye on you. We are your pack, don't forget. Although Ahren could feel his words assuaging Culhen, a longing thought briefly flashed in his head coming straight from the wolf – there was his four-legged friend, racing through the vast expanse of the tundra with a pack of Ice Wolves. Culhen quickly cut the thought from Ahren's mind, and the Forest Guardian sent his friend a message of loving understanding before their connection loosened to the point that it was only a humming at the back of the young man's mind. '…breaking his neck, just before she herself died, gurgling blood on account of the poison he had mixed into her dinner,' said Polundra, finishing a story she had been passionately relating to Khara. The young woman didn't look as though she had particularly enjoyed the tale and waved her hand impatiently. 'That's the fourth gruesome story in a row. Do you not at least have one legend concerning a couple, which has a positive ending? One where they retire to an island and live happily ever after?' Ahren sensed that the transience of attraction and love, a theme which seemed to dominate the pirate stories and legends, really got under Khara's skin. He surreptitiously took her hand in his and pressed it, a gesture which she quietly reciprocated without looking at him. Polundra frowned and looked down at the floor. 'There is one. A story that concerns a fisherman and a fisherwoman, both of whom are immortal and live a tranquil life on one of the Cutlass Sea isles, casting their nets day after day.' Ahren and Khara exchanged meaningful looks. 'And where do they say these lovers live?' probed the young warrior-woman in as neutral a voice as she could manage. 'On the northernmost islands of the Splintered Sword,' said the old woman in a bored voice. 'But there is nothing to this story, the ending is trite. At some point they get so bored that they both head into the sea and drown themselves.' Khara sighed bitterly before pulling out a gold coin from her moneybag and placing it on the floor in front of the pedlar. 'As promised, your payment for answering my questions.' The old woman nodded appreciatively and gestured to the others to stand up. 'Why did you want to hear all these sailors' yarns anyway?' she asked inquisitively. While Ahren and Khara were getting to their feet, the swordswoman looked at him pleadingly. 'We confiscated a treasure map,' said Ahren, scratching his head. 'It says on it that we must look in the place where the immortal couple live.' He shrugged his shoulders in apparent resignation. 'So, I suppose we should try our luck on the northern islands.' Polundra cackled grumpily again. 'Then, good luck,' she said mockingly. 'If you find your treasure at the feet of an eternally happy couple, think of Polundra's help, and buy me something nice.' They went out slowly, Ahren closing the door behind him. Then Khara quickly grasped his arm hard. 'A treasure map?' she whispered in a barely audible voice. 'Was that the best you could think of?' 'We Paladins are not renowned for our lying skills,' he said stiffly, moving swiftly while still holding Khara's hand, in an effort to get away from the cynical old woman as quickly as possible. 'Really?' said Khara in a sickly-sweet voice. 'And I thought Falk does nothing else but lie – sorry, Baron Dorian Falkenstein, I mean.' The real name of his mentor sounded so strange to his ears that he had to silently admit his beloved was right. All the Paladins had, or so it seemed, taken on less than laudable characters during their centuries of existence. Falk was leading a kind of double life, Bergen had become a mercenary captain, and the fact that Sunju was probably the most virtuous of the Paladins he had met, but had slumbered almost eight hundred years, spoke volumes. He was wondering how the reawakened woman was managing with her roc when Khara pulled him back to the here and now. 'Should we collect a few more stories or return to the ship now?' she asked as they climbed down the stairs in the hull of the wreck, carefully picking their way past the dead bodies. Ahren pondered for a moment, then pointed at a full rain butt outside what appeared to be a hostelry. 'I'd better clean myself up a little before we go anywhere. In the meantime, I can listen in on Culhen and see if Falk and the others have made any progress with their part of the plan.' He gave his face and arms a thorough wash and scrubbed the blood off his armour and clothing as best he could. He couldn't avoid hearing the noises coming from within the hostelry, which suggested that the guests here paid by the hour rather than staying the whole night. 'You always bring me to the most romantic places,' said Khara sarcastically. Instead of responding, Ahren focussed on Culhen's thoughts. The wolf was sitting in the corner of a well-lit, well-furnished, and well-maintained tavern within a luxurious shipwreck. Falk, Uldini and Trogadon were all sitting at a table beside the large animal. Half the pirates present were staring at them, and Ahren was quite sure that 'Captain Featherbeard' and his crew were not half as inconspicuous as they were hoping to be. Nevertheless, the faces of his companions suggested that they were remarkably relaxed. Falk was just addressing Culhen. 'If Ahren is within communications distance, tell him he should join us. The place is called Captains' Ring and it's in the middle of the island. We're in the King's Treasure.' Culhen barked once and Ahren conveyed to him that he had understood the message. He told the wolf he couldn't wait to see him again and then signalled to Khara that she should come with him. 'The others are waiting for us. They looked happy enough through Culhen's eyes to suggest that they've found someone who will offer us safe conduct.' They walked through the shipwrecks that made up the area, and Ahren was constantly astounded by the original forms the ships must have had. He saw delicate little one-masters, hardly bigger than river barges, situated beside enormous warships, whose walls must have soared twice as high as the Queen of the Waves. Then there were narrow hunting ships, fat merchant vessels, tall flagships, and squat army transports. It seemed as though the carcasses of the defunct ships wished to impress upon the viewer both the diversity among their erstwhile inhabitants as well as their mortality. 'The pirates in these parts seem to have a particularly morbid outlook on life,' he murmured quietly. 'No wonder,' sniffed Khara. 'Each day could be their last. When you are dancing on the edge of the sword, every breath gains vitality. Death itself is merely a spectre that has manifested itself once too often and has consequently lost its inhibiting effect.' She looked towards an inner horizon only visible to her. 'Some of the older arena fighters developed the same attitude. Usually, just before they died.' Ahren placed an arm around her shoulders and they walked on in silence. The further they travelled into the heart of the island, the better maintained their surroundings became. Some of the shipwrecks close to the centre could only be the domiciles of the more successful pirates, and when Ahren passed by a freighter painted totally in black, with the insignia of the Cold Woman painted on its planks, his suspicions were confirmed. There was a heavy metal door recessed into the hull, undamaged but for some rust on its hinges, and without a guard in sight. It seemed as though the notorious pirate queen had not been here in a long time, and yet the building conveyed a feeling so threatening that Ahren was convinced no-one would dare to make the structure their own. They rounded a battleship that had been transformed into a defensive fort, whose guards eyed them suspiciously, and then they stepped into the Captains Ring. The pit with the Blood Wolf was merely a black shadow in the middle of the circular open area, and because Ahren wished to spare Khara a closer look, he led her along the outer circumference of the space. One of the shipwrecks looking onto the area was hardly recognisable as such, resembling an enormous treasure chest instead, with its angular appearance and its wrought-iron superstructure, revealing an entrance to the front. They could hear the sounds of talking and laughter spilling out onto the space, reminiscent of the more popular and sophisticated taverns in the Brazen City. When Ahren saw the enormous, stylised crown forged into the frieze above the entrance, he pointed to it. Well, if that's not the King's Treasure then I'm not a Paladin,' he said drily. He sensed that he was getting closer to Culhen, which merely confirmed his suspicion that they were close to their destination. He covered the rest of the distance to the entrance in double-quick time, where he was stopped by a large, burly pirate with a cudgel. 'If you're not a captain or in the company of one, then you're not getting in here, me boyo,' growled the black-haired man, his eyes hard and icy-looking. Ahren was considering whether to engage in combat when Falk called to him from a corner of the taproom: 'There y'are, ya limpy version of a gouty turtle. Get a move on over here and give me your report.' He waved commandingly at Ahren and Khara, so that the bouncer let the pair pass. The young Paladin raised an eyebrow – Falk was taking to the role of pirate captain with a little too much enthusiasm for Ahren's taste. He positioned himself beside the old man and whispered his 'report' into the ear of the 'captain', while tickling between Culhen's ears at the same time. 'We were told a dozen dark tales of couples who took each other's lives,' he whispered. 'The most promising evidence points in the direction of the northern islands of the Splintered Sword.' Falk nodded impassively, then gestured grandiosely to Ahren and the young woman, indicating that they should sit beside him. Meanwhile, Uldini was playing the part of the browbeaten servant, and Trogadon was the ferocious bodyguard, although the young Paladin had misgivings when he spotted the dwarf twinkling at both the brimming casks of alcohol and the skimpily clad barmaids of The King's Treasure tending them. 'Admiral Bocasso is overnighting on the Crow's Nest, and we've just handed out a fortune for the privilege of meeting him,' explained Falk in a low voice. 'For the moment we're sticking with the version that I want to join his fleet, bringing The Queen of the Waves with me, of course. When we get to speak to him, we'll tell him the truth and ask him for protection.' He glanced over at the Arch Wizard. 'Uldini is convinced he has enough magical skills to persuade even a legendary pirate captain to be on our side, at least for the duration of our search.' Ahren took the amphora from the middle of the table and poured wine into the pewter goblets supplied, passing one over to Khara, who accepted it gratefully. He sipped from the heavy, sweet-tasting liquid, which burned more strongly in his throat than the wines he was accustomed to. Over the edge of his goblet he observed the other five groups that occupied the tables in the tavern. Each of the captains seemed to prefer staying with their own men and women. Ahren saw enough wealth and jewellery in the room to remind him of the banquet on King's Island two years previously, where all the nobility of the Knights Marshes had ostentatiously displayed their riches for all to see. The buccaneers he saw now could easily compete with those princes and barons he had observed then when it came to gaudiness. Except that the wealth he was looking at now was a consequence of violence and theft, every jewel spattered metaphorically with blood. The young Paladin saw that the revellers were constantly appraising each other with calculating looks, and he shivered. This was apparently the safest place on the island, with a truce in operation, and yet he couldn't help feeling that any one of the pirates present might suddenly cut another's throat if they felt it might be of benefit. He thought of the heavily armed fortification on the edge of the Captains Ring and of the Blood Wolf pit not fifty paces away. It was clear that not only mutinous sailors, but also ambitious captains were faced with constant reminders of the limits to which they could go. 'Like the night before a great tournament of slaughter in the arena.' Khara summarised the scene perfectly. 'And this is supposed to be relaxation?' said Uldini caustically. 'Is anyone here truly aware of the price they are paying for their lifestyle?' Ahren was considering what the Arch Wizard had just said when a door to the rear of the shipwreck opened, which seemed to close off a secure area. A figure surrounded by six dangerous-looking battle magicians in colourful robes walked unsteadily towards them. It was difficult to make him out, surrounded by the magical bodyguards. 'Well, if that isn't Admiral Bocasso,' said Uldini drily. 'It seems he has a weakness for battle magic,' he added derisively. The berobed men and women pushed their way forward until they were standing in front of Ahren's table, where they made way for the man they had been protecting. 'Ye want to enter the employ of the famed Admiral Bocasso then…' began the intoxicated man, who was making a less than legendary impression with his unshaven face and the heavy bags under his eyes. Falk tensed up immediately, the Admiral eyeing him keenly. 'Is that you, Dorian?' asked the pirate, before clapping his hands together and laughing with what seemed to be delight. 'I knew you'd give up playing the mercenary sometime and join the merry band of pirates.' Falk seemed flabbergasted and furious in equal measure. 'Hello, Fisker,' he said.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 10

Falk and Fisker exchanged a few more introductory pleasantries, but Ahren was simply too shocked to pay attention. He stared in disbelief at the pirate drunkard, who led the largest fleet on the Cutlass Sea and was simultaneously one of the Paladins they had been seeking. Was this champion of the gods really responsible for half of the piracies on the Cutlass Sea? Ahren was struggling to digest this possibility. Stunned, he looked at the drunken Paladin more closely. Fisker was of average height, wiry and nimble rather than muscular. His face betrayed signs of alcoholism, and both his puff-sleeved shirt, finely brocaded with gold, and his brocade trousers of delicate material were crinkled and stained. A rapier hung from Fisker's waist, and Ahren could make out eight slender daggers, some openly displayed, others covered by the folds of his conceited garb, yet ready to be thrown in the blink of an eye. The young man tried to follow the conversation, studying the admiral's features as he did so. Deep lines of sorrow furrowed the pirate's surprisingly young-looking face which appeared to suggest a man of little more than twenty summers. His piercing blue eyes were sparkling with life one moment and filled with a suffocating melancholy the next. The man's curly blond hair, straggly and greasy, was loosely bound in a silver-shimmering hairband at the back of his head. Falk finished relating the events of the last two years to his brother-in-arms before firmly crossing his arms before his chest. 'Well? Are you coming with us or do we first have to burn down this hellhole which you have made into your decadent residence?' he asked. On hearing those words, the battle magicians changed their posture from one of alertness to combat-readiness, but Falk waved his finger at them in a bored gesture, causing the charm-endowed men and women to withdraw to another corner of the tavern, from where they kept a suspicious eye on proceedings. Then the captain of the fleet leaned forward, momentarily contrite, before putting his enforced mask of joviality back on. Ahren heard the man's low, cutting retort. 'Of course, I'm coming with you,' said Fisker. 'It's not as though I have anything better to be doing here.' A look of pain came over the Paladin's young face. 'Even if it means in all probability that she wins,' he continued with a murmur. 'You mean the Cold Woman?' asked Trogadon curiously. Fisker nodded. 'We have been involved in a bitter conflict over a long period, but I think it is time for it to come to an end. If I go with you and leave the region, it might help me to forget her,' he said, his eyes sparkling with such hatred that a shiver ran down Ahren's spine. The pirate seemed to be seething with a rage so powerful that it put the frustrations that Ahren had seen in the other champions of the gods into the shade. Uldini sighed and stood up. 'Right, well that's settled then. Wake up Aluna, pack your things and we can get out of this godforsaken country.' Within an instant, the sorrow that Fisker had been trying to disguise returned. 'Aluna is dead,' he whispered. With tears in his eyes, he turned away, the shocked companions looking at him incredulously. Then he turned to face them again, every inch the grandiloquent Admiral Bocasso. 'Your request has been granted, Captain Featherbeard. You are now officially a part of my splendid fleet.' Three of the pirate groups erupted in cheers, while the others stared daggers at Falk, before muttering uneasily to each other. 'Meet me at dawn with your ship at the eastern cove,' called out Fisker, striding to the back of the room. 'We must celebrate our new partnership with a little foray!' Then he whooshed out the door through which he had entered, his battle magicians in tow, leaving the stunned and baffled companions in his wake. 'She can't be dead,' said Uldini firmly. 'Even third-rate wizards barely capable of mentally lighting a spark sensed the death of the Thirteenth Paladin that time. We would certainly have noticed it if Aluna had died.' Having achieved their goal, they were quickly heading back to the ship, but somehow their victory seemed hollow. 'But why would he lie?' asked Khara, irritated. Falk snorted. 'Why wouldn't he? Did you see the state he was in? To say he's a mess would be an understatement.' Trogadon slapped Falk on the back and laughed. 'Hold your head up, old lad. At least you're not the deadbeat among the Paladins anymore.' Falk gave the dwarf an icy look, but the squat warrior refused to be cowed. 'Although it has to be said that he has built up a pirate fleet. So maybe you're not out of the woods yet.' Falk gestured gruffly towards Ahren. 'I let him into my life. That counts for something.' Ahren would have burst out laughing were he not actually moved by the compliment. The dwarf eyed Ahren in a seemingly critical manner, before shaking his head in mock uncertainty. 'Well, we'll see about that. If he really does manage to gather together all of you sorry lot and defeat the dark god, then I just might award you a few bonus points.' Trogadon had somehow managed to express in his own inimitable way the goal that Falk was silently hoping to achieve. Laughter broke out among the little group, and Ahren, sensing how everyone needed this distraction, decided to play along. 'No pressure now,' he grunted in an exaggeratedly dark tone, and if anyone had seen the reaction of his friends, they would have imagined they were looking at a band of boisterous pirates on a celebratory night out. Captain Orben's cabin felt claustrophobic, and not just because Culhen insisted on squeezing in to join the group too. Ahren had still not found the time to take care of his friend, following the animal's traumatic experience with the Blood Wolf, but for the moment he was resting a comforting hand on the wolf's white fur. They had told Jelninolan, Yantilla and Captain Orben of the latest state of affairs; their joy at Fisker's reappearance was mixed with their shock and disbelief regarding his pronouncement that Aluna was dead and that one of the Thirteen Paladins, was none other than the infamous Admiral Bocasso. 'It could be worse,' said Orben, attempting cast the news in a better light. 'The admiral is renowned for having perfected the art of acquiring protection money from the merchants. Which means that he rarely resorts to violence when collecting his tribute. And he has never double-crossed a paying customer.' 'So, he's more of a thief than a murderer,' said Falk wearily before collapsing heavily on a chair. 'The gods really must be in a deep sleep if they let him get away with that.' 'Surely Quin-Wa's carry-on has made that abundantly clear,' said Khara bitterly. Ahren pulled her towards him with his free hand. The Empress of the Eternal Empire was a Paladin too, who had expanded her territories over the previous centuries, and within whose lands Khara had been born and suffered terribly as she had grown up. The Eternal Empress was the embodiment of evil in Khara's eyes, even more so than the Adversary. Ahren was already dreading the day when they would have to win over the empress, who was currently living in splendid isolation, to their Paladin cause. 'Whatever he has been up to until now, at least he is coming with us willingly,' said Ahren in a determined voice. 'That's more than what we had this morning and is a positive development.' There were general, if hesitant, nods of agreement. 'I suggest we get some sleep before we meet Fisker in a few hours' time at the eastern cove of the Crow's Nest. Then we can get some more information out of him without being disturbed.' 'With your permission I will start sailing the Queen of the Waves towards the cove immediately,' suggested the captain. 'There is enough moonlight, and the sea is calm. In this way we can avoid any…surprises from the islanders and get away from the unholy stench in this place. I swear by the gods, I have never seen such a polluted harbour in all my life, and I've paid several visits to Cape Verstaad in my time.' Everyone nodded enthusiastically at the suggestion of exchanging the malodorous mixture of refuse and human waste for the salty smell of the sea. Then, one after another, they left the cabin. Ahren made his way to the prow of the ship, one hand on Culhen's fur, the other around Khara's waist. 'Tonight, he saw a Blood Wolf in heat, and that has affected and confused him greatly,' he whispered into the swordswoman's ear. She nodded and released herself from him, but instead of leaving them, as the Forest Guardian had expected, she went to the other side of the wolf so that Culhen ended up in the middle. She stroked and fondled his fur while she spoke to him comfortingly, and he rubbed his head against her shoulder, whimpering quietly. Ahren nodded to her in gratitude. They went to their usual spot on the foredeck of the ship where they snuggled in closely to Culhen, and Ahren dived deep into the wolf's mind. Confusion, shame, loneliness, and fury were all still simmering within the animal, and with the best will in the world, Ahren didn't know where to begin. Culhen's normal sense of superiority had vanished, which shook the young man to the core. Do you want to talk about it, big lad? he asked cautiously, his eyes closed in concentration. She was so lovely and yet so horrible, began Culhen uncertainly. I wanted to jump down into the pit to her – and…not just to fight her. Ahren flinched, for the wolf's conflicted feelings were producing a storm in his own mind. It's not your fault, he responded, comforting the wolf. And not the she-wolf's either. HE, WHO FORCES has corrupted her. Your instincts see a gorgeous Ice Wolf calling you, but your reason is telling you that she is something else. Of course, you were at a loss when you first saw her. Ahren understood that Culhen had realised for the first time in his life that he was more than simply a wolf. Until now, his soul animal's instinct and his reason had been in perfect harmony, but his friend's first encounter with the Blood Wolf had created a conflict for which Culhen was completely unprepared – as indeed was Ahren. Am I all alone? asked the wolf in the stillness of their connection. Am I really an Ice Wolf? Or am I a monster too, like the Blood Wolves who have no place in the Creation? The animal's loneliness and confusion were mixed with a large portion of self-pity, so Ahren considered how he should respond to his companion. He finally decided on the Falk method. You are not alone. We are all with you, he thought firmly. You are a wolf, blessed by the goddess, and I personally tore you from the fangs of the dark god. You are on a mission which distinguishes you from all the other wolves of Jorath, and for that you should be thankful instead of feeling sorry for yourself. Ahren opened his eyes and stared into those of Culhen, golden in the light of the moon. We are going to find a nice, beautiful Ice Wolf for you even if I have to go to the ends of the earth to track her down. But first, you've got to pull yourself together and carry out the mission for which you have been selected, because I cannot imagine a she-wolf out there that would give a second glance to a pathetic, self-pitying, sodden dishcloth. The Forest Guardian felt Culhen's pride and vanity stirring, rising and suppressing the wolf's inner conflict in a manner that was considerably faster and more effective than Ahren would have thought possible. Only a hint of loneliness remained, like the distant song of a sorrowful wolf howling at the moon on a remote hillside. Do you know something? said Culhen in a mocking voice. You have just described with pin-point accuracy your own behaviour towards Khara at the beginning of our journey. Ahren was stunned as his friend began to yelp with laughter, but finally had to accept that the wolf had hit the nail on the head and began laughing too. Khara, half-asleep, looked dozily at her friends. 'What are the two of you joking about?' she mumbled. 'Nothing important,' said Ahren, stroking her hair. 'Go back to sleep, Your Highness.' Khara looked at him suspiciously, then shrugged her shoulders and fell asleep again. Ahren too closed his eyes. In his mind, he and Culhen were running over the icy steppes on the trail of an enormous pack of wolves who seemed to be calling them with their howls, until the two friends were carried away to the land of nod. The morning was dreary and threatened a day of persistent rain. They anchored in the sheltered cove of the Crow's Nest, which was too steep and rocky for the construction of any shipwrecks, preventing the pirate-town from extending that far. Instead, it appeared to be a gathering point for the formation of little fleets before they sailed off on their thieving forays. There was no sign, however, of Fisker and his ship, causing Ahren to fear that the Paladin had fed them a cock and bull story, only to sail away under cover of darkness and escape the call to join his fellow Paladins. The grim looks on his companions' faces suggested that he was not alone with his suspicion, so the relief on deck was all the greater when a swift, ostentatiously-decorated three-master with a gold-rimmed pirate flag depicting Admiral Bocasso's insignia finally came into view. To their amazement, the ship did not stop but simply sailed past with Fisker giving them a sweeping gesture to follow him. 'What, by all the smelly beards of unwashed ogres is going on?' growled Trogadon. 'I may not be a sailor, but I can tell that this course is not leading us to the mainland.' Uldini shook his head, using an almost imperceptible hand gesture to float upwards from the deck. 'I wanted to sound out our famous captain anyway,' he said with a scowl. 'I'll find out what he's up to.' Then the Arch Wizard flew at high speed towards the other ship, causing the jaws of Fisker's battle wizards to drop in amazement. Jelninolan chuckled gleefully. Ahren decided to spend the time talking to the elf. 'What do you and Uldini have against battle wizards?' Jelninolan frowned. 'You tend to think of us Ancients as normal wizards, but a talent for magic comes in many different ways. We Ancients possess just about every type of magic, even if we have our individual strengths and weaknesses. But most who are blessed with magical abilities have only the power to master half a dozen spells to a greater or lesser degree. Many of them become shamans, oracles, Keepers, or priests of the goddess. Your Keeper Jegral is a good example of an average wizard.' Ahren's eyebrows shot up in surprise. He had always considered the good man to be nothing more than a man of the cloth, never imagining him to be capable of magic. He had always considered the Keeper Jegral's healing abilities to be a gift from the gods. Then he remembered his godsday lessons. 'Magic is a gift from the gods,' he recited quietly. Jelninolan nodded in confirmation. 'That is why many wizards serve their communities, living in chapels, temples, shrines or monasteries.' She pointed over at Captain Bocasso's ship. The battle magicians were fleeing from Uldini, who was spraying flashes of lightning until he was alone with Fisker on the quarterdeck. 'But there are some who reject the spiritual life and try their luck with more secular ambitions. Most of these possess just one type of magic, which they have perfected. The most pathetic of them become battle wizards.' The disdain in the elf's voice was unmistakable, and the coldness she was radiating, almost tangible. The power of her True Form sparked for a moment, reminding Ahren of how powerful the good woman really was. The aura suddenly surrounded Jelninolan like a royal cloak, and more than one sailor fell to their knees, gasping. The effect was gone as fast as it had appeared, and Jelninolan smiled reassuringly at the shaken men and women, who leaped to their feet again and returned to their work. 'I still have to learn to control it,' the embarrassed priestess murmured before returning to her original theme. 'Uldini and I, and indeed most of the Ancients and priests, despise battle wizards, because they dedicate all of their magic and lives to death and destruction. A warrior can at least charm a shield into existence to protect others or use the blunt side of his sword to knock his defeated opponent out without killing him. But a wizard who has only a thunderbolt, a fireball, or an acid cloud at their disposal? He or she knows nothing else but inflicting sorrow on the victims; all their strength is focussed on killing quickly and effectively.' Jelninolan clenched a fist and stared at it. 'Imagine what kind of a person it takes to make such magic their lifework. Why not a protective shield? Or healing magic? Or something that will help people in their everyday lives? Centuries ago, there was a wizard who bundled up his modest supply of magic, which allowed him to put splintered pieces of wood and shattered rocks back together again. People loved seeing him – he travelled through kingdoms, repairing houses and castles, which otherwise would have been torn down. He died a contented, wealthy, and respected man, surrounded by a large family. Since then, there hasn't been a single wizard that has continued his work. But in Jorath there are dozens of dunderheads who are capable of throwing fireballs, most of whom, incidentally, die young.' 'Why so?' asked Khara curiously, but it was Trogadon who responded. 'The first rule that rookies learn when they join a troop of mercenaries is this: shoot the wizard first.' Ahren shivered. No wonder that battle wizards were not popular among the elite magicians. Ahren had to admit, much to his shame, that if he had felt the gift within himself as a youngster, he too would probably have chosen the route of becoming a battle wizard. The idea of using magic to succeed against his violent father would have been too tempting to resist. 'The allure of power can be very tempting to a child,' he said diplomatically, taking care not to offend the elf. She merely nodded wearily. Trogadon cleared his throat. 'Didn't the Ancients try to set up a training centre once?' he asked irritably. 'A place where trainee wizards were given the choice of how to develop their magic properly if they weren't interested in becoming spiritual leaders? Because if not, I can well understand how the fireside tales in the taverns and village squares would give them the idea of becoming battle wizards.' 'It was tried a few times,' said Jelninolan aloofly. 'But following the first argument among the more hot-headed pupils, the schools were reduced to burned out heaps of rubble. The only wizard school left is located in Cape Verstaad. Guess what they teach there?' Ahren's shoulders slumped as he replied. 'Don't tell me – battle magic?' he responded in a low voice, the priestess nodding grimly. Trogadon gave a bitter laugh and no-one felt like pursuing the matter any further. They looked over at Uldini and Fisker, who were deep in lively discussion. Ahren took the opportunity to examine the pirate Paladin's ship in greater detail. Buoyant Spirit was written in gold on the hull, which was painted red, as was the rest of the warship. The ship's design resembled that of the Queen of the Waves, and Ahren couldn't help thinking that what he was looking at was a captured flagship of Kings Island. He glanced over at Captain Orben, whose clenched fists and angry look suggested to Ahren that he wasn't far off the mark with his suspicion. There were a good fifty pirates scurrying about on the vessel, as well as the five battle wizards striding the deck like little princes, albeit keeping their distance from Uldini, who was arguing vociferously with Fisker. The Arch Wizard suddenly floated upwards and flew back to his companions, carrying a piece of black material. On landing, the Arch Wizard gruffly pressed the black cloth into Captain Orben's hands. 'Here you go – our new flag,' he growled. 'Hoist it – it will save us a lot of trouble in the next few days.' Then he beckoned his companions to the quarterdeck, where he lowered his voice to a whisper. 'Fisker refuses to talk about Aluna, but at least he didn't contradict me when I told him that we would know it if she were dead. All he says is that she's dead to him.' There was a general sigh of relief and Jelninolan uttered a hurried prayer to the goddess. 'They probably fell out with each other again,' she said disapprovingly. 'Some couples are their own worst enemies until they eventually find the courage to look for happiness elsewhere.' Ahren reached for Khara's hand, pressing it hard, but the young woman's response was merely to raise an eyebrow, as if to scold him for daring to even think of them in those terms. 'Well, at least we seem to be going to collect his things. You know – all that Paladin stuff,' said Uldini sarcastically. 'Hang on a minute,' exclaimed Falk in disbelief. 'Are you telling me he doesn't have his armour and weapons with him?' Uldini shook his head before waving his finger in remonstration in front of the old man's nose. 'He didn't want to go into detail, but surely you, of all people, should show him some understanding. If memory serves me correctly, you hid your own armour in a sack in the forest.' Ahren covered his mouth with his hand to hide the grin, but Falk had spotted it already. 'I had good reason. After all, I was a simple Forest Guardian in a sleepy village,' he said defensively. Then he turned to Ahren. 'Paladin or no Paladin, if you carry on grinning like that, I'm going to pluck out your pathetic beard, and I mean all of it!' Ahren took a step backwards but could refrain from laughing no longer as Uldini continued unperturbed. 'The island on which his armour and weapons are buried is only twelve days' sailing away. As soon as we get there, we should give him a thorough grilling and try and find out what happened to Aluna. Maybe the few days' rest will give him the chance to get his head around being a Paladin again.' A refreshing calm radiated from Ahren's thoughts as he slowly approached the Void. Now that Culhen was no longer putting up barriers, and the Forest Guardian was using wolf-friendly images to relax his friend, they were close to achieving the meditative state that had saved Ahren on several occasions already. Suddenly, Culhen let out a yelp, and his paws trembled as the white wolf jerked back from Ahren. 'What did you see, my friend?' asked Ahren gently. It was clear to him that Culhen had reached the ghosts of the Void, those subconscious conflicts that had to be overcome in order to drift into the Void. The she-wolf, was Culhen's simple reply. Ahren gave an understanding nod. The experience was still too fresh for his friend to have come to terms with, so the information didn't come as a surprise to the Forest Guardian. 'You have to get past her. She represents that which is troubling you,' he explained in a soothing voice. Then he pointed to Khara. 'She is in the arena again and has to confront her cage-master,' he whispered. Khara had told him so the previous day and he hoped that relating this to the wolf would make him realise that he was not alone in his struggle. And how do I get past her? asked Culhen in frustration. Ahren let out a sigh. He had not been looking forward to this question, for the answer was uncomfortable for anyone who wished to master the Void. 'You have to find your own way. I have reconciled myself to most of my ghosts, whether to my father or to my time as the whipping boy in Deepstone. Some I have suppressed, such as my fear of failure, by making it clear to myself that doing nothing would be worse than all my second-rate ideas combined.' Then he laughed self-ironically. 'Or most of them, at least.' I know, said Culhen, amused now too. I'm in your head so much now, and some of your madcap plans are ridiculous beyond belief. Ahren ignored the comment and gestured over his shoulder. 'Falk seems to suppress most of his ghosts, and you can see how well that works in his case.' Khara, who had been sitting there meditating with her eyes closed, giggled. 'I'm sure your erstwhile master would be delighted to hear what you're saying about him,' growled Trogadon from the other side of the curled-up wolf. Culhen had blocked off his friend's view to the rest of the ship, which kept making Ahren think that they were alone on the prow. Trogadon's scolding reproof shattered that illusion. 'I'll say that to his face, don't worry,' replied Ahren confidently. 'He uses the Void so rarely that I think I'm right.' 'The Void is no cure-all, you do know that, don't you? It has its time and its place like every work tool. If you use it too often, it becomes blunted – or you do,' warned Trogadon. Ahren nodded impatiently. 'Falk told me that already,' he said defensively. Then he became curious. 'Do you use it too?' he queried. Trogadon shook his head. 'We have our battle hymns.' Trogadon was referring to the trancelike singsong which helped the little folk overcome pain or exhaustion, and aided them, indeed forced them, into continuing their fighting until the hymn had finished. 'But the principle is the same.' He dug his fingers deep into Culhen's fur, massaging it with his massive hands. Ahren's four-legged friend responded by growling with pleasure. Nobody can do that as well as Trogi, said Culhen appreciatively. Ahren sensed the animal's spiritual discipline dissipating like a dandelion seed-head in a storm. 'Thanks a lot,' he said sarcastically. 'I think it's going to take quite a while before Culhen manages the necessary concentration again.' He stood up and Khara did the same. 'Then I think it's time for us to cross Wind Blades,' she said decisively. 'This sitting around isn't doing any of us any good.' Ahren nodded. By the time it was dusk, Khara had defeated him half a dozen times, while he had been victorious twice in total. Although the swordswoman was so far ahead of him in terms of experience and talent, he was at least improving at reading and anticipating her moves. As the first stars began to twinkle in the heavens Trogadon began to sing a Dwarfish drinking song, accompanied by Jelninolan on her Storm Fiddle. Soon everyone on board was singing the simple text that the dwarf had taught them during the feast on the beach. The cheerful melody echoed out over the waves of the night, and by the light of the waning moon, Ahren could make out that the Buoyant Spirit had come closer to them, as though its mariners were attracted to the warmth and camaraderie of the Queen of the Waves, which seemed to radiate like one of the many stars above her. If rain had only threatened the day before, now it was a heavy curtain, pouring over the two ships as they sailed, one behind the other. Ahren was relieved that the downpour wasn't accompanied by strong winds and high waves, but anyone who could, retired below deck to seek shelter, including the wet wolf, who was the subject of more than one scowling look, Culhen's musty-smelling fur making breathing even more difficult in the stuffy air of the hull. Eventually, Ahren escaped to the quarterdeck, deciding that rain was the lesser of two evils, where he was surprised to find Falk peering thoughtfully over the bulwark down into the water. When the young Paladin stepped up to him, he saw a large white head with a hornlike tusk peering out of the sea, and he waved enthusiastically down at Selsena. 'How is she?' he asked, realising he had heard nothing from the transformed Titejunanwa for a considerable time. Falk nodded, the wet raven feathers in his beard and the black plate armour lending him a dark, martial appearance. 'She is happy, which means I am too,' he said in a voice that was far from convincing. Then he smiled painfully. 'If truth be told, I miss our travelling on land together, and being close to her,' he admitted. Ahren started wiping the rain out of his face but gave it up as a fruitless exercise some moments later. 'Imagine if she had to spend all her time below deck. Or had to battle her way through Jorath on her own,' he said, pointing down to Selsena, who was frolicking around in the waves. 'I think this is the best option by far.' Falk nodded and turned to face Ahren. 'What do you think of Fisker?' he asked suddenly. The young Paladin folded his arms thoughtfully. 'He's hiding something from us, that much is obvious,' he began, pondering aloud. 'But whether out of shame, grief or rage, I cannot tell. Something has shaken him to the core, and I don't think it happened centuries ago. When I look into his eyes, I can't help thinking of an infected wound. Not fresh, but neither has it fully mended.' Falk raised his eyebrows and then suddenly grinned. 'If I didn't know any better, I'd say Jelninolan's influence has rubbed off on you. That sounded very grown-up.' Ahren shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, I could be wrong,' he said, peering out into the rain in an effort to make out the Joi-de-vivre, which was a barely visible outline in the distance. Falk clucked in disagreement. 'I have the same feeling. What's worrying me is his unwillingness to talk about Aluna. I have a feeling there might be stormy weather ahead.' Ahren raised his open hand demonstratively towards the teeming heavens. 'Then we might as well enjoy the good weather for as long as it lasts,' he said drily. Falk chuckled and slapped him on the back. The two Forest Guardians stared out onto the ocean, watching Selsena diving playfully into the surging waves. Ahren accompanied Khara and Culhen for three days as they fought against their ghosts of the Void. The young swordswoman proceeded by using her own methodical method, fighting her way forward slowly but surely with gritted teeth, and relating afterwards the gruesome situations she had experienced, but for Culhen it was even more difficult. His wolfish reason was not designed for subconscious conflicts and it still had not discovered the key to combating Culhen's ghosts. Ahren knew full well that humans had major difficulties in attaining the trance and felt guilty about demanding that the wolf should pass this test. But his four-legged friend remained determined, so Ahren had many long conversations with him, explaining the possible ways of overcoming the ghosts of the Void. 'We have an invitation!' announced Uldini on the evening of the third day, having floated back to the Queen of the Waves following a discussion with Fisker. 'Get yourselves ready. Fisker would like us to have dinner with him on his ship – as Admiral Bocasso, of course. So, the whole pirate costuming, please.' Ahren rolled his eyes, and Khara seemed even less enthusiastic. In the eyes of the Buoyant Spirit crew members they were still pirates, and that meant the traveling companions would have to keep up the charade once they were on board the other ship. Following their visit to the Crow's Nest, Ahren's romantic notions regarding noble buccaneers had well and truly evaporated, which meant the fun of dressing up as a pirate was no more than a distant memory. When the sun began to set, Ahren found himself on one of two dinghies that were transporting his friends and himself to the Buoyant Spirit. Only Culhen remained behind, looking at them soulfully with his sad yellow eyes from his position on the quarterdeck of the Queen of the Waves. I'll bring you the leftovers from the feast, I promise, said Ahren comfortingly, which seemed to cheer the wolf up somewhat. And anyway, you'd find the cabin too constraining and stuffy. Culhen did not answer, lying down and curling up instead. 'Once we're finished with the Cutlass Sea, I wouldn't mind giving sea voyages a break for a while,' said Ahren, watching the figure of Culhen diminishing in the distance. 'Who are you telling,' growled Falk. He pointed to the outline of Selsena, who was frolicking in the sea beyond the range of any potential arrows from the Buoyant Spirit. 'I swear to you, her thought processes are slowly changing, and I find that really worrying. Her sentences are getting longer, and she's beginning to speak in riddles.' 'Our bodies and our surroundings determine our way of thinking,' said Jelninolan solemnly. 'Selsena is now living in an underwater world permeated by currents and subtle sounds. Those leave their mark, needless to say, but once I release her from the charm, she will be back to her old self within a couple of days.' Falk nodded, but the anxious look on his face remained. Their dinghy arrived at the Buoyant Spirit, scraping against her hull, and one after another they clambered aboard and were welcomed loudly by the pirates. Fisker's crew was made up of men and women who seemed highly experienced. They enjoyed cracking smutty jokes and making lewd advances, much to Trogadon's delight, and the squat warrior started grinning broadly. Falk grabbed the dwarf by the scruff of the neck as he was about to go over to the pirate women. 'We could do without any complications,' he whispered. Trogadon gave a disappointed nod. More than one of the she-pirates bawled after the dwarf as he walked away, and Ahren couldn't stop smiling as he followed the others down to the captain's festively decorated cabin. He was astounded by the size of the luxurious room, which stretched out under the whole length of the quarterdeck and ended with a leaded window at least three paces wide and as tall as a fully-grown man. In front of the window was an ornate four-poster bed, with more people sitting and lying on it than was decent. The walls were decorated with expensive trophies, and the thrown-together effect suggested they were the spoils of piracy. On one wall Ahren could see a helmet from the Eternal Empire, on another was a beautifully decorated golden vase of the sort the young man had seen in the Sunplains. He saw a wall tapestry with an illustration of Three Rivers, doubtless intended for a wealthy Hjalgar merchant, before it had fallen into the greedy hands of the Paladin who was now greeting them so effusively. 'Welcome to my home on the waves,' he said, spreading out his arms and smiling. For a moment there was a glimpse of an exceedingly charming, open-hearted Fisker, whose face was normally so anxious, and Ahren thought he recognised the good-natured young fisherman that Uldini had described – before the Dark Days and what followed had cast their shadow over him, turning him into what he was today. The general mournfulness and melancholy that hung over him was apparent again an instant later – only the broad smile remained, which seemed just a little too forced to be real. He was wearing the same clothing as when they had first met him, only now it had been washed and even starched. Had the person standing before them been merely a notorious pirate captain and not a renegade Paladin, Ahren might even have been impressed by what he was looking at. With a flourish of his arm, Fisker beckoned them towards a long table, covered in a pristine white tablecloth and surrounded by a dozen large chairs. On it was an array of fried fish, dissected octopus, potatoes, rice, and freshly baked bread. Uldini let out a low whistle and was the first to sit down. 'I have to say, that is impressive considering we are on the high seas,' said the Arch Wizard. Fisker responded with an exaggerated bow. 'One of my battle wizards has specialised in an ice fog that incapacitates the enemy. I get him to cool down the pantry every day with it. That keeps everything nice and fresh. At first, he refused to co-operate, but I find a crossbow bolt to the knee changes one's perspective wonderfully,' he said in a pompous voice. Jelninolan and Ahren exchanged looks. Magic could bring such positive benefits, but Fisker clearly surrounded himself with charms that were destructive. This was confirmed by his willingness to shoot his own people. Ahren suddenly felt disgusted at the fact that he would have to fight alongside this person, and it seemed that the others shared his opinion, for the meal that followed was accompanied only by a heavy silence, broken occasionally by Fisker's long-winded yarns concerning his successful pirating forays. The man with the blond curls indulged in copious amounts of wine and even before the meal had been finished, his speech had become considerably slurred. To Ahren, the evening felt like torture, and when Culhen sarcastically communicated that he was only too glad not to be there with them after all, Ahren couldn't even manage a smile at his friend's biting humour. Finally, he lost patience. Fisker was in the middle of yet another story – this one about a battle with three warships – when Ahren slammed his fist down on the table, causing the crockery to rattle terribly. 'I have had enough!' he thundered at Fisker, who was completely taken aback. 'You rob and you murder to your heart's content so that you can increase your personal wealth – you have made that abundantly clear to all of us! I'm sure that the THREE are incredibly proud of you.' Fisker flinched when he heard those words, then interrupted the Forest Guardian. 'I'm enjoying my life. I don't deny it. But you have the same enemy in these waters as I do – the Cold Woman. She is the one who murders much more than she plunders. For twenty years she has been slaughtering anyone who has set eyes on her, for she sinks every ship that she seizes and leaves only corpses in her wake.' Ahren swallowed hard and listened aghast to Fisker, who had suddenly become deadly serious as he continued in a hoarse whisper. 'When Aluna and I…separated, I fell into a deep hole, which I tried to fill with all kinds of vices. If I have heard correctly, I am not alone in this regard among my illustrious brothers and sisters.' Falk cleared his throat in embarrassment, not daring to say anything or look up from the white tablecloth. 'Drunk and penniless, I signed onto a pirate ship and within a few weeks I was captain. Centuries of experience…you know yourselves.' Despite the casual way he had uttered his words, Ahren could see the intense pain in the captain's eyes. 'I would surely have become bored in no time at all were it not for the fact that I had heard stories about a she-pirate who was uniting under her flag the most unscrupulous and hard-hearted bastards to be found on the Cutlass Sea. Merchants were now longer merely being plundered; their ships were being burned on the high seas. Three port towns were destroyed in this manner and no-one dared to try rebuilding them. Why do you think nobody has even considered the idea of settling by the Cutlass Sea since then? The natives were driven out or slaughtered, even the Sunplainers didn't dare to establish a fortification here. I decided to gather an opposing force – to protect the Cutlass Sea from falling completely under the Cold Woman's control. Which is why I have become Admiral Bocasso. I built up a fleet and went to war against my opponent's ships. Our war in these waters has been raging for forty years now – and wars are expensive. I finance it by plundering and protection money – that is true. But I only kill if it is unavoidable.' Fisker slumped down in his chair. 'The irony is this: a proxy war has been raging between our fleets for two decades. She and I have not crossed paths in a long time. I am caught up in a conflict that I cannot win, but from which I have never wanted to flee.' He looked around at his guests. 'Until this moment. Now that you are here, I can cast off the role of admiral at last and accompany you to the mainland. Someone else can take care of the Cutlass Sea. I have a higher calling to follow.' Fisker's eyes were glistening almost manically. Ahren was sure that the Paladin's mental state was far less stable than they had initially assumed. Jelninolan and Uldini exchanged looks of alarm, and Falk stared at Fisker with a mixture of pity and disgust. Only Trogadon was cheerfully munching on octopus, a dish that clearly tickled his fancy. A quick side-glance at Khara, who was sitting beside him, and Ahren understood that she considered Fisker's willingness to flee the maritime battle and abandon his people to be a tactic beneath contempt. 'So – you are the lesser of two evils,' summarised Ahren, who couldn't bring himself to sound more diplomatic. He folded his arms before his chest defiantly. Fisker, however, seemed thankful for Ahren's less than total condemnation. 'Yes, exactly,' he said hurriedly. 'My pirate existence is an emergency measure, which admittedly has got out of hand.' Ahren deliberately scanned the opulence of Fisker's domicile. 'That's an understatement if ever I heard one,' he said and then paused. His attention was attracted to a narrow door directly beside the four-poster bed, situated at the back wall of the ship and secured by three heavy locks. The pirate captain had noticed what Ahren was looking at and quickly pushed his chair to the left, blocking the young Paladin's view. 'As our youngest brother has just noted, my intention was merely to put a stop to the damage being done to the Cutlass Sea…' he began explaining to the group, only to be cut off by Uldini. 'Bah, humbug! If you were really serious, you could have sent a messenger to me or to Emperor Justinian at any time. We would have established a couple of forts, you could have defended them with your pirate fleet, and the Cold Woman would have been done for after five or six years of bloodshed.' Ahren was hardly listening. He leaned back in his chair to get another look at the peculiar door. Behind it was surely the end of the ship – unless there was a secret room no more than two hands in width. Again, Fisker adjusted his chair to block Ahren's view, meanwhile responding to Uldini's accusation in a nervous voice. 'For the love of the THREE, we are talking about pirates. The Cutlass Sea is a magnet for those who wish to be masters of their own destiny and not belong to any kingdom. If I had helped the Sunplains or any other ruling power to gain a foothold here, I would have been strung up from the nearest mast before you could say "shiver me timbers".' Uldini snorted in disbelief. Ahren stood up and stretched, looking at the narrow door more keenly and stepping towards it. Fisker sprang up so quickly that his chair crashed to the floor behind him, He gestured towards the exit. 'It was lovely having you to dinner, but you really must leave now,' he commanded loudly, before calling for his guards who had been standing outside. 'What's going on here?' asked Falk with a frown. Ahren was now like a dog with a bone. A strong suspicion had arisen within him. Was it possible that the renegade champion of the gods was holding Aluna prisoner in that tiny cubbyhole on his ship, hidden from the eyes of the world? 'Trogadon, Khara, do not allow anyone to enter this cabin!' he commanded loudly. 'Jelninolan, a protective charm in case his damned lap-wizards have any silly notions. Falk, you take care of Fisker! Uldini, I need your assistance back here.' He had to hand it to his friends that they reacted immediately and without question. Doubtless, their scepticism regarding Fisker's behaviour had played a role, but Ahren was too busy now to give it a second thought. Trogadon and Khara leaped up and braced themselves against the entrance door to the cabin, while Jelninolan drew out Mirilan and playing a crescendo of wild, high notes, throwing a whirlwind over the entrance. 'Any magic will get caught in the little windstorm, but you still have to use all your strength to keep the door closed,' she called. Alarmed voices could be heard from outside, and Khara's and Trogadon's boots scraped against the wooden floor as they held against the force of pirates trying desperately to gain access. 'Thank you so much,' gasped the dwarf sarcastically before redoubling his efforts. Ahren and Uldini, meanwhile, had crossed the room. Fisker failed miserably in his attempt to hold them up, Falk in his armour having little difficulty in throwing the drunken man to the floor. 'Open this door, Uldini, but do it without damaging what's on the other side,' said Ahren urgently. The likelihood that they would have to fight their way off the Buoyant Spirit was growing by the second, judging by the irate shouts of the pirates outside. Uldini looked down at the locks and frowned. 'Is that a little treasure chamber? The frame and the locks are made from Dwarfish steel. That door is more valuable than the rest of the ship put together.' 'Can you open it or not?' asked Ahren impatiently. 'I don't know what you expect to find in there, but I really hope it's worth all this trouble,' murmured Uldini, drawing the lights of the cabin into his crystal ball. A flimsy thread of liquid fire came forth from the charm-focus as Uldini held the ball in front of the locked door. The Arch Wizard's charm began cutting through the Dwarf steel like a hot knife through wax, opening the locks one after the other. 'You can't do that! Stay away!' screamed Fisker deliriously as Falk pinned the raving man to the ground. 'Don't be afraid!' he sobbed towards the narrow door. 'I am here. I will protect you – I will always protect you.' His final words were little more than muffled, unintelligible blubbering. Ahren was fearful of what he was about to see. A final, futile cry from the struggling Paladin accompanied the breaking of the remaining lock and Ahren opened the heavy door with trembling fingers. 'NO!' screamed Fisker desperately and dementedly as Ahren stared dumbstruck at the figure in the tiny hideaway while Uldini, stunned beyond belief, dropped his crystal ball, which clattered noisily before rolling along the floor.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 11

The main camp of the THREE militia was considerably larger and more professional than Sven had expected. At least five hundred men and women were marching and training between the neat rows of simple white tents, set up on the spring meadow, three square acres in size, which was situated in the south-west region of the Knight Marshes. He found it difficult to maintain his composure on seeing that there were at least six Keepers in attendance. The Thing within his skull was squirming greedily. 'You go that way,' said the well-conditioned, tall woman with the straight, flaxen hair, who introduced herself as Adjutant Cosin and reminded him of his sister, Lena. Who had betrayed him. Who was doing penance for his sins now as a Keeper herself. He ground his teeth until they hurt, and before he knew it, he had already drawn his dagger. He quickly put the weapon away, suppressing his desire to cut the innocent woman's throat. She seemed to sense his hostility, for she looked at him suspiciously. 'Is something the matter, Captain Sven?' she asked, eyeing him critically. 'It's just that I am so excited about meeting the founder of the militia, Adjutant,' he assured her, mustering up what he hoped was a convincing smile. The woman stared at him for another heartbeat, then led him into the core of the camp, whose volunteer army was to seal off the Borderlands until the rulers of the eastern lands could agree on a common approach. Sven had taken over command of his small troop after their last commander had fallen victim to his wounds despite the heroic efforts that the miller's son had feigned so well. Then it had only been a matter of a couple of successful skirmishes against confused Low Fangs before he had been officially made captain. Sven noticed that he was able to exert increasing control over his misshapen brothers and sisters, and so was able to bend every battle to his will. He now had a reputation as a fearless fighter, and when Baron Aconus called all militia captains to a council of war, Sven had jumped at the opportunity. His plans were bearing fruit – soon he would come face to face with the man who had created this militia in the first place. They were approaching a large tent now. Sven suddenly had a vision of poisoning the baron and all his commanders while they were gathered in this one place. But, however tempting the images of many distorted, dying faces were, Sven's aims were more long-term and glorious. He followed the adjutant into the meeting-tent and was astounded. At least fifty commanders were sitting on simple benches at long, plain tables, talking, joking, and laughing among themselves. At the far end was an empty podium, little more than a wooden box. 'Sit yourself down somewhere. Everyone should be in attendance soon, and the Baron will then explain the militia's next steps,' said Cosin absently, already heading back outside to welcome the next captain. Sven gave an irritated snort and scowled in annoyance. The Baron really seemed set on transforming this collection of yokels into an army – something that didn't fit into the High Fang's plans at all. He would have to do something about this or adapt his intrigue to suit the circumstances. Hardly had he sat down on one of the benches, when he was already being bombarded with questions coming from the military men and women around him. Did he have any children? Had he lost any loved ones to the enemy? Had he any idea of what the news from Kings Island was that the Baron was going to deliver to them? The last question was the only one of interest to him. Getting information regarding the negotiations between the Knight Marshes, the Silver Cliff and the Sunplains was going to make his journey worthwhile. But Sven hoped to achieve so much more. While he rattled off platitudes and related his story of being the only survivor of a mercenary group, the last few captains arrived in the tent. The High Fang didn't even need to pretend to share the thrill displayed by the other attendees, for he really was looking forward excitedly to encountering the founder and leader of the THREE militia. Sven was silently considering what vice the nobleman might exhibit which he could then use against him, when Aconus, the man of the moment, stepped into the tent through an opening behind the podium. While everyone around him leaped up and started cheering, the miller's son had to stop himself from laughing out loud. This small, pudgy man with thin, grey-black hair and a handlebar moustache that was far too big for him was supposed to be their most revered baron? He reminded Sven of the eccentric uncle that you would steer well clear of during a family feast, in order not to be bored to death by long-winded stories from his past. Baron Aconus stepped onto the improvised podium as the crowd roared their delight and began to speak in a gentle, fatherly voice, his soft green eyes twinkling kindly upon the assembled men and women. The people fell silent and you could hear a pin drop. Sven realised to his disgust that this innocuous little man possessed the gift of speaking directly to the hearts and minds of his followers. 'It gives me great pleasure to see you all looking so well in front of me. Let us first turn our thoughts for a silent moment to those who have fallen victim to the claws and fangs of the Dark Ones.' He bowed his head and closed his eyes, all the followers around Sven following suit. The miller's son hesitated for a moment, thinking of all the poor oafs that had been slaughtered by Dark Ones while a malicious smile crept across his face. Then he noticed Adjutant Cosin, who was standing beside the baron, looking at him with narrowed eyes. He quickly lowered his head reverentially, all too aware that he had just made a big mistake. During the Baron's speech, in which he spoke about self-sacrifice and fearlessness in the face of the ever-increasing danger caused by roaming Dark Ones, the flaxen-haired woman kept her eyes fixed on Sven. He attempted an impassive face tending towards humility, but inside he was fuming, and swearing to himself that he would deal with that woman as soon as he got the chance. 'And finally, some news that is good for us all. Our beloved King Senius Blueground has been working on a formal peace agreement with the Sun Emperor, the Clans of Silver Cliff and those from Kelkor too.' There were cheers of delight and approval, which eventually died down, enabling the Baron to continue. 'That means the following: there is no danger of troop movements along the borders being misinterpreted as acts of aggression, nor is there any further need to guard the inner borders between the domains. As soon as the preparations have been completed by autumn, the combined armies of the federation will guard the Borderlands from the Red Posts to as far south as the Forest of Ire.' This was followed by more cheering, louder this time and slower to abate. 'One summer – lend me the strength of your swords for one more summer and our militia will have completed its task of protecting our homes from the Dark Ones.' Now the joy was unbounded. The captains slapped one another on the back or embraced each other. Sven tried to push himself forward to the podium, seeking his chance to address the Baron, but Cosin led the squat little man out of the tent, using her body to prevent him from seeing Sven's gesticulating hand. Seething rage threatened the self-control of the miller's son as he saw his plan slipping out of his grasp. He stormed to the exit, ignoring the celebratory looks around him. Spring had already broken, and his ambitions would have to be realised by autumn or his master's ire would crash upon him. He felt a stabbing pain behind the knitted skin above his eye-socket. For the first time in weeks, the Thing in his head had enough freedom to bite into Sven's flesh with its tiny teeth. The High Fang immediately summoned up his will, closing it around the parasite within him, stopping it from wriggling. Then he clenched his fists so hard that they became numb, and he began to consider his next step. He would have to make a name for himself. A name so great that the Baron would have to call Sven to him at their next encounter. His fingernails were digging into his palms with such ferocity that he was starting to bleed. Spring was going to be a difficult time for all Dark Ones, he thought grimly. For he would literally have to carve out his success through their bodies – and woe betide anyone who was going to stand in his way.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 12

With Fisker's wailing in his ears, Ahren carefully entered the hideaway and gently lifted the creature hiding inside. Aghast, he stared down at the maltreated little monkey with its horribly twisted limbs as it looked over at Fisker, chattered weakly and called pleadingly for the Paladin. 'I'm here, Cassobo,' wailed Fisker again and again. 'They won't do anything to you. They won't do anything to you. Don't be afraid.' 'Of course! That's why the stupid cover name sounded so familiar,' groaned Uldini beside him. 'He used a variation of his soul animal's name for his pirate title.' Ahren almost dropped the misshapen little monkey in surprise. 'This is a soul animal?' he said in disbelief, looking down at the little creature. It had neat black fur, only its head and shoulders were white. Intelligent black eyes were looking at Ahren, and its strangely dented chest rose and fell as the little thing breathed irregularly. Its arms and legs seemed to be deformed, and Ahren thought he could make out a multitude of fractures that had not healed properly, transforming the creature into a little heap of misery. Exerting as much self-control as he possibly could, he gently set the little monkey on the dining table, drew out Wind Blade and turned to face the Paladin, still blubbering on the floor, where Falk had him pinned down. 'Did you do this?' asked Ahren, ready to execute the Paladin on the spot if he had indeed been responsible for treating his soul animal so cruelly. But Fisker shook his head violently, his blond locks flying. 'The Cold Woman! The Cold Woman! It was the Cold Woman!' he pleaded. Falk released his grip – it was clear that Fisker no longer presented a danger. 'We were on the high seas, and she managed to get hold of him as we were fighting,' explained the captain, his eyes unfocussed, his mind clearly caught up in the horrors of the past. 'I capitulated, but she just laughed and broke him and broke him and broke him until he stopped screaming. No healer on the ship and no mast left to sail away. Weeks at sea on a wreck, terrible wounds hurting day in, day out, and an agonised soul. We survived, but Cassobo only barely. Deformed and broken, deformed and broken.' Fisker was rocking back and forth on his knees. 'My fault, all my fault,' he murmured, again and again. Trogadon, who was still braced against the door with Khara, groaned loudly. 'No offence, but our Paladin here seems just as broken as his little monkey. Whatever you're planning, can you speed it up a little? Our arms are beginning to go numb.' Ahren could hear the emotion in the squat warrior's voice, which reflected exactly how he was feeling himself. He put Sun away and turned to Uldini and Jelninolan, both of whom were bending over Cassobo and speaking to each other. The Forest Guardian could see that Jelninolan's face was tear-stained, and Uldini's eyes too were bloodshot. 'Is there something you can do for the little whippersnapper?' asked Ahren in a low voice, mentally comforting Culhen at the same time, whose howling on the other ship could be heard from the cabin. The fate of the little soul animal had shaken the wolf to the core, and Ahren too was finding it difficult to pull himself together, trying desperately not to break down. Somehow, they had to get a grip on the situation or soon there would soon be a pitched battle on board the Buoyant Spirit. 'What do you think?' Uldini asked Jelninolan with a lump in his throat. The priestess's lower lip was trembling as she stroked the monkey's little head gently with the tips of two fingers. 'The injuries are far too old for a conventional healing charm,' she said firmly. 'The bones are completely deformed, not one rib is in the right place.' She closed her eyes and ruminated. 'This calls for a ritual charm circle – something like the time I healed Khara's scars, only much more powerful.' Uldini nodded. 'A Place of Power,' he mused. 'There should be several around here. What should I look for?' Jelninolan touched the little monkey's forehead, causing him to immediately fall asleep. 'The older, the better.' Then she paused. 'Something shattered would be good.' Uldini nodded, smiling grimly. 'Good idea,' he said conspiratorially before turning to Fisker, who had calmed down considerably once his monkey had fallen asleep. 'Can you call your people to order so that we can help Cassobo?' he asked slowly and clearly, as if he were communicating with a child. Fisker nodded as he wiped the spittle from the corners of his mouth. 'I'm feeling better now,' he whispered. The madness had vanished from his face, only the deep sadness remained. 'Cassobo has become terribly anxious since…that time. When he gets into a panic, he floods my mind with those horrific images. Relentlessly.' Ahren shivered as he considered how he would feel if Culhen had been so badly maltreated. Suddenly, his wolf's reason was in his mind, pulling him away from that line of thinking. Spending your time worrying about that hypothetical situation won't do you any good, said his soul animal sternly. Ahren had to admit that he was right. There was no point in torturing oneself with such visions, their journey was already dangerous enough – as the enraged pirates outside the cabin were making abundantly and vociferously clear. He walked over to Khara and took her place at the doorway. She nodded her thanks and massaged her upper arms. 'Well, isn't that just great,' grumbled Trogadon. 'And who's going to replace me?' Fisker, meanwhile, had got up to his feet and staggered over to Jelninolan and Uldini. 'Can you really help him?' he asked in disbelief. He was behaving like a prisoner, newly released to the fresh air after decades in the dungeon. 'Only if you can get your sabre-rattling horde under control,' barked Uldini. 'If they tear us limb from limb, we'll hardly be able to help you, will we?' Fisker nodded and walked uncertainly towards the door. 'I suggest you get yourself in order first,' said Khara. 'You look more like a hostage than the proud captain of a sailing vessel.' 'Thanks for that,' groaned Ahren, struggling to keep the door closed while the pirate began to spruce himself up at a leisurely pace, the pressure from the crew outside growing by the heartbeat. Then there was a heavy bang and Ahren felt a painful jolt in his back, which was pressed against the door. 'Hurry up now,' said Trogadon when there was a second thud. 'They seem to have constructed some sort of battering ram. It won't be long until there will be no door for us to push against.' Fisker stepped forward and beckoned Ahren and the dwarf to move aside. The pair gratefully got out of the way, and immediately a stream of pirates rushed forward into the cabin, their weapons drawn, only to stop in annoyance when they saw their unharmed captain standing in front of them. 'No need to worry, men. We just had a very loud argument concerning the division of the spoils from our upcoming foray. Guess who won?' asked Fisker, pointing his two thumbs at himself. The pirates looked at each other uncertainly, at which point the quick-witted Falk came to his assistance. 'He wants to keep the booty from the next three ships for himself,' he groaned in a seemingly defeated voice. 'This is what happens when you sail with the Admiral, my friend,' responded Fisker cockily, causing some of the pirates to guffaw. 'Why don't we make some room for our friends here so that they can go and lick their wounds,' he continued in a generous tone. The rabble slowly created a space, allowing Ahren and his friends to leave the ship. 'I will stay here and prepare Cassobo for the spell,' said Jelninolan in a low voice to Fisker, who nodded, before dramatically pulling her towards him. 'My friends, it seems that I have also, much to my surprise, conquered another heart,' he called loudly, and a broad grin spread across his face. 'Please give your captain a little privacy.' Raucous cheers went up from the assembled pirates while Ahren and the others were led to the dinghies and Fisker, with Jelninolan on his arm, re-entered his cabin and slammed the door shut behind him. 'You have to admire his acting talent,' whispered Falk. 'Only a few minutes ago he was a heap of misery, and now he is the swashbuckling commander of the fleet again, and a heartbreaker to boot.' 'How do you think he's going to feel when Jelninolan tells him what she thinks of his little romantic intercession?' asked Trogadon, pursing his lips. 'I don't think I'd like to be in his shoes now.' Ahren spent much of the following few days in silent communication with his wolf. The fate of the little monkey had affected both the young man and Culhen deeply, so they comforted each other, and the connection between them grew even stronger. In the meantime, Uldini had placed a complex charm on his crystal ball, which was now floating three paces above the wheel of the Queen of the Waves, beaming a soft light which guided the superstitious steersman as he followed the course towards the magical place that the globe was seeking out. Alas, the magic light failed to take into account minor details such as islands, reefs or pirate ships under the flag of the Cold Woman as it gave its directions, which forced the pilot to take regular detours as they continued their quest. Falk and Trogadon spent their time sitting together, playing dice, but it wasn't the carefree sport of two old friends, rather the grim silent waiting of two warriors biding their time until the ugly battle they were expecting would begin. Khara gave Ahren his personal space, instead spending her time trying out a variety of sword-moves in the riggings, on the prow, and between the main deck and quarterdeck, causing more than one sailor to look at her admiringly or longingly. There was little to be seen of Jelninolan. The elf remained on the Buoyant Spirit, where, according to Uldini, she was weaving a myriad of tiny spells, too many to count. Ahren was leaning on the poop rail, one hand on Culhen's neck, the other stroking the salt-encrusted wood in front of him. The water that the sea threw onto the railing formed into strange patterns, and the Forest Guardian was glad not to be thinking about anything in particular for a change. He heard a respectful clearing of the throat behind him. Without turning around, Ahren asked: 'What's up, Yantilla?' 'How did you know it was me?' asked the woman behind him, her voice betraying surprise and uncertainty. 'Culhen,' explained Ahren, his eyes still fixed on the expanse of sea in front of him. 'I can use his senses when I allow them in. And at the moment we seem to be particularly close.' The wolf pushed his head against Ahren's body, and the young, bearded Paladin smiled. The closer their connection was, the fewer words he and his four-legged friend needed to exchange. 'What brings you to me?' he asked the woman behind him. Yantilla positioned herself beside him and looked out onto the deep-blue waters of the Cutlass Sea, trying to come up with the right words. The wind blew through her short hair, and out of the corner of Ahren's eye, the gaunt woman in her costume looked completely convincing as the hard-bitten pirate captain. If Falk ever gets tired of his role, we have a superb understudy, don't you think? suggested Ahren, and Culhen growled his agreement. Yantilla had by now plucked up her courage and began to speak. 'I am not a diplomat and will never be one, so I won't beat around the bush. What happened when you were having dinner over there? You and your companions have been behaving completely differently ever since your visit to the Buoyant Spirit. The whole crew is talking about it and let me tell you, they're not happy. The rumours are flying around – that there was a murder attempt by the admiral, that he has forced you under his control by means of magic, and even that the Buoyant Spirit is a ghost ship and that you found out about it and are protecting us now with the ball of light so that we don't suffer the same fate.' Ahren closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. 'Do the men and women on this vessel have too much free time on their hands or is it just that their imaginations are running riot?' he asked sharply, causing Yantilla to stiffen, taken aback by the Forest Guardian's unusually harsh tone. 'I'm sorry,' he said immediately. 'In fact, we did discover something terrible and we're all finding it incredibly difficult to talk about it aloud. 'He gestured towards Falk and Trogadon, who were silently throwing dice. 'Let me just say this: we have become aware of a great wrong that the Cold Woman committed a long time ago. A…curse, if you will.' Yantilla retreated half a step on hearing this and looked at Ahren fearfully. He ignored her, however, and continued speaking, a little faster now. Even his sketchy description of the pirate queen's deed left a bitter taste in his mouth. 'Uldini and Jelninolan are convinced that they can lift this curse. But to do so we must travel to a specific place – Uldini's light is showing us the way.' Yantilla nodded slowly. 'You're not telling me the whole story, are you?' she asked quietly. Ahren shook his head. 'Ignorance can be bliss, Captain,' he said firmly. 'I have given you all the information necessary. And if the pair are successful, this whole episode will be over in one or two weeks.' Yantilla gave a curt, military nod. 'Of course, Squire,' she responded, as though she had been given an order. She marched away, stiff-backed and with her arms close to her sides. I don't think she appreciated that, said Culhen, watching the gaunt woman as she moved off. Ahren shrugged his shoulders sadly. 'I am supposed to be her commander,' he said to himself quietly. 'Which means, among other things, that I should protect her from any unnecessary suffering.' You sound exactly like Falk when he was being all secretive at the beginning of our journey, teased Culhen, finding it all very amusing. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, responded Ahren quietly. They stopped talking, staring instead out at the ocean, lost in thought. 'I did it! For a brief moment I really did it!' shouted Khara joyfully, jumping up from her crouched position and throwing her arms around Ahren's neck. She smothered his face with wild kisses, causing the jealous wolf to bark. 'Congratulations,' said Ahren lovingly. 'What pulled you out of there?' Khara hesitated. 'It was all so cold and lonely. No feelings at all.' She paused again. 'Not even for you,' she said quietly. 'That's why it's called the Void,' explained Ahren, stroking her hair. 'It's supposed to help you in times of difficulty – when your arms are exhausted from fighting or when you have been wounded. But giving yourself to it all the time is bad for the spirit.' Khara nodded and released herself from him. 'What happens now?' she asked inquisitively. 'Not a lot,' said Ahren, shrugging his shoulders. 'The door in your head has opened, now you just have to learn to be able to walk through it whenever you need to. Start training in a sitting position, and once you have become more confident, do it standing, and finally when you are practising with your sword.' He stared, lost in thought, out over the ocean, which was like a dark mirror under a thick layer of low-hanging cloud. 'The way I remember it, I was able to slip into it for one or two heartbeats before quickly slipping out of it again. That was perfect for archery, of course, but I don't know how you can get it to work ideally for you.' Khara nodded enthusiastically, planted another kiss on his cheek and then sat down on her heels again, ready to give it another try. Of course she was going to achieve the Void before me, sulked Culhen, turning his head away. Ahren tickled the wolf between his ears. 'It will happen. Just keep at it,' he said. With every passing day without a run, Culhen was becoming increasingly grumpy. Ahren hoped that the Place of Power they were seeking out, where they would perform the ritual to help Fisker's little monkey, Cassobo, would also have a nice long stretch of beach for Culhen. Gasping for air, Ahren hauled himself up towards the deck of The Queen of the Waves by means of the wet rope. His arms and chest were burning, but the exercise had done him good, leaving him with a deeply satisfying feeling. The ship was making terribly slow progress on account of the light breeze, so he had tied himself to a rope, dived overboard and swum alongside the vessel until he was exhausted. Falk helped the snorting young Forest Guardian over the railing and then nodded at his erstwhile student approvingly. 'Well done,' he commented dryly. 'You seem to have found your rhythm over the past few days.' The old man could only be referring to the combination of short bursts of archery, sword fighting, endurance training and weightlifting that Ahren had recently been practising. 'I've watched the way yourself and Trogadon keep yourselves fit without being exhausted the whole time and I've decided to develop my own routine.' Falk nodded approvingly. 'Spoken like a true Forest Guardian,' he said, grinning and slapping Ahren on his back. 'One word of warning, though. Training in this way will ensure that you don't fall behind, but it won't bring you forward either.' 'That's alright,' said the young Paladin calmly. 'For the moment I don't need to worry about the consequences of missing when I shoot, or what will happen if I swing my sword too slowly,' he said. Then he remembered his missed shot in the jungle when he had almost slain a dangerous High Fang shaman from a safe distance. He frowned at the memory. 'You've come a long way,' said Falk. 'I can understand your wish to improve yourself in the way that you're doing.' Then his voice became quieter. 'But we need to talk about Fisker too,' he said. Ahren nodded silently. They retired to a quiet spot, where the old man spoke again. 'A couple of things make much more sense now that we know about Cassobo's condition. The enforced jollity, Fisker's need for as big a fleet as possible to protect himself, and his hatred towards the Cold Woman. But why didn't he finish her off long ago? This feud has been going on for no less than forty years. His arch-enemy must be grey-haired by now.' Ahren ran his fingers through his wet hair. He understood what his one-time master was trying to say to him. A revengeful Paladin was an almost unstoppable force of nature. 'She broke him,' he said after a pause. 'We all saw what happened when Cassobo's fear flowed through him. It wasn't just the monkey's feelings that rose to the surface. Fisker is afraid of meeting her. That's why he hasn't found her, as he put it himself. He is avoiding her.' then another thought struck him. 'And maybe she is avoiding him too. If she really is an old woman by now and she's hearing stories about the admiral not aging, then maybe she realises whom or what she has made an enemy out of.' Falk scratched his beard thoughtfully. 'Your theory makes sense,' he said. 'Let's just hope we get the original Fisker back – or at least some of him – once we've helped Cassobo.' Ahren nodded in agreement. 'It will certainly help him to regain some emotional health. Imagine if Selsena had suffered a similar torture.' Falk clenched his fists, and Ahren had the impression that the old man was close to hitting him. I've spent two weeks trying not to imagine such a thing, thank you very much,' growled the old Forest Guardian. 'I've been doing exactly the same thing,' admitted Ahren. 'But at least we know how Fisker must have felt at the time, not to mention Cassobo. It's a wonder that they've persevered for so long.' 'Tough little bastard,' acknowledged Falk. Ahren wasn't sure to which of the unfortunates his mentor was referring. 'But why didn't he simply leave the Cutlass Sea?' asked Ahren after a moment's silence. 'If I had been in his shoes, I would have sailed as far away as possible, or made myself scarce on terra firma somewhere.' Falk shrugged his shoulders. 'Perhaps he was simply too revengeful towards the Cold Woman. Or there was still enough Paladin spirit within him to want to defend the Cutlass Sea from falling under the Fury's control of the. We can ask him once he's holding an undamaged Cassobo in his arms.' Ahren gave Falk a quick embrace before walking broodily away. Their conversation had shone a new light on Fisker's inner turmoil – and it had also done something else. Ahren now felt a burning hatred for the Cold Woman. This was the first time that Ahren had wished for anyone's death, without ever having met the person. He was certain of one thing – if he ever crossed paths with the pirate queen, he wouldn't think twice about planting an arrow in her heart. 'It must be that island over there,' said Khara, pointing at a small, almost circular patch of land that rose high up out of the sea. Uldini's crystal ball had begun to pulsate weakly but continuously that morning, which, according to the Arch Wizard, was a good sign. They had reached the eastern islands of the Cutlass Sea, and the crew had been growing increasingly restless, for behind the islands were the Hungry Waves, an expanse of sea that no mariner had ever successfully negotiated. The legends ranged from enormous octopi that effortlessly plucked mariners off the decks of ships, to deadly currents from which you couldn't escape for weeks on end if at all, not to mention enormous whales capable of swallowing whole ships in one go. Even Ahren was feeling increasingly queasy, and the fact that Uldini had never poo-pooed any of the tales that were being told, was less than reassuring. The crew had held its collective breath with every island they had passed, but the crystal ball had continued to pulsate more strongly. Now, however, they were heading for the lonely islet that Khara was pointing to. Ahren could see a high mountain with a flat summit, which dominated the surrounding land. He imagined the whole island to be merely the top of an enormous rock formation, hidden under the waves, with only its tip peeking out above the ocean. On one of side of the island was a narrow sandy beach, and the lower slopes of the mountain were heavily wooded, while its incline grew steeper as it ascended. 'Looks very nice,' said Trogadon, who had come up beside them. 'You're only saying that because the whole island is a giant mountain of rock,' teased Khara with a crooked smile. 'That's a cliché, and you are showing your prejudice,' argued Trogadon, jutting his chin out. 'Alright then, is there anything else that you like about this islet?' interjected Ahren. Trogadon plucked at his beard for a few moments in embarrassment, then he cast down his eyes. 'You're right, of course – it's the mountain,' he grumbled in a low voice. 'It's standing out here in the middle of nowhere, proudly defying the waves. A fine specimen if ever I saw one!' Ahren and Khara burst out laughing, and it struck the young Forest Guardian that it was not only Trogadon and Culhen, who longed for more familiar surroundings. Just looking at the expanse of trees on the island made the Forest Guardian itch to disembark. He was glad that Trogadon had joined them. When he wasn't playing dice with Falk, the dwarf had spent his time in his little forge below deck, tinkering around with his projects. Ahren had paid him a couple of visits and knew that he was restructuring the bow that had been used by the assassin in Waterheart during the attempt on Falk's life, but what exactly the master smith was planning to do with it, Ahren simply did not know. He only knew that he would never touch the cursed object himself. Apart from that, Trogadon was still working on the Firespray-ostrich leather of the desert folk. But this task was shrouded in mystery too. A shrill whistle sounded behind them, and when they turned around, they saw Falk, beckoning them over to the captain's cabin. They walked over and entered, finding Uldini and Captain Orben already sitting at the table, along with Yantilla, who gave Ahren a quick nod. 'We will go ashore at the beach and then head for the wood,' Uldini was saying. 'If I haven't reverted to the ignorance of an apprentice magician, then I can safely say that the place we are looking for is on top of that mountain.' 'Let me come too,' interjected Trogadon enthusiastically. Uldini nodded his approval. 'The ritual is going to require a few helping hands, not least because we are going to have to improvise. The energy lines, whose power we need for our charm maxims which will heal Cassobo, run straight up through the mountain to its summit.' He pointed at Ahren and Khara. 'You two have nothing against a bit of climbing, do you?' Ahren shook his head. 'Culhen has become extremely lethargic. He is really going to want to let off some steam on land, and I will be able to climb the mountain in the meantime.' Khara assented too, and Uldini clapped his hands together in jubilation. Falk grunted as he considered the situation. 'Much as I don't want to climb this mountain, I will go with you. Fisker is simply too unpredictable. I want to be near him in case anything goes wrong during the ritual.' 'Captain Yantilla, can your marines hunt for food while this is going on, and seek out a water source?' asked Orben politely. 'The squire's wolf has reduced our food stocks considerably.' 'No problem,' said the gaunt woman. 'A little exercise won't do us any harm either.' 'Good,' concluded Uldini. I will float over to Buoyant Spirit and inform Fisker and Jelninolan.' Everything happened quickly after that. Uldini returned a short time later, instructing Ahren and the others to pack four heavy rucksacks with all the objects needed for the ritual. 'Black candles? Troll hair?' asked Ahren in surprise as they carried up the supplies from the belly of the ship. 'Do we really need all these things?' Uldini shrugged his shoulders. 'I really don't know. As I've said already, we have no idea what to expect up there,' he said casually. 'All I can say is, well done Elgin for following my instructions to the letter and ensuring that the Queen of the Waves was suitably decked out. He patted one of the large, heavy rucksacks. 'At least we have everything we need with us.' They headed towards the white beach on their dinghy, which was weighed down by the bulging rucksacks, and as much as Ahren looked forward to being on land again, he couldn't help thinking that he would rather climb the mountain without all that additional ballast. Trogadon sang quietly to himself as they approached the beach, not stopping when their feet touched the ground for the first time in weeks. 'Can you please shut up?' asked Ahren, irritated, which only prompted the dwarf to sing more loudly, his face beaming with pleasure and his eyes sparkling. Then they heard a loud cry and a splash behind them. Ahren spun around at the same time as he experienced Culhen's excited thoughts. The wolf had dived overboard, unable to wait any longer, and was now paddling furiously to the shore, his nose in the air. The animal's mind was so full of joyful anticipation that Ahren couldn't make out a word of what Culhen was saying, and hardly had the wolf's paws made contact with the ground when he was already hurtling towards the trees. 'Should I stop him?' asked Ahren doubtfully. 'We have no idea what creatures are living here.' 'Our trail charms suggest that it isn't dangerous,' said Uldini, placating the young man. 'There are only small animals here and quite a few wild boar. And Culhen will have no problem dealing with those!' So Ahren let his friend go scampering off and it wasn't long before their connection weakened considerably. It seemed his four-legged companion was in need of some time on his own, and the Forest Guardian couldn't begrudge him that. 'It's going to be damn hard getting him off this island again,' said Ahren quietly. 'Once he's demolished any boar that have been left behind by the hunting party, he'll go aboard of his own volition,' interjected Trogadon, smirking. They both laughed. Then the Buoyant Spirit's dinghy with Fisker and Jelninolan on board came into view. The elf was holding a small bundle on her lap and judging by the way the blond-curled Paladin kept looking anxiously at the grey material, Ahren reckoned Cassobo had to be wrapped in it. Ahren was ashamed to realise that he was relieved at not having to see the little monkey's misshapen body again, and he exchanged a long look with Jelninolan, who was carefully stepping out of the dinghy and onto the beach, holding her bundle as if it were a raw egg. The young Paladin could make out an icy determination in the features of the priestess, combined with a gracious serenity, both of which brought her True Form to the fore. She looked like the natural leader of a procession as she placed herself at the head of the group. She uttered neither a word nor a greeting but began leading them first towards the forest and then to the foot of the mountain. Fisker dispatched his sailors and the dinghy back to the Buoyant Spirit and then followed the others, which Ahren was grateful for. The young Forest Guardian considered their venture to be something of a private Paladin event, and he didn't want to have any rapacious buccaneers accompanying them, particularly as it was a pirate queen who had been responsible for the tragedy they were trying to repair. Few words were spoken, and only in a whisper when necessary, as they stepped into the shadow of the trees and began walking towards the slope, which began its gentle ascent five furlongs further along. Ahren inhaled the intoxicating aroma of the plants, letting his fingertips run along the leaves of the bushes and trees they were passing. The earth felt unbelievably good under his boots and the young man sighed contentedly. 'Once the war against the Adversary is over, I'm going to live in a forest,' he said in a low voice, only to be rewarded with a dig into his ribs. 'I assume that I am going to have a say in this,' interrupted Khara, her voice expressing her irritation. 'As it happens, I am particularly fond of the sea and there is nothing I would like better than to live on the coast.' 'Then, why not a forest directly by the sea?' suggested Ahren diplomatically. 'Where the water is clear and the current safe so that one can swim there safely?' Khara snuggled her head into his shoulder and pulled his left hand around her waist. 'Where it will be peaceful and quiet and where I will only need to draw my blade for training,' she said, adding substance to their dream home. They walked on in silence, lost in the reverie of their perfect domicile. The ascent gradually became steeper and the climb more difficult. Ahren began to feel the weight on his back, while his legs negotiated the incline, which was becoming more acute with every step. Jelninolan moved forward at a calm, steady pace, and it was only the rise and fall of her chest that suggested she was experiencing the same difficulties as her companions. It wasn't long before the only sound that could be heard was the snorting and heavy breathing of the travellers. Ahren realised that they would soon be encountering their first real climbing passages. He reckoned that the mountain was well over a mile high and they would be lucky if they managed to reach the summit before sunset. When they arrived at their first genuine climbing challenge, a steep rise of a good three paces, Uldini floated up to work out the easiest route for them. He carried Cassobo in his arms, leaving Jelninolan free to use her hands for ascending. 'Can't you just make us float like you do?' suggested Ahren, breathing heavily. It was late afternoon and they had just paused for a break. Uldini shook his head. 'Jelninolan and I are going to need every ounce of magic energy available to us if we want to enact the ritual. We don't want to climb all the way up only to risk an Unleashing.' Ahren shuddered. He had witnessed one of those uncontrolled eruptions already, and the experience still haunted him, causing him to drop the idea of magical support for their climbing expedition immediately. He glanced over at Fisker, who was sitting on a small rock, speaking soothingly to the grey bundle in which Cassobo was cocooned. Ahren stood up and dragged his weary body until he was beside the pirate. Fisker glanced at him uncertainly, then instinctively used his back to protect the maltreated little monkey from Ahren. 'I'm not going to hurt him,' said Ahren impatiently. 'On the contrary, we are all here to help the little chap.' 'He gets afraid so easily,' said Fisker apologetically. 'I'm just used to protecting him from all other humans.' He turned to face Ahren, still blocking the Forest Guardian from seeing Cassobo. 'I want to apologise for my behaviour in the cabin, but my protective instinct has become much stronger over the last twenty years and is concentrated completely on Cassobo.' Ahren nodded understandingly. 'So, why the endless war against the Cold Woman? To protect the Cutlass Sea or as an act of revenge?' Fisker screwed up his eyes and looked at the sky, which was a deep blue, but for some wispy clouds. 'Are not both possible?' he asked uncertainly after a moment. 'I think my remaining here was in equal measure down to stubbornness, to a thirst for revenge and to shame. Not to mention an attempt to prove that I still had the Paladin instincts within me, wicked though they had become.' Fisker looked at Ahren. 'But believe one thing – had I known that Cassobo could have been healed using magic, I would have set sail for the mainland immediately and left the Cutlass Sea with all its islands to the Cold Woman without a second thought.' He gestured down to the two ships, which could be seen from the slope, anchored in the bay and resembling little toys from where they were looking. 'I didn't always only have battle wizards on board,' said Fisker in a melancholy voice. 'There was also a damn good healer in my ranks. A Keeper from the Knight Marshes by the name of Dulck, who had fallen into disgrace and wanted to try his luck on the high seas rather than face the hangman's noose. Patched me up more than a dozen times. When I got to know him, I pleaded with him to heal Cassobo, but he swore blind that the deformations were too extreme and that my little friend's weak body would not survive the re-breaking of his bones, necessary so that they could knit together correctly.' Fisker swallowed hard. 'And anyway, Cassobo's spirit had become so fearful that he would have broken down completely were his limbs to be…' he broke off when he heard a weak squealing sound behind him. 'Let's not talk about it anymore,' said Ahren quickly. He stood up. 'I know what I need to know.' As he returned to Khara he could hear Fisker soothing the agitated little monkey. 'What did he say?' asked Khara curiously. 'That his remaining on the Cutlass Sea was a mixture of outside circumstances and inner compulsions,' said Ahren vaguely. 'I think that at heart he is a decent fellow who has suffered a few too many calamities and consequently retreated into playing a role which treacherously promised him relief from the pain within his soul.' 'Do you think the other Paladins have similar problems?' asked Khara, her voice barely a whisper. 'I really hope not,' replied Ahren fervently. 'I am a Forest Guardian, not a damn spiritual advisor.' 'You're not doing too badly all the same,' said Khara, kissing him lightly on the cheek. Soon they were climbing again and Ahren's world was reduced to the heavy rucksack on his back and the bare rockface beneath his fingers. 'Success!' shouted Uldini, five paces above them. 'Just this rockface and we're here. This place is simply perfect.' 'I'm glad he's happy,' croaked Ahren. His mouth was dry from dust, his arms felt like jelly, and he was quite sure that his fingers were only connected to his hands, thanks to his leather gloves. 'It could be worse,' said Trogadon, grinning beside him as the sweat dripped down the plaits of his beard. 'Imagine if he had said something like: "This place isn't suitable," or "we have to wait for a thunderstorm." I prefer this feeling of satisfaction in my tummy, and the realisation that the torture he has put us through has been worth it, thank you very much.' Ahren had to admit that the warrior was right, and so he spurred himself on to climb the last bit of the ascent. At last he reached the ridge of the summit, rolling himself over the edge and onto the rugged plateau, which marked the highest point of the mountain. He unstrapped his rucksack and lay down on his back, gasping for air. The summit seemed to have been the crater of a volcano at some point, which the ravages of time had worn into its present, relatively smooth condition. Here and there he could see cracks and splintered rocky spurs, indicating that weather-beaten stones had fallen as avalanches down the slopes on more than one occasion. Uldini was floating on a seemingly erratic course above the uneven surface, staring all the while into his crystal ball, which was exhibiting the most unusual forms and patterns, which changed with every move the Arch Wizard made. 'I couldn't have picked a better Place of Power,' said Uldini in a self-satisfied voice, lowering himself onto a point on the summit where a splintered chunk of rock, the height of an average person, was standing. Ahren could see a sort of indentation on one end of the boulder, approximately two hands wide, and of the same depth. Uldini placed the crystal ball into it, the globe immediately emitting a warm golden light that seemed to beam half a mile without being blinding. Uldini nodded and raised the ball again. 'This is the spot,' he announced. Then he unwrapped Cassobo and gently placed the little monkey into the indentation. Ahren now noticed that the crippled animal's fur was decorated with tiny, feathery magical designs, which began to glimmer gently as soon as the shattered body of the monkey was laid on the rock. 'There have to be over a hundred symbols on him,' said Ahren, awestruck. 'Two hundred and seven,' interjected Jelninolan, a pained expression on her face. 'A unique symbol for every permanent internal injury, for every badly knitted splinter of bone, for every atrophied sinew, and for every contorted muscle – I named each and every one of the injuries by means of glyphs and bound up the magical signs.' Ignoring the admiring looks of Ahren and the others, she walked over to Uldini and began eliciting a tiny, questioning melody from Mirilan. Immediately, a breath of wind wafted across the plateau, bringing with it the aromas of plants, and of growth, along with images of an untamed springtime. 'This place really is powerful – and so, so old,' she said reverentially. Then she gently tapped Cassobo on his forehead and the little monkey fell into a deep sleep. Ahren heard Fisker breathing a sigh of relief behind him. He couldn't imagine what a struggle it had to be for the Paladin, spending every breath fighting against his soul animal's dreadful fears. No wonder Fisker drank like a fish. Uldini and Jelninolan began drawing magical signs on the rock and on the surrounding ground, considerably larger though than those on the sleeping monkey. 'They are the same shapes, aren't they?' asked Ahren. 'You are creating a mirror-image of the glyphs which Jelninolan drew on Cassobo earlier.' Uldini raised an eyebrow before responding. 'Well spotted, Ahren. Yes, we are going to weave this mountaintop into our spell. Cassobo's injuries are old and numerous, just like the cracks and tears in this rock. Our magic would literally tear Cassobo apart if we tried to heal him directly, so what we are going to do is repair the mountaintop, and through the connection between the two, the injuries done to the little monkey will heal.' 'Why a whole mountaintop?' asked Trogadon curiously. 'Why don't you just smash a little vase and use that as the template?' Jelninolan shook her head. 'The destruction that we must bind together has to be old – the older, the better,' she explained. 'And we need a considerable amount of magic from outside, because even the considerable combined power of Uldini and me is being stretched to its limit here. Therefore, we need an old Place of Power, one which has suffered similar physical damage. Of course, I would have preferred a contorted tree, but I'm sure you understand that beggars can't be choosers.' The pair refused to answer any more questions after that, concentrating completely on preparing the charmed circle. Ahren saw that Khara had wrapped her arms tightly around herself, so he leaned in towards her. 'Everything alright?' he asked in a whisper. She nodded uncertainly. 'It's just bringing back memories,' she answered after a moment. 'Of that time – on Kings Island, when Jelninolan healed my scars.' Ahren understood. Two years previously, the young woman had been brought back to her unwounded self in a ritual circle of blue flames, when the patterns of scars on her skin had been burned away. 'The principle must be the same,' he whispered. 'Jelninolan drew lines in the sand that time, which burned magically and erased all your scars. They seem to be doing something similar here – except that it's considerably more complicated.' 'That was the first time I trusted you, do you remember?' she said with a smile. 'I wouldn't say "trusted" exactly,' grunted Ahren. 'I had to hold onto you for dear life, so that you wouldn't run away and destroy the charm.' Khara gave him a long, steely look. 'You lifted me up that time,' she said slowly. 'Remember what you were capable of in those days. Do you really think I would have let you touch me if I hadn't trusted you?' Ahren thought for a moment. He wanted to respond that she had been far too panicked to fight back that time, but he remained silent. If he were honest with himself, there was no doubt that she could have broken every bone in his body in the blink of an eye if she had really wanted to. The fact was that his beloved had just revealed a little more about herself, which he decided to take as a compliment. The Forest Guardian didn't pursue the matter any further. The moon rose. The two Ancients worked tirelessly under the watchful and nervous eye of Fisker. Soon an area covering over several dozen paces was decorated with magical symbols and a strange assortment of objects taken from the rucksacks that Ahren, Khara, Falk and Trogadon had brought up the slope. The mountaintop now resembled a patch of land with a jumble sale spread across it. Finally, Jelninolan and Uldini positioned themselves in the middle of the magic circle surrounding the shattered rock and examined the work around them. 'It's not enough, is it?' said Uldini, crestfallen, and to Ahren's horror, Jelninolan agreed. 'We need another, special, splinter. A piece that got lost – was torn away and now returns,' she intoned wearily. Uldini snapped his fingers. 'A wonderful idea, my darling,' he said, his face beaming. He turned to his companions. 'We need a piece of the mountain, one that broke away a very, very long time ago,' he announced firmly. 'Nothing too big – roughly the size of a fist.' 'And how are we supposed to know which of the thousands of rocks that litter this island belongs to this mountaintop and is the one we want?' asked Falk incredulously. Ahren seriously doubted they would identify the correct rock. 'I will recognise it,' announced Trogadon, breaking the brief silence that had ensued. 'My folk know the minerals of the world like no other living creatures of Jorath.' He ran his fingers lovingly along the jagged rock beside him. 'At least you're good for something, after all,' teased Falk quietly, and Trogadon elbowed the Forest Guardian in the ribs, causing the old man's armour to clang noisily. 'The rock needs to be as old as possible,' urged Jelninolan. Then she began to play a deep, seductive melody, and a solitary glow-worm floated up from the trees below and settled down on the back of the surprised dwarf's hand. 'Go find that splinter of rock. If it is sufficient, my luminary friend will let you know.' 'Be back before dawn,' added Uldini. Daybreak is full of symbolic power, which I would hate to waste on account of your dawdling.' Ahren puffed out his cheeks. The thought of climbing down and then back up the mountain again wasn't exactly appealing. 'We don't all have to go, do we?' he asked hesitantly. 'I mean, how difficult can it be to carry a rock no larger than your fist?' 'Good point,' said Falk before sitting down again demonstratively. 'Considering Captain Featherbeard has to run around in his armour all the time, even when climbing a damn steep mountain, I think I'll stay here.' The look of relief on his bearded visage spoke volumes. 'It's easy to see you don't have to set an example anymore,' said Trogadon cheerfully. Falk winked at him mischievously. 'Well, I am not going to leave Cassobo out of my sight,' said Fisker firmly, a wild look in his eyes. 'There really should be at least two of us,' said Trogadon. 'A second pair of eyes is always better, and if I need help, I really don't want to have to run all the way back here to get it.' Khara threw her arms around Ahren's neck as soon as the dwarf had spoken and batted her eyelids exaggeratedly, giving her face a helpless, pleading look. 'Alright, alright,' said Ahren with a groan, not giving her a chance to speak. 'I'll go with Trogadon. His resolution was met with guffaws by his companions, but the soft kiss Khara gave him made up for the derision. When Ahren finally eased his way out of the young swordswoman's embrace, he noticed the pained look on Fisker's face, which made him feel guilty. Although the self-proclaimed pirate refused to speak about Aluna, it was clear that the wound caused by their separation was still raw within him. 'Enough lovey-dovey stuff now,' said Trogadon, pushing Ahren to the irregular ridge of the summit. 'It seems that centuries ago there was a major avalanche which started just here. If we follow its path, we're bound to find a rock that will do justice to the ritual.' The dwarf began his descent while the glow worm hopped up from his hand, settling on the warrior's broad nose instead. Ahren grinned and Trogadon reciprocated with a laugh. 'At least I have my personal torch-carrier,' said the dwarf majestically, climbing downwards easily on account of his enormous strength. He jammed his powerful, indestructible fingers into the fissures as he lowered himself, the same gaps Ahren had struggled to hold onto during their ascent. 'Stop dawdling – downhill is always easier,' called the dwarf from below. 'We have to climb up this mountain again and a third of the night has already passed.' Ahren suppressed the urge to roll his eyes and wished bitterly that the two magicians had thought about the necessity of finding the charmed rock before the group had begun their ascent. He swung himself over the edge and followed Trogadon as quickly as he could. It was past midnight by the time Ahren arrived at the foot of the mountain, bathed in sweat. Trogadon was as fresh as a daisy and was following his own peculiar logic, clearly only understandable to dwarves. Again and again, he would point at rocks and stones sticking up out of the ground while they walked further into the island forest, but the little glow-worm on his nose didn't move an inch. When the warrior arrived at one particular discovery, his face beaming with pride, the insect still didn't react, causing the dwarf to scratch his head in bafflement. 'Jelninolan has given us a decidedly fussy and selective little chap,' he thundered, his face growing anxious. 'This rock has surely lain here for two hundred years at least, and I'd bet my beard that it was part of the summit at one time…yet that still doesn't seem to be enough.' 'Uldini said that the ritual has to be incredibly powerful,' responded Ahren, delighted that they were taking a short break. He knew that he had a lot of stamina, but Trogadon seemed to be able to march for weeks on end without running out of breath. The dwarf, who was now pointing deeper into the forest, looked as if he had just woken up refreshed from a little nap. 'Time and the rain should have pushed the oldest rocks towards the sea, together with the island soil. Let's try our luck nearer the coast. The alternative is that we start burrowing under the rocks haphazardly.' Ahren shook his head and couldn't resist a sarcastic jibe. 'I thought you dwarves liked nothing better than to burrow,' he teased. 'Dwarves don't burrow,' said the dwarf worthily. 'We dig. And never without a definite goal. New tunnels are always planned carefully, and work only begins following moons of consultation.' Ahren realised that he had touched a nerve and decided not to pursue the matter any further. Then his mind was filled with a feeling of emotional satisfaction, and he knew that somewhere in this forest Culhen was curled up asleep, his body exhausted by hours of frolicking about the place at high speed, and satiated by two fully grown wild boar that he had consumed. At least he's making good use of his time on the island, thought Ahren, as he continued to walk quickly beside Trogadon. He decided to let his friend sleep on, for the next stage of their voyage would surely grate on the wolf's nerves again. The more Culhen could relax here, the more bearable the sea voyage in the coming weeks would be for his four-legged friend. They carried on, moving quickly along the track that was only visible to Trogadon, and which was hopefully leading them to the mountain's oldest rubble. The thought that the two Ancients might not succeed in their mission to heal Cassobo made Ahren quake in his boots. Fisker's broken spirit would be a danger to himself and to others in every future battle. How they could hope to campaign against the Dark god with such a shattered person alongside them, Ahren could not imagine. The realisation hit him like a thunderbolt. His job was not merely to find the Paladins. He had to heal them as well, to restore their fighting spirits, and to strengthen their belief in the goodness of humanity. He had succeeded in this mission when it had come to his master, Falk, because he had been completely unaware of what he had been doing. Bergen, too, had merely needed a little prodding in the right direction. Sunju had woken up from her charmed sleep, filled with goodness and with a zest for action. But Fisker was the first Paladin who they really could have done without, thanks to his state of mind – even if it were true that his initial reaction had been to willingly accompany them on their journey. This ritual for the healing of Cassobo was not only an act of goodness and mercy, but also a calculated necessity, and clearly influenced by Uldini's diplomatic wile. That was why the Arch Wizard, who was normally in such a rush, had so willingly agreed to come to this island in an attempt to heal Fisker's monkey. Ahren was about to ask Trogadon if he was of the same opinion when he suddenly heard the sound of the sea. They were almost at the shore and the little glow-worm on Trogadon's nose still refused to budge! One hundred heartbeats later and they were standing on the edge of a cliff, eight paces high, with the Cutlass Sea lapping against its base below. Trogadon scratched his head uncertainly and pointed down over the edge. 'I think that was a wasted journey, my friend,' he said regretfully. 'There was a promontory here once, And I'll lay a wager that the stone we need was part of the avalanche that caused it to collapse. I propose we head back to the mountain and I'll try another avalanche track.' Ahren chewed the inside of his cheek and considered the situation. 'This was our most promising route, wasn't it?' he asked apprehensively. Trogadon nodded silently. Ahren cursed and then went to the very edge of the cliff and peered down onto the moonlit water. The Cutlass Sea was so clear there that Ahren could indeed see the outlines of the rocky seabed dropping dramatically beneath the surface. 'It gets bloody deep very quickly,' he said in frustration. Trogadon pursed his lips. 'It looks as if the rocky spur smashed part of the shore, dragging it down into the ocean. We're not going to find anything here.' No sooner had the dwarf turned away than the little glow-worm flew off his nose and down the side of the ridge, only to dance above the deep water in the little cove. 'Well, isn't that just fine and dandy,' said the irritated dwarf. 'Now the little rascal decides to move.' Ahren looked uncertainly down at the dancing point of light below, which was bobbing wildly up and down. 'Don't even think about it,' said Trogadon in a warning voice. 'You won't be able to see in the water and have no knowledge of rocks. The only thing you'll manage to do is get wet.' Ahren really didn't know what the best option was. He stared down at the little glow-worm again. 'It's pitch-black in the water now. Is there any way I could somehow feel the right rock?' he asked hopefully. Trogadon frowned and shook his head. 'After centuries in the water? Absolutely not. It will either have been worn smooth or covered in plants.' 'Then we need to ask Jelninolan for a new…' began Ahren, only to be interrupted by a round, white head breaking through to the surface of the water as Selsena's white horn playfully reflected the moonlight. The narwhal looked up at them expectantly. Trogadon pulled at the plaits of his beard in exasperation. 'What does she want now?' asked Trogadon. 'To help,' replied Ahren, stunned to see, not only the little glow-worm sitting on Selsena's horn, but also the way she was holding him securely above the waves. 'She must have spotted our baffled faces,' joked Ahren, delighted at seeing the disguised Titejunanwa again. 'I wouldn't put it past her,' said the dwarf pensively. 'But we are still faced with the same problems: you have no light and no idea of the material, and I can't swim.' Ahren shrugged his shoulders. 'I'll think of something,' he replied with more confidence than he was feeling. 'Describe to me what I should look for. I'll pass on the message to Selsena, and she can lead me there.' Trogadon still wasn't convinced, but eventually raised his arms in helpless resignation. 'You're not going to recognise the subtle distinctions, so I'll just keep it simple. Up there I spotted the remains of a rock vein – it had a wavy pattern with a deep-blue and a stormy-grey colour. If you find a piece of that rock, that should be it.' Ahren listened carefully to the advice, taking off his armour and all his clothes, until he was only wearing his underpants and carrying his dagger. 'Oh, Ahren, how splendid,' cried Trogadon, fluttering his eyelids and speaking in a high voice that bore only the vaguest resemblance to Khara's. The Forest Guardian glared at the dwarf, who laughed in response and waved his hand. 'Jealousy, my good lad,' he responded heartily. 'I only wish a woman looked at me the way our Khara looks at you.' Placated, Ahren stepped towards the edge and was about to dive in when he felt a calloused hand on his forearm. 'Be careful down there! I won't be able to help you from up here, and the others are damn far away. I don't want to have to appear before Khara and tell her that you've been lost at sea.' Ahren swallowed hard. 'You always know how to cheer me up,' he responded light-heartedly. Then he dived into the depths before he had the time to lose courage. Selsena glided elegantly out of the way and the young Paladin was submerged in the surprisingly cold water, which lay like a caressing blanket over him, washing away the sweat and the heat of the long march from his skin in a most pleasing manner. The current was weaker than he had anticipated, and although the waves pulled him towards the rock face at the base of the cliff, he was able to push against them easily. The moonlight enabled him to see down about a pace, but everything below that was pitch-black. Ahren only knew that it was very deep down there and could only guess what might be lurking in the depths. As he swam up in order to get some air and converse with Selsena, he imagined flashes of tentacles and toothy mouths shooting up from the darkness below, ready to tear him apart in the silent sea. He came to the surface gasping for air, trying to overcome his sense of panic and his feeling of complete insignificance in this seemingly endless ocean with its myriad sea creatures. Then Selsena was beside him, rubbing her head against his hand, so that he snuggled up to her thankfully. Her skin was smooth and supple, unlike any he had touched before. 'Hello, my dear. It's so nice to see you again, even if I would have preferred a sun-washed bay with the ground beneath my feet.' Selsena squirted the air out of her blowhole and headbutted him energetically, as if encouraging him to concentrate on the task in hand. He described the stone they were looking for and gestured downwards. 'There should be a suitable rock down there somewhere. Can you go have a look for it and then show me where it is?' Selsena nodded, her thin horn whipping up and down. Then she disappeared beneath the waves, while the little glow-worm made itself at home on top of the Forest Guardian's head. Ahren looked up to the top of the cliff and saw Trogadon's face briefly peering down from the edge before the dwarf hastily retreated a step. 'Are you still there?' called out the dwarf nervously. 'Forgive me, but I'd rather stay back from the edge. Something just creaked up here, and the last thing you need is for a bulky dwarf and a ton of rocks to come raining down on top of your head.' Ahren quickly swam a couple of paces away from the cliff, hoping that Selsena wouldn't be too long. The cold water was slowly becoming uncomfortable, and now that he was alone again, the nightmare visions of approaching sea monsters were returning to plague him. His pulse began to race as he looked around for any tell-tale signs of an attack, but the inky-black ocean refused to reveal any potential monsters that might be loitering in its depths. Suddenly, there was an explosion of water beside him and instantly the young Paladin had his trusty dagger in his hand. But it was only Selsena who had surfaced beside him, not an arm's length away, and she seemed to be mocking him with her black eyes. 'Just keep doing that,' he gasped, sheathing his knife. 'If I get a heart-attack and die, you can explain to Falk why he will need to go in search of another Thirteenth Paladin.' Selsena squirted up air and beckoned down into the water with her horn. Ahren frowned. 'Have you found a rock?' Selsena nodded rapidly, and a feeling of relief came over the Forest Guardian. 'Brilliant! Thank you so much!' he blurted out exuberantly. 'Can you lead me down there?' The animal nodded again, turning her long body so that he could hold onto one of her fins. No sooner had he gently touched it and filled his lungs with air than Selsena was diving and pulling him into a world of currents and coldness. After a few downward paces, his ears began to hurt, and his chest felt as though Ahren had dressed in leather armour several sizes too small. Luckily, Selsena's descent ended after several heartbeats, and he felt they were now in a horizontal position. Because Ahren's eyes were completely useless at this depth, he closed them, relying on his other senses. Selsena was making sharp clicking sounds that seemed to spread out in wave patterns through the water. Suddenly, Ahren felt a shudder run through his body. He was beginning to run out of air, but he now understood what Selsena was doing. She was hitting her horn against a rock or a stone. He quickly slid his hand along her head, then carefully tapped her horn until he reached its tip, which was resting on a long, narrow piece of rock. Ahren got to work, and when all was done, Selsena placed her fin under his waiting fingers and they began their ascent. They reached the alluring, silver surface with dizzying speed and Ahren gasped and took several greedy breaths. 'I have it,' he called out loudly, and Trogadon's head, together with two outstretched hands appeared over the cliff edge. 'Throw it up to me! Our little luminary friend has flown back up to me and can tell us if we really have the correct stone,' echoed the dwarf's voice over the water. Ahren tensed up his muscles and threw the stone as high as he could. The last thing he wanted was for the chunk to ricochet off the edge of the cliff and sink back down under the surface, The shard flew in a wide arc over Trogadon's head, the dwarf racing after it, cursing loudly about pretentious Forest Guardians with too much power in their arms. Ahren, meanwhile, was breathing easier now, Selsena waiting patiently beside him. 'Thank you for your help,' he said sincerely, patting her head. 'That's not the right stone,' shouted Trogadon impatiently from above, flinging the rock far out to sea. 'I said stormy-grey, not mousy-grey. And that wasn't a wave pattern, but zigzag. Give it another go.' Ahren gritted his teeth, preventing himself from uttering some choice expletives. 'Maybe you would like to dive with Selsena the next time?' he asked in a sickly-sweet voice, but Trogadon shook his head, unperturbed. 'No thank you. I'm happy to wait here for the next stone. Just as well I brought a bit of rum with me. That will make the time pass more quickly.' Ahren could imagine the broad grin on the dwarf's face and was on the point of hurling back an insult when Selsena dived again, bringing him with her, as he was still holding onto her fin. She descended a little deeper this time, but Ahren knew what to do, quickly collecting the next stone and bringing it back to the surface. 'That blue is too pale,' shouted Trogadon even as Ahren was holding the stone up above the water. 'Keep trying.' Another half a dozen attempts at producing the correct specimen ended in failure. Ahren was really beginning to run out of energy, and his arms and legs were becoming numb. Furthermore, Selsena was pulling him down deeper at every attempt and now his ears were hurting. Finally, she shook Ahren off, presumably needing a break herself. Ahren used the breather to rest his weary body. 'Chin up!' shouted the dwarf cheerfully. 'Don't forget we still have to cross the island and climb all the way up the mountain!' 'Trogadon?' 'Yes, Ahren?' 'I hate you.' A pleasure-loving, gravelly peal of laughter rolled down from the cliff and echoed as far as the neighbouring islands. The sound was so deep and endearing that Ahren could imagine it warming the ocean itself. 'I love you too, lad' replied Trogadon, guffawing again. Then Selsena surfaced beside Ahren and butted him for attention. 'Have you found a new candidate?' he asked wearily. She nodded, hesitated, nodded again. 'Is there a problem?' he enquired, and Selsena nodded again. 'A greedy resident of the ocean?' he asked anxiously, and when the whale shook her head, Ahren breathed a sigh of relief. 'Is it deep?' he asked, and she responded with a nod. 'Too deep for a human?' Selsena paused, then nodded and shook her head. 'Alright then – you're not sure,' concluded Ahren. Ahren pondered for a moment, then summoned up all his courage. They needed this stupid stone for the ritual, so that Cassobo would be healed. The image of the small, broken, deformed body of the monkey, for whom every breath was torture, decided it. It wasn't for the Paladins he was doing this, or for their preparations ahead of the Dark Days. No, he was doing it to help an innocent creature, who had already spent decades vegetating in a shadow-existence, tortured by physical and mental agony. He took a few deep breaths. 'Right, then. Bring me down there.' Then he held onto her fin. Selsena beat her tail and dived so quickly that the pain in Ahren's ears and chest was immediate. The feeling that his body was being crushed was unbearable, but just when he felt he was going to have to give up, colours started appearing on the inside of his eyelids, distracting him from the pain. They seemed to be calling him – beautiful and sparkling, and Ahren was almost on the point of reaching out to hold onto them when some little spark of reason within told him that, were he to let go of the true Selsena, then he would certainly die. Ahren held on, and they sank like a stone into the depths. When Selsena finally stopped, the young Paladin was so disorientated that it took him two heartbeats to realise that the whale's horn was tapping against another stone. His lungs felt as if they had shrunk to the size of an apple, and he could only move his hand along Selsena's body with difficulty. His thoughts were somehow numb and dull, his desire for air, meanwhile, was swelling like an urgent and alluring song of the Sirens. His fingers felt something smooth and hard, and he grasped it, no longer knowing why. Then his body was pulled upwards by the white thing beside him and onto which he was clinging for some reason or other. He almost let go, but as they rose towards the surface, his understanding returned, placing the building blocks of reality one on top of the other until he finally returned to his senses. They were still three heartbeats from the surface – three unbearable heartbeats without precious air in his lungs, which had reduced to the size of a solid little ball. The fingers of one hand gripped Selsena's fin hard, the fingers of the other clutched the rock. The sparkling surface was within touching distance when suddenly something grabbed his foot and pulled him downwards. Another heartbeat and the thing had wrapped itself around his arms and legs, and he felt a thick, fleshy body on his back. The weak moonlight battling its way down through the upper mass of water enabled him to see what was clutching him. The long tentacles of the octopus squeezed him painfully, his lack of oxygen and the pain of the pressure causing the Forest Guardian to let go of Selsena and to sink down into the depths again. It was over. All over. The thought flashed through Ahren's mind like a pulse of light as the young man fought against breathing in, although the reflex was trying to dominate his body. The knife on his chest was not within reach, his arm entangled in the merciless embrace of the tentacles, which had fixed themselves onto his skin. Ahren felt a great sadness as he thought of Khara and the fact that he would never have the chance to openly declare his love for her. This was going to break Falk's heart, and Ahren wanted so much to cry, but his body was no longer up to the task. The young Paladin opened his mouth as if through a need he could no longer control. Timeless instincts took control of his lungs, desirous of a final, futile intake of air. Then his body was jolted unmercifully as Selsena came racing up from below, skewering the octopus on Ahren's back with her horn, shooting upwards with both the Forest Guardian and the cephalopod, catapulting all three several paces above the surface. Air! Wonderful, clarifying, and all-healing air shot into Ahren's tortured body. Even before Selsena landed in the water again, her horn still bored through the octopus, Ahren had taken three greedy gulps of air. Hardly were they back in the water when Selsena began swallowing the creature – a disgusting, sucking sound directly at the back of Ahren's neck. The tentacles loosened and Ahren immediately began freeing himself from their murderous embrace, which had almost brought his journey to a premature end. Selsena seemed to be greatly enjoying her supper, making a loud smacking sound as she disappeared under the surface with her meal. Ahren stared after them, blinking and gasping for air until Trogadon's voice finally penetrated his scrambled thoughts. 'Ahren! For the love of the THREE, talk to me, damn it!' roared the dwarf, his concern clearly audible. 'I'm here,' cried out Ahren with as much strength as he could muster. 'It really was a close shave this time, but I'm here. Give me a moment and I'll throw the stone up to you.' He prayed it was the correct one this time, for his need to dive and to meet tentacled sea-creatures had truly been satisfied – he wanted to do neither for the foreseeable future. He gathered all his strength and flung the rock up over the edge of the cliff. Even as it travelled through the air, he could see the little glow-worm react to its approach by lighting up powerfully for an instant before dancing joyfully off into the night. 'I think that was a yes!' bellowed Trogadon gleefully down to the young man. 'There is a beach two hundred paces to the west. You can go ashore there. That's where I'll meet you. I'll just finish off this rum-skin here and then we can scamper back up the mountain. Don't dilly-dally now – it won't be long until daybreak.' As Ahren began to swim, he was surprised at how much energy he had recovered, and how he was using it to hurl the most colourful language at the dwarf. Trogadon, meanwhile, was laughing uproariously.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 13

It didn't take Ahren long to find the beach. He dragged his weary body out of the water and onto dry land. As far as he was concerned, they could sail back to the mainland the following day, and not a moment too soon. The sea seemed to have it in for him. From now on he would show the ocean more respect. He rubbed his aching arms and legs, which were dotted with circular bruises where the octopus's tentacles had attached themselves to his skin. The spots burned like fire, his skin was hot and swollen. Ahren trotted quickly over to Trogadon, who was lying on the grass on top of the cliff, humming quietly up at the stars, the empty rum-skin beside him. By now, an ugly dull pain was throbbing throughout the young man's limbs. No sooner had he reached his belongings than he fished out a soothing ointment from his little bag of healing herbs, which he always carried on his belt for emergencies. Much to his relief he discovered that the cream worked, but just to be sure, he still chewed on some herbs which were an antidote to potential poisoning. Then he painfully pulled on his clothes while Trogadon got back up on his feet, a troubled look on his face. 'Are you feeling alright?' asked the dwarf, pointing at Ahren's bruises. Although the look on his face suggested otherwise, the Forest Guardian nodded quietly. Trogadon immediately cheered up and he slapped Ahren energetically on the shoulder. 'Then it won't be long before you'll be telling everyone your fantastic maritime yarn.' he said encouragingly. 'You mean, how I nearly drowned while you were having a great time up here knocking back the rum? Oh yes, the others will be sure to love my story,' responded Ahren, his tone rather too biting, as the pair began making their way back towards the mountain. Trogadon stroked his beard, his embarrassment all too evident. 'I'm just useless when it comes to water,' he said, genuinely crestfallen. 'Dwarves cannot swim, our bodies are too heavy. HE, WHO IS designed us to be inside mountains.' 'Selsena was there for me anyway,' said Ahren, steering the conversation in a new direction. He had immediately regretted his sharp tone. 'She really seems to have grown used to her watery residence.' They walked on in silence, taking a direct route through the forest, while the moon slowly sank in the cloudless sky. Ahren was intensely aware of the different smells in the night vegetation, and he started wondering about where the aromas were coming from. With a sigh, he gently rubbed the bark of a tree. He realised he would always be a Forest Guardian at heart, no matter where his journey took him. As they continued their march Ahren noticed that the dwarf was picking up small fragments of rock every now and again and putting them in his rucksack. 'We have what we need,' said Ahren irritably. 'I don't think another two dozen arbitrary shards will be necessary.' 'They're not for the two Ancients, they are for me,' said Trogadon, holding one of the rocks up so that the moonlight shining through the trees reflected a shimmering vein in the hand-size rock. 'There are countless ores here,' said the dwarf in amazement. 'And they seem to be running directly under the surface. This sea mountain rising directly up out of the water is a real treasure trove for any blacksmith.' A dreamy look came over Trogadon's face, and Ahren decided to leave him to his reveries. Halfway up the forested mountain slope, Ahren sensed Culhen's sleepy spirit stealing into his head. Ahren, you're in pain. Are you injured?' asked Culhen in a concerned voice. The Forest Guardian sensed the wolf's growing alertness. It's nothing –I just had a little dance with an octopus, said Ahren reassuringly. My skin is burning a little and it's beginning to itch, but I'm not in any danger. Go back to sleep and enjoy your time in the forest, he said, reassuring his friend, who promptly dropped off again. The moon had almost completely set behind the horizon by the time Ahren and Trogadon were negotiating the last part of their climb. The dwarf was now ascending at a murderous pace, sweat running down the squat warrior's back, and by the time they reached their friends on the summit, Ahren's arms and legs had turned to lead. The plateau was almost unrecognisable. Falk, Khara and Fisker were completely exhausted and on the verge of collapse, whereas Uldini and Jelninolan seemed to be completely refreshed and chipper, standing and waiting with the sleeping Cassobo in the middle of the ritual circle. Rocks and boulders were rearranged in a new pattern, and when he saw the exhausted state of his friends, Ahren suspected what had happened. 'Did you move everything around up here?' he asked in disbelief. 'By hand?' Falk nodded weakly. 'You were hardly gone when the first orders were issued. Supposedly we could make the ritual easier if we put a few of the rocks back in their original positions. We didn't give it a second thought, but then there were more and more, and they became bigger and bigger.' The old man looked daggers over at Uldini. 'He was standing there like a tyrannical child, screaming orders at us.' 'I swear I haven't worked so hard in the last four decades,' said Fisker, his face lined with exhaustion. At the same time Ahren could see a glimmer of goodness in his eyes, something he hadn't noticed before. 'Believe you me, when we're finished you will be glad that you have helped us,' said Jelninolan, her smile warming the others like the rising sun. That reminded Ahren to point at Trogadon's rucksack. 'We found a suitable ritual stone –at least if your little glow-worm is to be believed,' he said, then sank down onto the ground for a breather. While Trogadon was rummaging around in his rucksack in search of the correct rock hidden among his countless mountain souvenirs, Khara approached Ahren with a critical look. 'What's that on your neck?' she asked anxiously. Trogadon glanced up from his bag and gave her a wry look. 'Ahren had a tryst in the ocean. But the octopus's embrace wasn't nearly as tender as yours.' Khara looked more closely at the injuries, then stroked Ahren gently on his cheek. 'It seems we had the easier task up here after all,' she said in a quiet voice. Ahren indicated to Trogadon. 'And others had it even easier,' he said pointedly. The dwarf quickly cleared his throat. 'Here is the good piece,' he announced, throwing the little rock to Uldini, being careful to avoid the charm signs arranged on the ground. The Arch Wizard caught it, turned it over in his hand and examined it through his crystal ball. He whistled and passed the rock over to Jelninolan. 'Your lucky little luminary seems to have done the job,' he said appreciatively. 'We should be able to manage it with this shard as the main focus.' 'Selsena and I did help, you know,' said Ahren with a groan, but the Arch Wizard ignored him. The two Ancients now set to work furiously, and when the first rays of sunlight hit the summit, Jelninolan began playing a quiet, low, moving melody on her Storm Fiddle, which sang of suffering, grief and injuries. Tears came into Ahren's eyes as the magic went into effect – he was sensing every wound, every cut, and every scratch he had ever suffered in his life. The pains were merely memories, but the sheer volume of them was overpowering. Khara sank to her knees beside him groaning, so he quickly took her into his arms. If she was going through the same thing that he was, then this moment had to be so much harder for the erstwhile slave and fighter. Falk's face was the picture of pain, and Fisker's eyes had rolled to the back of his head. Uldini and Jelninolan were facing away from them and looking directly into the first rays of sun, but their backs, bent in pain, spoke volumes. Only Trogadon was standing upright, grinning, and looking as though he didn't have a care in the world. The song of Mirilan began to change – the tones began to rise and the tempo to accelerate. Uldini raised his crystal ball towards the sun, the object catching the rays and directing them to the shard of rock in the Arch Wizard's other hand. The stone glowed as if lit from a fire burning within it, and when Jelninolan's song soared towards the heavens, heralding renewal, healing and the dawning of a new day, the shard flew from Uldini's hand, sinking perfectly into a recess of the same rock on which Cassobo was lying. Ahren gasped with relief as the pain within him began to subside, replaced by memories of the time after the injuries. Cuts that healed, breaks that knitted, wounds that vanished. It seemed to him as though all the sorrows of the world were fading away, and for a heartbeat it was as if Jelninolan were holding Tanentan in her hands again, the soundless lute, the instrument of the Elven goddess. Stones, pebbles and splinters were floating through the air; they were flying from every part of the island and beginning to take part in a complicated dance before settling down in the place on the summit from where they had originally come. As more and more shards of scree found their places on the edge of the plateau, Ahren could make out what exactly was forming here – the crater that had been worn away by the ravages of time until only this rugged surface had remained. Now the ritual of the Ancients was bringing back together what had burst asunder many, many moons ago. With amazement in his eyes, and Mirilan's lively melody in his heart, Ahren turned around on his axis and saw in wonderment, the recreation of a smooth, undamaged crater, which now looked as if it had risen out of the earth only the day before. Uldini gave a grunt of satisfaction as Cassobo's body began to move gently and ever so slightly. Ahren saw the tiniest of movements under the monkey's painted fur, and then the charm signs glimmered on the plateau around them, one after another, glowing and disappearing in a shimmer of morning light, and every time this happened a glyph on the sleeping little monkey vanished. Fisker let out a cry of jubilation and sank to his knees. 'It's working!' he cried out deliriously. 'His pain is melting away!' Jelninolan turned towards them, her face etched with sorrow. 'His body is healing but his spirit will not follow. The decades of pain have left too deep a mark. The mountain cannot heal this damage – it lacks the emotion to join the elements of our ritual together.' The hope in Fisker's eyes were extinguished like a candle in the wind. 'You have to do something,' he begged. 'Make him again who he once was!' Jelninolan spun around to face the sobbing man. Power was streaming from her True Form as a storm blows cold wind. 'Who he once was?' she echoed, her eyes seeming to ask the very winds for advice. 'That could work,' she said after a pause, changing her melody immediately, which caused Uldini beside her to groan. His crystal ball was still capturing the rays of sun and directing them to the focus-shard, causing it to radiate a supernatural light. 'A little advance warning would have been nice – changing the magic in midstream,' he scolded, every muscle on edge. 'What have you got up your sleeve now?' Instead of answering him, she stared at Fisker with such overpowering eyes that he could not break away. 'Remember back, Fisker. Remember back to the time before you were broken.' Her command rolled with such power across the crater that the very mountain seemed to shake and everyone other than Uldini and Jelninolan sank to their knees. 'Jelninolan, no!' gasped Uldini. 'What you're doing will affect the mountain too!' 'We have no choice. Otherwise, Cassobo's spirit will remain a scarred ruin forever,' she said, her voice brooking no objection. Uldini ground his teeth. 'Alright, then.' He raised the crystal ball above his head with both hands, and now it was no longer emitting the light in a single beam, but as a golden fan, so blinding that Ahren could recognise nothing else but the smouldering golden ball of heat. 'Remember back!' commanded Jelninolan, her voice whipping the air and causing the earth to rumble in reply, accentuated in a terrifying way by Fisker's weeping. 'She is there,' whispered the man hoarsely. 'She is breaking him in two, and he is screaming while she laughs…' 'Go on!' commanded Jelninolan. 'Fight your way through, Paladin! Until that evening. Find your way to the eve ere that terrible day.' For a while the young Forest Guardian could only hear the sobbing and choking of Fisker, and he feared that the tortured man would finally break forever under Jelninolan's magic. In the blazing light of the ritual, Ahren stretched out his hands in search of Falk. When he felt his mentor's armour under his fingertips, he leaned forward to his ear. 'Come with me,' he whispered, just before the mountain heaved violently again, resembling the awakening of a sleeping giant, as though the mountain wished to shake the irksome magic from off its back. Falk followed Ahren, who was orientating himself by Fisker's sobbing, hoping to lead Falk to the figure with the blond-curled hair. Ahren placed Falk's armour-plated hand on Fisker's left shoulder, and his own on the poor man's right. Now they stood behind the kneeling Paladin, whose sobbing began to abate. 'We are here, brother,' said Ahren softly. 'A Paladin is never alone.' 'Together, never alone,' intoned Falk, his voice betraying his emotion. They stood there in the blinding light of the magic, repeating their words again and again, and Ahren could feel Fisker's back beginning to straighten, his stooped neck stretching upwards. 'Together, not alone,' the three Paladins intoned in unison. Uldini's light literally exploded and Jelninolan uttered a thundering ejaculatory prayer to the goddess. The charm dissolved and a heartbeat later the crater was lying there in perfect stillness. The sun shone cheerfully over the summit, kissing the companions gently with its rays. Fisker stood up and looked back over his shoulders, first at Falk and then at Ahren. 'Thank you,' he said. His face was peaceful and young-looking, and he even had a hint of rascality about him. Then he turned around, his eyes the size of saucers, and he sprinted. 'Cassobo!' Three bounds and he had reached the little monkey, who opened his eyes and sat up, chattering. The eyes of the animal were alert and intelligent, and hardly had Fisker stretched out his trembling arms when the monkey sprang nimbly on his forearm and climbed up the Paladin before settling comfortably on his right shoulder. Fisker's face was the picture of shock and disbelief. Then he burst out laughing, so loudly and heartily that Ahren thought momentarily the ritual had caused the Paladin to lose his mind for once and for all. 'He's asking for rum. He says he had a terrible nightmare,' uttered Fisker with some difficulty, tears of joy rolling down his cheeks. 'We've presented him with his earlier self, and we've taken away some of his memory,' said Jelninolan wearily. 'Everything after the eve of the calamity never happened in his mind.' She fell silent for a moment before frowning. 'You give him rum?' Fisker shrugged his shoulders innocently. 'He likes it, and as he has the blessing of the goddess, it can't do him any harm.' His trembling fingers stroked Cassobo's fur, but the monkey found the exaggerated attention of his friend suffocating and so he chattered in protest. Suddenly, the mountain shook powerfully, accompanied by a deep rumbling sound many furlongs beneath them. 'Exactly as I feared,' said Uldini scowling. 'We must get out of here as quickly as we can!' 'The mountain,' said Trogadon, his voice filled with wonder. 'It's suddenly young again!' 'Volcano, you mean,' snarled Uldini as he shooed everyone to the crater's edge. 'Cassobo and the mountain were bound together during the ritual. The healing charm has helped this place regain its former glory.' The mountain rumbled once again, this time louder and much closer to the surface. 'Descend!' ordered Uldini loudly. 'Run for your lives!' The wizard didn't need to tell them again as they began their difficult descent, accompanied by the deafening rumbling of the mountain and the violent quaking of the earth. One positive effect of the mountain's return to youth was the smoothing of its slopes, which meant they could slide rather than climb down and it wasn't long before they reached the treeline. 'That wasn't too bad,' said Ahren only for the earth to begin exploding above them. With an enormous bang, the volcano spewed rocks into the air, which were accompanied by a thick column of smoke climbing towards the heavens. Stones began to shower down around them, some the size of pebbles, others as large as fully-grown horses. Ahren's body protested against the latest exertions, his lack of sleep making it more difficult for the Forest Guardian to work at peak performance. Fisker was swearing like a trooper, holding Cassobo close to his chest, the little monkey chattering with fear. Suddenly, Culhen was beside Ahren, half-asleep and confused. Didn't the mountain look different yesterday? asked the bemused wolf. It's a long story, responded Ahren, who was finding even thinking difficult. The healing ritual was just a little too effective. A large rock thundered to a halt, not five paces away. The heat from it reddened Ahren's skin within a couple of heartbeats. He raised his hands protectively before his face and made a detour around the volcanic debris. I leave you alone for one day and you all go and explode the island? asked Culhen grumpily. Despite the immediate danger, Ahren had to smile. Ahren looked at the Ancients as they ran downwards. 'Is there any way either of you can protect us?' he asked, but Uldini and Jelninolan quickly shook their heads. 'We're totally drained,' shouted Jelninolan. Ahren nodded as he jumped over a fallen branch. Falk was not so forgiving. 'If you insist on bringing a whole volcano to life, then you should really have an idea of how we can escape from it,' he complained, groaning and pulling the gasping Fisker along, so that he wouldn't fall back. There was a clanging noise as a piece of rock, the size of a fist, ricocheted off Falk's armour, causing him to stumble forward and curse loudly. 'We do have a plan, old man,' snapped Uldini sarcastically. 'Talk less and run more!' Ahren noticed that the Arch Wizard was only floating the breadth of two fingers above the ground, instead of his normal altitude of one pace. He was also pausing every so often to stand on his tiptoes, which indicated just how drained he really was. Jelninolan was staggering down at a sluggish pace, and Trogadon was repeatedly stretching out his arm to give her support or assist her when they changed direction abruptly. They were fleeing like scared rabbits, and the safety of the forest they had now entered was of course illusory. The canopy of leaves prevented them from seeing the rocks but provided little protection. There was plenty of hissing, smoking, and cracking as scorching shards of rock crashed into the ground around them, clearing paths, narrow and wide, through the vegetation. The undergrowth was now beginning to smoulder and burn. 'We have to get to the ships immediately!' shouted Falk over the gathering inferno. 'If the rocks don't kill us, then the fire and smoke will.' 'Don't forget the lava,' said Trogadon, gesturing to a stream of molten rock that was gobbling its way down at alarming speed to their right, threatening to block off their route to the ships. 'Brilliant!' shouted Khara, her voice quavering. 'I always wanted to challenge a lava stream to a race.' Ahren and Khara held hands for a moment to give each other courage. 'Then it's your lucky day, girl,' laughed Trogadon. 'Come on – faster!' Ahren and Falk moved instinctively to the head of the group, searching out the easiest route to negotiate through the undergrowth while Uldini floated higher again. 'I'll warn the ships and get help,' he groaned. The childlike figure's bald pate was covered in a layer of sweat and his black robe was dripping wet. 'It would be a shame if you won the race against the lava only to find there were no dinghies ready to pick you up in time.' 'How I hate it when that little twerp is right,' grumbled Falk, picking up speed, which Fisker responded to with a groan. Cassobo, meanwhile, had resumed his perch on the Paladin's shoulder and was urging him on with a stream of chattering. By this time, the island was completely dark, thanks to the pall of smoke that had been spewed out by the volcano, the companions unable to see more than five paces in front of them in the forest. Only the shimmering glow of lava, two hundred paces to their right threw some additional, if sinister, light on their progress. Ahren's lungs were burning again, and his mind went back to his life-and-death struggle earlier. What a day, he thought, coughing in the ever-thickening smoke. First, I nearly drown, and now I'm running for my life to avoid being burned to a cinder. Is there any way I can hand back my status as soul animal? asked Culhen in a biting tone. I had such a lovely day in this forest replete with wild boar. But then you all had to turn up and spoil everything. They ran on, as fast as their strengths and the thickening smoke would let them, until at last the saving sand came into view. The companions broke through the last line of trees at exactly the same time as the lava, their tired run turning into a desperate final sprint. 'At least it's stopped raining rocks,' gasped Khara. And the smoke isn't so bad here on the shore.' 'We just need to worry about that seething mass of rock flowing towards us,' wheezed Falk grumpily. 'Any ideas?' 'Not to burn before the boats have arrived?' suggested Trogadon drily, pointing to the many dinghies that were being lowered from both ships into the water or already coming towards them at high speed. The arms of the rowers were moving at a murderous rate, not least because Uldini was standing on one of the boats, screaming orders to the mariners at the top of his voice. 'Why don't we wait in the water?' suggested Ahren, stepping towards the waves only to be pulled back by Falk. 'Not such a clever idea. Look over there,' he said grimly. Ahren followed the direction of the old man's armour-plated hand and saw another stream of lava pouring down a cliff, hissing loudly and creating a powerful cloud of steam as it entered the sea one hundred paces away. 'The current is pulling the heated water in this direction. If you take one wrong step, you will be boiled alive.' 'We're better off wating for the boats,' said Ahren hastily while everyone nodded in agreement. If he were sweating earlier, it was getting far worse with every heartbeat. The lava was creeping towards them, a dark shimmer appearing on its surface as it slowly cooled down. 'Any chance of it stopping before it reaches us? asked Khara, turning to the dwarf, but he merely shook his head silently. Ahren looked out at the dinghies, which were approaching at speed, then he looked at the deadly river of molten rock. If they were going to make it, it was going to be very tight. 'Jelninolan, do you have any kind of a spell, a small one maybe, that could help us here?' The elf nodded, her eyes closed, her red hair sticking to her forehead. The power of her True Form was now merely an erratic flickering rather than the corona of strength that normally radiated from her, as she picked up Mirilan and began playing a gossamer melody. When she finally stopped, a strong wind was blowing across the shore, cooling the skins of the trapped companions, and driving away the last of the smoke. 'More is not possible,' said the priestess in a muffled whisper. 'Unless you want to stand beside me while I unleash my magic.' 'No thanks,' responded Trogadon hastily. 'I think I'd prefer death by lava. It's the third most popular means of dying amongst the dwarves.' 'What are the two most popular then?' asked Ahren, nervously trying to distract himself. 'Beer and women,' responded Trogadon, grinning widely until Jelninolan glared at him sternly, whereupon he became strangely fascinated by the tips of his boots. The stream of lava came ever closer, its heat overcoming the effects of the elf's wind charm. There were less than ten paces separating them from the deadly mass of molten rock now. Breathing was growing increasingly difficult, for the air was unbearably hot and burning in their lungs. Ahren prayed that Jelninolan's charm would not fade completely – otherwise, the scorching hot air would scald their lungs within a few heartbeats. The dinghies were fighting their way through the final few waves when Ahren made a snap decision. He gingerly walked into the water until it was up to his hips, ready to jump back out if he felt a burning current. 'Ahren,' groaned Falk. 'You're being rash now.' 'It's safe until this point,' said the young Paladin urgently. 'We'll save time this way, and the dinghies won't have to land.' 'I wouldn't be able to go any further anyway,' said Trogadon, standing demonstratively beside Ahren in the waves, which were already slapping against his face. The others followed the pair's example and were glancing alternately between the boats and the encroaching lava. 'Damn it,' said Falk, looking at the water around him. 'Am I just imagining things or is the sea getting warmer?' 'I can sense it too,' said Jelninolan. 'The tide is turning.' Ahren waved his arms wildly and screamed at the mariners on the dinghies to speed up, his companions joining in. The Forest Guardian could feel the water temperature rising with every passing heartbeat. It wouldn't be long before it was burning hot. By the time the dinghies were within touching distance, he was gritting his teeth to stop himself from screaming, and just as he was pulling himself over the ledge and into one of the dinghies he felt his leg being pulled by a current of boiling water. Everyone threw themselves on board willy-nilly, and Ahren heard an almighty crash coming from a boat beside him. He looked over and saw that Culhen had thrown himself into the vessel with an almighty leap, landing on top of half the crew. Boy, was that hot, said the wolf, peeved, but Ahren could sense that his friend's protective fur had insulated him from any serious damage. Still, I think it might not be a bad idea to get off the poor sailors, advised Ahren, rubbing his painful legs, his companions doing the same. If you're going to make them lie under you for any longer, they're sure to throw you back into the sea as soon as they're free. They were a pretty miserable group for the next couple of days, spending their time listlessly in the narrow confines of the communal cabin. Falk and Ahren would regularly dress the burns of Jelninolan, Khara and themselves with cooling bandages, using up most of their store of healing plants in the process. 'It's high time we were in more familiar surroundings so that I could at least pick some Wolf Herb or Fire Weed,' said Ahren to Falk, as they examined the meagre remains of their healing provisions. Falk rubbed his beard and nodded. 'We are certainly going to have to find some before we go in search of Yollock,' he grumbled. 'Has that been decided already?' asked Ahren, surprised. 'Are we travelling to the Fields of Ice next?' Falk shrugged his shoulders. 'They're in the vicinity, and our only definite clue lies there. At least until Fisker reveals where Aluna is.' 'He hasn't said anything to Uldini?' The Arch Wizard had been on board the Buoyant Spirit several times since they had left the volcanic island. Ahren had assumed that the Paladin had become considerably more cooperative since Cassobo had been healed. 'Only that we have to collect his armour next,' replied Falk. 'Uldini believes that Fisker is still suffering from shock. We turned his world well and truly upside down. A few days with Cassobo will do him a lot of good, I think. And we need to recover Fisker's armour and weapons anyway, so the time will be well spent.' Ahren nodded, then left the cabin quietly so as not to awaken Jelninolan, and wandered over to Trogadon, who was spending his time in his workshop fiddling with the rocks that he had discovered on the island. The dwarf was just filling a little crucible with a molten, oily looking metal, which he then balanced between the clamps of a long pair of tongs on his workbench. 'Ahren – great that you're here,' said the dwarf, beaming. He was wearing the leather apron that Ahren had given him as a present the previous year, and which was now decorated with over half a dozen burn marks. 'Be so good as to raise the crossbow carefully, would you?' said the warrior, gesturing to the contraption that was dominating the mess on the overfull workbench. Ahren saw a massive, extremely heavy crossbow with a thick stock. The bow was the assassin's crossbow, with which the dwarf had been experimenting for a considerable time now. The young Paladin lifted the modified weapon and almost dropped it immediately, it was so heavy. 'It's almost the weight of a small person,' he said in surprise, puffing out his cheeks. 'A very small person,' said Trogadon, correcting him, his voice full of concentration as he carefully moved the little crucible of molten metal closer to the join between the crossbow shaft and the bow. 'It has to be that heavy. Otherwise the wood would break, or the recoil would pull the weapon out of my hand. Stay still while I start to pour. As soon as I tell you, turn the crossbow evenly to the left and then to the right so that the alloy completely covers the seam where I have integrated the bow. Understood?' Ahren nodded. He had helped a blacksmith while undercover in the Brazen City for a while and therefore understood some of the basic instructions. Trogadon grunted appreciatively as he poured the bubbling contents of the little crucible onto the seam with Ahren's skilful help. Then he quickly put the tongs and the crucible aside and examined where he had poured the liquid more carefully. 'That will hold,' he said with relief. 'Put the crossbow back on the workbench but do it as carefully as you can.' Ahren was only too happy to put the heavy object down, and not just because of its weight. The assassin's crossbow, which was now a part of this new weapon, still filled Ahren with unpleasant memories. 'I can spruce up the fine object a little bit more,' said Trogadon. 'Then it won't look quite so ugly.' Ahren shrugged his shoulders indifferently. 'Maybe it will help. Especially when Falk sees it for the first time.' 'Hm, yes, good point,' said Trogadon ruminatively. 'I wouldn't like him to overreact and throw it into the water when I'm not looking.' They both laughed. Then Ahren pointed at the weapon again. 'Considering its weight, I'm assuming it's for you?' he asked in as light a voice as he could manage. Trogadon nodded cheerfully. 'And you want to know why I need a crossbow all of a sudden?' inquired the dwarf, who had understood what Ahren was getting at immediately. 'Because of the water all around us,' said the squat warrior after a pause, pointing at the wall of the ship behind him. 'As you know, my speciality is hand-to-hand combat. But you saw at the cliff how useless I am when I'm near water. I cannot swim, but when it comes to fighting, I can use the crossbow, without having to sacrifice the solid ground under my feet.' The Queen of the Waves rocked gently, and the dwarf gave a crooked smile. 'Or at least what passes for solid ground in this godforsaken place.' Ahren understood the feeling of not wanting to stand idly by when friends were in danger, and so he decided to put the crossbow's history out of his mind, insofar as that was possible. 'Maybe you could stain it?' he suggested. 'Then it would really look different.' Trogadon snapped his fingers. 'I know an alloy for sealing the surface of materials. It helps against acidity and gives it a wonderful, reddish sheen.' Even as he was speaking, he was already throwing several metal powders into a clean crucible before placing the container into the tiny smelting furnace in the corner of the workshop. Ahren was about to leave the preoccupied dwarf to work in peace and was already standing in the doorway when Trogadon addressed him again. 'Do you happen to know if these islands belong to anyone?' asked the dwarf, and Ahren could hear a hint of anxiety in the warrior's voice. 'Well, the Crow's Nest belongs to the pirates, for good or ill, even if their claim is based on brute force,' he began, causing Trogadon's face to darken. 'But the rest of the islands in the Cutlass Sea belong to no realm and are unclaimed. Do you remember Fisker mentioning that the Sunplains had tried to settle here? According to Uldini, their few forts were abandoned many winters ago. The Cutlass Sea is a less welcoming place than its appearance might lead one to believe.' Trogadon chuckled, a rumbling warm noise coming from deep within the dwarf's chest. 'We'll make a real poet of you yet. Being in love seems to have done you good.' Then he became serious. 'I've given it a name. The mountain, I mean.' 'You mean the volcano?' asked Ahren irritably. Trogadon nodded energetically. 'I'm calling it Murgamolosch. That means "old youth" in Dwarfish.' 'That sounds like a suitable name,' said Ahren politely, not knowing where this conversation was leading. 'I'm going to travel back there – to Murgamolosch. And I'm going to establish a dwarf colony,' announced Trogadon decisively. Ahren must have been looking at him dumbstruck for the dwarf quickly continued: 'Not now, but later. When the Dark Days are over. I'm going to need the permission of the King of Thousand Halls first, anyway.' 'But…why there of all places?' asked Ahren, bewildered. 'Did you like the deadly lava so much that you really want to settle down there?' Trogadon shook his head, grinning all the while. 'The mountain has shot off its fire. When I return to it, it will be lying there in peaceful slumber. My reasons are the following: firstly, no dwarf has ever dared to establish a colony on the high seas before; secondly, this mountain is full of metals that one normally has to dig deep into the earth to find.' He was listing off the points by pointing at his powerful, chubby fingers. 'Thirdly, we can profit from trade on the Cutlass Sea. We would be a safe harbour available to every merchant who needs one, and our Dwarfish fortifications would make mincemeat of anybody daring to threaten our island.' The warrior's eyes were shining with excitement. 'Our mountain kingdom might even bring a little peace to this region.' Ahren was totally flabbergasted. 'A nice vision,' he murmured. 'And why do you want to do it?' he probed. 'To achieve something,' said Trogadon passionately. 'Don't get me wrong – I've nothing against hammering away at a High Fang with my weapon, but when all this is over, I want to build something up. Something big, something that will outlive me.' Ahren understood what the dwarf meant and gave a respectful bow. 'If I can help you in any way, I will be delighted to do so.' Trogadon responded to the formal gesture in kind. 'I shall remind you of that, Paladin,' he said with a look of seriousness on his face. Then it was replaced by embarrassment. 'Please don't tell the others. It's bad luck, sharing your dreams with too many too early.' Ahren nodded graciously, then left the cabin. Listening to Trogadon pottering away at his stove and singing quietly to himself, Ahren couldn't decide what pleased him more: that the good-hearted warrior had discovered a goal for his life after the fighting, or that he had honoured Ahren by sharing his secret hopes and dreams with him alone. Ahren awoke to the sound of light footsteps moving secretly across the room. It was the very quietness of these steps among the creaking sounds of the ship, the crashing of the waves against the hull, and the whistling of the wild wind outside that jolted him upright, clutching his dagger in his hand. In the darkness of the cabin he could only make out the shadows of his companions, enjoying their well-earned sleep, but also a female figure moving silently through the room. At first, he thought it was Khara coming over to him for a snuggle in spite of her burning skin, but then he recognised Jelninolan leaving the cabin with a strangely stilted gait. Curious and more than a little concerned, he stood up and followed her. The elf seemed to be moving in a trance-like state, and as it was stormy outside, he wanted to keep an eye on her. The last time he had behaved on a ship like she was doing now, he had been under the spell of the Adversary, who had tried to lure him into leaping into the waves. He quickly sheathed his dagger and walked after the priestess, keeping five paces back. If it turned out she merely had a rendezvous with one of the sailors or marines, he would retire to his hammock in embarrassment and apologise in the morning. Yet there was something in Jelninolan's movement that made him nervous. The elf was climbing up on deck in her bare feet when Ahren noticed that she was grasping Mirilan in her claw-like fingers, its wood glistening mysteriously in the weak glow of a hurricane lamp. He was now fully alert. What was going on here? Jelninolan had slept for almost two days, but Ahren knew the limits of the two magicians well enough now to be certain that it was too soon for them to be casting spells again. He wondered if he should wake the others, but that might take too long. If Jelninolan really was under a spell like he had been that time, then he really needed to stay near her so that he could take quick action if required. He climbed up the steep steps onto the deck of the Queen of the Waves and saw Jelninolan moving unsteadily to the railing on the starboard side. Ahren quickly looked around, certain that something was wrong. The sailor responsible for holding course overnight had fallen asleep at the wheel, and he saw no other night watches on deck. Culhen, can you come here now? he asked his companion silently. Ahren had to repeat the request three times before the wolf eventually woke up from his unusually deep sleep. As Jelninolan was reaching the wooden bulwark, the large white figure of Culhen appeared, crouching low on the wind-whipped deck. Storm clouds were racing across the skies and the ship was pitching dramatically as the waves broke against the hull. The yellow eyes of the enormous white animal reflected the light of the hurricane lamp, and for a moment Culhen seemed to resemble a phantasm from the underworld, foreshadowing the imminent demise of all on board. Very nice, I must say, said Culhen, breaking his friend's train of thought. You wake me up only to describe me as an omen of death. The Forest Guardian gestured to Jelninolan, standing still at the bulwark, Mirilan at the ready on her shoulder, her head slightly tilted as if she were listening to something. Jelninolan is behaving strangely, and the whole crew is asleep, he said, trying to explain the situation. It's night-time, Ahren, said Culhen irritably. Normal creatures sleep during these hours. He gave a big yawn and glanced around, smelling the air. But you're right. I can sense two sleeping mariners lying on deck. I would expect them to have sought out their hammocks in rough weather like this. Ahren swallowed hard. They had to be the night watches. I'm afraid that we are about to be attacked. Can you keep an eye on Jelninolan while I wake up the others? he asked the wolf, turning unobtrusively back to the hatch. If an unknown enemy was preparing an ambush, it was vital for the Forest Guardian not to reveal that the plot had been uncovered – the element of surprise was simply too important. Ahren was about to go quietly below deck when it struck him that Culhen had not replied. Culhen? he asked – still no answer. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the wolf, who was normally almost two paces tall, down flat on the wooden deck, his ears to the side, his nose pressed on the planks, trying to make himself as small as possible. Ahren had never seen his friend in such a submissive pose before, and now the young man was really worried. The wolf began to whimper quietly and at that moment Jelninolan began to play a melody so light on her Storm Fiddle so that its gentle tones were whipped away by the gale-force winds and only snatches of music reached Ahren's ears. The elf did not seem to be employing magic at all. She was simply making music, as if she were performing to the ocean. Ahren concentrated on his friend again, who was still pressing down on the deck and whimpering. Talk to me, Culhen! commanded Ahren sternly. He sensed an incredible awe rolling through the animal's spirit, combined with a panicky fear that any aggression on his part would result in certain death. So old, was the weak thought that pulsed from the wolf into Ahren's consciousness. The Forest Guardian had to pull himself together so as not to be sucked into his friend's emotional chaos, otherwise he would fall to his knees and press his own face to the floorboards. Whatever was going on here, he needed to act with the utmost caution. He decided to stay with Jelninolan for the moment. He would establish what was going on and call the alarm if necessary. He crouched down and took one careful step after another until he was beside the elf at the bulwark, where he drew himself up before looking out onto the sea too. The windswept waves were capped with foam, the Cutlass Sea having turned into a restless hostess for their ship. Every so often the moonlight would peek through the broken cover of clouds scudding across the heavens at tremendous speed. Ahren could not make out any danger or strange beings in the occasional snatches of light, and for a brief moment he feared that an Ire-or Grief Wind might be catching them unawares on the high seas. But neither of these controlling forces tended to manifest themselves over the oceans, and so he looked down onto the waves in bemusement – until his blood suddenly froze. Beneath him, deep down below the surface, a small round spot suddenly shimmered in the water, a black dot surrounded by silver. Although his reason was screaming that this was impossible, Ahren knew instinctively what he was looking at – an eye! An eye that was in all probability larger than the Queen of the Waves! Its silvery light, which seemed to be glowing up at them from a depth of several hundred paces, enabled the gasping Forest Guardian to make out an enormous oval body; if its body was the size of a small island, the fins it was using to glide gracefully along resembled enormous headlands. Ahren clutched the railing hard as it dawned on him that this creature could swallow all and sundry by coming to the surface and opening its mouth, causing tons of water, along with the battleship and its screaming occupants to disappear into its stomach, never to be seen again. Suddenly, Ahren understood Culhen's reaction, and it took every effort to stop himself from curling up into a ball and hoping that the enormous creature would simply glide away from them. All the while Jelninolan continued to play her barely audible song, apparently for the enormous creature beneath them, who surely could not hear these soft tones. Or could it? The eye blinked once, at a pace so slow that Ahren realised that the thing below had all the time in the world. Then Jelninolan finished her playing, and a strangely vibrating echo sounded in Ahren's head – an aethereal, wordless song of high tones, so strange it could only come from their enormous visitor. Jelninolan seemed to be listening to these sounds, for she smiled and nodded, before beginning to play again, this time, however, accompanied by her wonderful voice, a counterpoint to the notes of her Storm Fiddle. There was awe and gratitude in her little song, which, although over within ten heartbeats, had moved Ahren beyond all measure. A solitary, echoing note rose from the creature in the deep, before the eye closed and the ocean lay dark, still, and smooth as silk. 'Ahren?' asked Jelninolan, confused. She blinked at him as though seeing him for the first time. 'What are you doing up here? Why aren't you sleeping with the others?' Too emotional to speak at first, Ahren simply shook his head. 'This…this creature…the music in my head…your peculiar behaviour.' Everything was spinning around, and Jelninolan had to support him to prevent him from falling. 'You poor boy,' she said in a concerned voice. 'These notes were not intended for your unprepared spirit. The music must have shaken your reason to the core.' She carefully lowered him onto the wooden floor, at which point, the wolf's shivering flank pressed into her side. 'And why is Culhen awake? He must surely have suffered terribly in her presence?' she asked sternly. 'Didn't know…what was happening…thought…ambush,' stammered Ahren, feeling blood running out of his nose. 'Woke him up.' Jelninolan shook her head sadly. 'The two of you have got yourselves into a right state, my dear. I would help you, but my magic is currently so weak that it would surely do more harm than good. But maybe there is something I can do to help.' She sat opposite him with her legs crossed and smoothed her robe. 'I will explain to the pair of you what you have just experienced. That might help to calm your reason down.' Ahren barely nodded in response. What else could he do? So long as everything was spinning around him, he couldn't go anywhere anyway. He dug his fingers into Culhen's fur in an effort to comfort both himself and the wolf. 'She is a Leviathan,' said Jelninolan, coming straight to the point. 'One of the first beings created by the gods and adjudged by them to be flawed. She swims in the lowest depths of the ocean and dreams of days gone by.' A look of sadness came over her good-natured face. 'We must have crossed her path on her way home, and when she heard the song of a Stormweaver for the first time in centuries during the healing ritual, she became curious.' The elf chuckled quietly. 'Our ritual must have been audible from leagues away to those who can hear magic. It impressed her, which is saying a lot, considering she has been alive for aeons.' Ahren's head had cleared a little and he blinked hard, to see more clearly. He felt for his nose and was relieved to see that it had stopped bleeding, 'You understood her tones as words?' he asked numbly. Jelninolan giggled. 'I am an elf, an Ancient, and a priestess of the goddess. What do you think?' Then she continued with her explanation. 'I made it clear to her that my art was only slowly reawakening, and she gave me an insight into the songs that she remembered from the times when Stormweavers still travelled on Elven ships across the seas – when the world was still young.' Ahren slapped his hands against his temples in an effort to drive out his dizziness. 'Elves travelled across the seas? I thought they didn't like leaving Eathinian.' Jelninolan smiled. 'You're thinking in the wrong dimensions. We're talking about the time when the gods had just lain down to sleep. Long before the Dark Days or the Adversary. At that time, he was still the Keeper of the world, and all was well with the world.' Ahren closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. The Leviathan was old enough then to have experienced Jorath in its original state, a time that was now only remembered in the written legends of the priests. No wonder his head was feeling as if a Glower Bear had been dancing on it. 'You should, in fact, have all been asleep,' said Jelninolan irritably. 'Her understanding is enormous, and she makes sure everyone is asleep whenever she swims under them. She woke me up, however.' The priestess looked at him in puzzlement now. Ahren groaned as he tried to think of something to say that might make sense. 'Our supply of healing herbs is petering out,' he began. 'So, when I was dressing my own burns, I had to improvise. The others got normal herbs, but in my case, the herbs produced positive and negative effects.' He rubbed his eyes wearily. 'One of them is an inability to fall into a deep sleep.' Jelninolan shook her head sadly. 'That was really bad luck. And then you woke Culhen up?' Ahren nodded shamefacedly. 'Sorry, big lad,' he whispered. The wolf licked him across the face and whimpered, unable to think clearly. Culhen's mind was at least as muddled as his own, so the Forest Guardian pressed himself in against the wolf and swore that he would sleep with his friend the next night, storm or no storm. 'You should try and get some sleep, the two of you,' said Jelninolan, full of maternal concern. 'I will brew you up some healthful tea that will relax you.' She stood up and looked down at Ahren. 'I take it you used some Sleepless Blossom for your dressing?' Ahren shrugged his shoulders with an embarrassed look while Jelninolan tut-tutted disapprovingly. 'Very irresponsible of you. You must look after your health – physical as well as spiritual. The Sleepless Blossom can confuse your mind if you overdo it,' she scolded, then turned away. As they went below deck, the images of the Leviathan floated past Ahren's inner eye and the sound of her strange song echoed through his innermost being. He doubted that he would ever forget this night. The thought of such a creature, living in the ocean depths and forgotten by the rest of the world made him shudder as he considered what other surprises awaited him and his friends in the wide expanse of the Cutlass Sea. The next morning was gusty but friendly. The sun shone in the cloudless sky, and the strong wind was cool enough to provide some relief on deck. Jelninolan's tea had worked wonders and Ahren had slept through until late morning, as had Culhen, who was now determinedly trying to master the Void. The fact that he had completely lost control the previous night was spurring the wolf on now. Ahren sensed a new desire in his friend to be able to control his animal instincts for fear of them gaining the upper hand in dangerous situations. The Forest Guardian spent the day with Culhen in silent isolation, the peace of the spiritual exercises involved in attaining the Void helping them to overcome the emotional upset they had both experienced through the Leviathan's enormous spirit. The wolf was still unsuccessful in his efforts to achieve his final goal, but he was falling into deeper trances and Ahren was delighted with his friend's progress. 'If you've done enough lazing around with your wolf, Fisker has sent out another invitation to dinner,' intoned the ironic voice of Uldini right beside Ahren's ear, causing him to flinch in surprise. The Arch Wizard had floated over to them in dead silence so as to frighten the young Paladin, who was now desperately trying to slow down his heartrate again. Culhen growled in irritation, and Ahren glared at the childlike figure, who grinned cheekily back at them. 'If you frighten me, then you do the same to Culhen,' scolded the Forest Guardian. 'I see that as a bonus,' was Uldini's quick-witted response. Culhen growled again and now it was Ahren who was laughing. 'What did he just say?' asked Uldini curiously. 'That we need the Thirteen Paladins to defeat HIM, WHO FORCES, but nobody mentioned the necessity of keeping a particularly annoying Ancient alive,' said Ahren casually as he got up onto his feet. 'No need to be rude,' said Uldini to the wolf in a peeved voice, nevertheless stroking the animal's flank in a conciliatory gesture. 'As I said, Fisker wants us to eat with him. I was on the Buoyant Spirit a little earlier and he said he owes us a civilised meal without nervous breakdowns or incarcerated monkeys.' Ahren chuckled. 'Is that how he put it?' Uldini's frown turned into an annoyed grimace. 'It seems that his old sense of humour has blossomed again. How I have always hated it!' Ahren was curious and full of eager anticipation as he smartened up his pirate costume. Uldini's words suggested that Fisker was gradually returning to being the Paladin he had been of yore, and Ahren was eager to get to know this person. When they were finally all on deck waiting to be brought over, Ahren could see in the faces of the others that they too were anticipating the evening with excitement. 'So that we don't waste any time and to avoid the need to anchor, we will sail broadside of the Buoyant Spirit and I will levitate us over,' announced Uldini as both ships began to approach each other, accompanied by the loud shouting of the crews. 'Surely, you are too tired for that,' suggested Ahren diplomatically only to be rewarded with a withering look from the Arch Wizard. 'I know what I am able for, thank you very much,' growled the childlike figure. Ahren decided to let the matter drop. In that case I'm coming too, said Culhen decisively. Ahren realised that trying to dissuade the wolf would involve a long and laborious discussion, and so he decided to leave it to Uldini to assess whether the heavy wolf would be simply too great a load. Culhen trotted up to the Forest Guardian and looked at Uldini demandingly. The Arch Wizard simply raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The Queen of the Waves got closer and closer to the other ship, and once the hulls were twenty paces apart from each other, Uldini made a sweeping arm gesture. Ahren immediately felt a force going through his body as he was thrown in a wide arc up into the air, before landing on the quarterdeck of the Buoyant Spirit and doing a somersault to the lusty cheers of the welcoming pirate crew. He staggered up onto his feet with the intention of hurling abuse back at Uldini, but already Trogadon was flying through the air, yelping with glee, and the young Paladin had to quickly make room in order to avoid being swept off his feet by the dwarf, who was tumbling along the planks towards him. The delighted warrior pulled himself up, grinning from cheek to cheek. 'I could do that all day,' he said enthusiastically. Ahren tugged Trogadon's broad body to the side as Khara was catapulted through the air. The swordswoman used her landing to execute a succession of flips, the pirates cheering at her wildly for her elegant performance. 'She knew what to expect,' grumbled Ahren in his defence, reacting to Trogadon's knowing look. Jelninolan was next on the list, completing her flight elegantly by stretching her arms towards the ground and expressing a trickle of magic through her fingers, which manifested itself in the form of a fine spray. Ahren looked over at the Queen of the Waves to see who would be flying over next and his eyes widened in surprise. 'Make room there!' he roared. 'Everyone to the sides!' But Culhen was already flying in a magically enhanced leap through the air, howling joyfully before landing on the Buoyant Spirit's quarterdeck. The enormous animal slid along the timbers, crashing into the pirates who had moved too slowly, and pushing no less than three of them overboard, much to the delight of the remaining sailors. While the unfortunates were being pulled out with ropes, Uldini and Falk – the latter disguised as Captain Featherbeard – floated majestically across before landing gently in front of Fisker's cabin. The Paladin was already awaiting them, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded. Fisker clapped his appreciation, leading Uldini to bow in an exaggerated manner. There was the sound of laughter everywhere on the ship and it felt to Ahren as if they had boarded a completely different vessel from the previous time. The pirates' faces were still rough and fearsome, their humour coarse and their manner of speaking a little too foul-mouthed for the Forest Guardian's taste. But now there was a camaraderie among the mariners that he had only ever experienced on the Queen of the Waves. It seemed as though their captain was inspiring them again, and that, as far as Ahren was concerned, was a damn good sign. He strode with the others to Falk and Uldini, the Arch Wizard looking the picture of innocence as Ahren glared at him. 'What? I have to protect my powers,' said the childlike figure innocently. 'And anyway, everyone else seemed to enjoy flying through the air like that.' Ahren dropped the subject, for he was too distracted by Fisker's appearance. A low-cut jerkin, a puffy-sleeved shirt, a dashing three-cornered hat on his head, and every golden button on his neat, clean clothing polished and gleaming in the sunshine – everything contributing to the appearance of a swashbuckling figure from a pirate tale. His whole appearance, not to mention his deportment, radiated bravado and a certain cheekiness that Ahren found magnetic. Suddenly, he felt a stab of pain as he remembered his childhood friend Likis, and when Fisker winked at him, it was almost as though his companion from his early days was standing there facing him. 'Come in before the rum gets warm and the dinner cold.' He gestured to Culhen. 'There's some spiced boar in the corner.' I like him already, said Culhen, licking his chops. Fisker bowed deeply and elegantly before Khara, planting a gentle kiss on the back of her outstretched hand, at which point Ahren wondered if they had perhaps helped the Paladin get back to his old self just a little too eagerly. If the blond-curled pirate were really to make advances towards Khara, Ahren would have to have serious words with him. The interior of Fisker's cabin had not changed dramatically since their last visit. However, subtle alterations suggested that the occupants' personalities had changed. Everything looked shinier and neater. The darker, heavier spoils had been pushed out of the way to be replaced by brighter, friendlier objects. A large, golden-white harp, which Ahren vaguely remembered as being tossed aside in a corner the last time, was now standing freshly polished beside the four-poster bed, its welcoming appearance adding to the silent hospitality that Fisker's domicile now presented to its visitors. Cassobo was sitting, dressed in a tailcoat, on the richly laden table, bowing to the visitors, and baring his teeth before skilfully filling the goblets with wine from a crystal carafe. 'We heal a companion animal and you put him in a costume and get him to play the role of a servant?' asked Jelninolan in a cutting voice. Ahren felt the temperature in the cabin drop several degrees. He shared a warning look with Falk, who quickly laid a reassuring hand on the priestess's arm. The magical powers of the elf were exhausted, which meant her mood could change rapidly – something that nobody present desired. Fisker, however, smiled disarmingly and lifted his upturned palms in a gesture of innocence. 'Cassobo merely wants to thank you all for your help in his recovery. If you're lucky, he might even play the harp for you. He couldn't remember all the details of his recovery, so I described everything you undertook on his behalf. Believe you me, I cannot force him to do anything.' Fisker tapped his temple, a mischievous look on his face. 'He is much cleverer than I am, and his pranks are legendary. I'm not going to risk his displeasure merely to show off in front of you.' 'He's not exaggerating,' said Uldini, confirming Fisker's statement. 'Cassobo is devilishly intelligent. He has defeated me in chess more often than I would like to admit.' He pointed at the little monkey. 'I demand a rematch.' Cassobo nodded, grinning and baring his teeth. The priestess calmed down and everyone took their place while Culhen trotted over to the roast wild boar, which was waiting for him on the floor in a golden bowl. This is the way I would always like to eat, said Culhen, sniffing at the roast with delight and pawing the expensive bowl, which was sparkling in the candlelight. Ahren rolled his eyes and turned to Fisker. 'You're spoiling my wolf. He is chronically vain, and I possess no bowl made from precious metal with which to present his nourishment in the future.' While his companions chuckled, the pirate captain raised an eyebrow. 'Yours too, then? Cassobo is exactly the same. Who do you think insisted on a white tailcoat of finest linen?' The little monkey screeched in annoyance and made an unmistakable gesture with the middle finger of his right hand, causing Trogadon to cough, and splutter his wine in a wide arc across the table. 'Where did he learn that?' he asked excitedly. While Cassobo stared at the dwarf as if he were looking at an idiot, Fisker raised his arms in feigned frustration. 'As I've said already, he is cleverer than I am. We have been living for a considerable time among pirates and, in contrast to wolves or falcons, he can imitate many human gestures. Such as the fine example he has just given you.' Cassobo ran along the table with his head held high, placing a piece of fried fish on each guest's plate, the primate looking decidedly dignified with his back straight, and his half-closed eyes. 'But he looks so peculiar,' said Trogadon, poking the little monkey in the side with his chubby finger. The animal jumped away from the dwarf, scolding him with his upraised clenched fist, at which point Fisker gave his companion a warning look. 'That was really rather rude, my good friend. Remember, without Trogadon's feel for rocks, you would in all probability still be your old self,' he said crossly. The little monkey snorted, then spat into the dwarf's goblet, before continuing to dish out the food. 'We urgently need to get back to civilisation,' sighed Uldini. 'You and Cassobo seem to have become real mischief-makers and frivolous fellows among the pirates. And now you are destroying the rest of my rabble.' Fisker raised his goblet and toasted him. 'One does one's best,' he said triumphantly. The meal that followed was accompanied by lively banter between Jelninolan, Uldini, Fisker and Falk. Ahren quickly realised that the self-proclaimed pirate had the gift of the gab, reminding the young Forest Guardian more and more of his friend Likis, even as far as the crooked smile that the pirate captain sometimes revealed. He also saw that Fisker and his monkey were a well-oiled machine, helping each other out during the course of the conversation. Cassobo played the sweet little monkey on more than one occasion when Fisker was on the defensive, and the captain would in turn hold a protective hand in front of the little animal whenever the little rascal snatched a fork from one of the guests, or poured salt into another guest's rum. These little pranks usually occurred when the other speaker was getting the upper hand, and Fisker would use the temporary distraction to regain the initiative in the conversation. I prefer our method of teamwork, said Culhen, who had eaten the joint of meat down to the bone. If I jumped on the table every time you said something stupid, you'd never get a bite to eat. Your criticisms are always so helpful, snapped Ahren, but his heart wasn't in the mood for arguing. He was genuinely moved by the familiar manner between the impudent Paladin and his little monkey, and the realisation that he had contributed to their recovery filled him with so much pride that he really didn't want to argue with his beloved wolf. You're no fun, sulked Culhen, chewing on the carcass. 'That's enough beating around the bush,' announced Uldini, once they had finished their delicious desserts which had made Ahren just a little bit jealous – it was clear from the excellent pudding that Fisker had the better ship's cook in his service. 'We've spent the whole evening chatting about current affairs and been regaled with pirate yarns and exciting tales of derring-do. But the most important topic has not been mentioned yet – Aluna.' It was as though Uldini had blown out a candle. From one heartbeat to the next the melancholy returned to Fisker's eyes, even if not to the same degree as during their first meeting. The somewhat scurrilous pirate captain vanished from the man's demeanour, leaving behind a grief-stricken fisherman with memories of better days. There was a silence lasting twenty heartbeats before he spoke. 'Things were going well for a while.' Cassobo scurried over to Fisker and pressed his little head encouragingly into one of his friend's hands. 'I've missed that so much,' said the Paladin, moved, as he stroked the little monkey's fur with the tips of his fingers. 'Cassobo would always cheer me up before I had the chance to fall into a deep depression.' Uldini cleared his throat, an indication to Fisker that he should continue, and the latter nodded gratefully. 'As I said before, Aluna and I sailed to the Cutlass Sea together and found a cosy little island where we built a little house and went fishing together. It was a good, humble existence and the first hundred years were happy ones. We sought comfort in each other's arms following the horrors of the Dark Days and the Night of Blood, and slowly our wounds began to heal.' Fisker tilted his head back, his eyes were now closed. 'But then something changed. The more our emotional pain receded, the more often we argued with each other. We constantly compared the other to our soul-mates who had been snatched away from us, and in this way, we hurt each other more and more. Sentences like: "Telina would never have done something like that" or "Wankuro always understood me" became an everyday occurrence, leading us to go our separate ways on more than one occasion, only to eventually return to each other again. Each time our arguments became more intense, and the destruction of our relationship more bitter – we hurt each other on more than one occasion, physically too. I looked for distraction from my troubles and found it among the pirates. I drank and gambled with them in the Crow's Nest, leaving Aluna alone on our island, concentrating all her attention on her relationship with Fjolmungar.' 'Who is that?' interjected Khara, and Fisker looked at her for a moment before smiling apologetically. 'Of course – you don't know him. Fjolmungar is Aluna's soul animal. Cassobo and I never really got on with him. I think he was always jealous of me.' Fisker blinked and struggled to pick up the threads of his story again. 'It finally ended with a bang when Aluna found me in our bed – and I wasn't alone,' he said, giving a little cough and averting his eyes from Jelninolan's disappointed look. 'She set our house on fire while I was still sleeping and sailed away with the only boat we possessed. The woman who had been sharing our bed then stole the first raft I built. My next attempt at a vessel sank. The following one brought me as far as the Crow's Nest, where I was hired as a pirate after Cassobo and I drank away all our savings.' Even the little monkey managed to look guilty while this part of the story was being related, and suddenly Ahren was glad that he and Culhen had such different characters. They balanced each other out, whereas Fisker and his monkey seemed to goad each other on to extremes in all matters, both good and bad. 'What happened to Aluna?' asked Jelninolan coldly and Fisker turned away, unable to look anyone in the eye. 'Following that morning, I never saw the woman called Aluna again,' he said sheepishly. Ahren screwed up his eyes and observed the squirming Paladin keenly. The pirate captain's choice of words puzzled the young man, until suddenly he understood what Fisker was attempting to hide. 'Aluna is the Cold Woman, am I right?' he said in a low but firm voice, and everyone at the table turned to look at him. 'That was why you began to build up a fleet, that's why you've been at war with each other for centuries, and why you are afraid of a she-pirate who after all these years should be nothing but an aging hag.' Ahren's eyes widened as the import of his realisation became clear. 'And that's why you were shaken to the very core when she crippled Cassobo,' he whispered, horrified. The little monkey screeched and sought refuge on Fisker's chest, the Paladin putting his protective hands around his friend and nodding silently. 'So that's what you meant when you said you had to protect the Cutlass Sea from the Cold Woman and that it was all your fault,' groaned Falk as the realisation dawned on him. 'Your misdemeanour turned her into a cold-blooded monster. She is sending shiploads of innocent mariners to their deaths on the ocean floor, leaving not a single survivor, and the cause of this senseless war at sea is a dispute between two ex-lovers?' 'Shit,' said Trogadon after a moment's silence, and nobody had the heart to contradict him. 'Which means,' said Uldini after another painful silence, 'you have not seen Aluna since she had Cassobo in her grasp?' Fisker nodded mutely, stroking the shivering monkey, his head bowed. 'So you have no idea of where we can find her?' concluded Jelninolan in an icy voice. Now Fisker looked up. 'I don't know where she is but finding her should be easy. I have been avoiding her for the past twenty years and concentrated merely on keeping her pirate fleet in check. If I give the command to attack her on a broad front, my provocation will surely bring her out into the open.' He swallowed hard. 'But first I need my armour. If she finds out that I have returned to my old self, she may try to harm me by getting rid of it.' 'What makes you think that?' asked Uldini suspiciously. 'Because it wasn't me who put my armour and weapons there,' admitted Fisker, his lips pursed. 'While we were becoming more hostile to each other and hurting one another, she took it with her. A lesson in humility, she said at the time.' Falk leaned forward, his eyes boring into Fisker's. 'You said you knew where your armour was. Why didn't you pick it up long ago?' he asked cuttingly. The Paladin's shoulder's slumped despondently. 'Because she hid my armour on an island teeming with Dark Ones.'

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 14

The campfire burned brightly and cheerfully under the dark spring skies. Although the days were already pleasantly warm, and the winter had ended two moons previously, the night air remained bitterly cold. All his men and women were wrapped in rough woollen blankets, but none of them wished to go to sleep. Not until their captain had laid down his weary head. With fervent loyalty they hung onto every word that came from his lips and listened intently to the one-eyed man's every utterance. The man who had led them to victory after victory over Dark Ones as they travelled through the outer regions of the Borderlands. Only that morning had he slaughtered a Glower Bear with his spear, the animal having made the fatal mistake of displaying his unprotected neck for a fraction of a heartbeat. Here, as they sat around the fire and admired their great leader, he had to recount the story again and slake the curiosity of his disciples. 'Ben had already fallen to the ground,' said Sven, placing his hand in a heavy yet comradely fashion on the shoulder of the lad, who had not yet experienced his sixteenth winter. The youth was sitting in front of the miller's son, his face blushing with gratitude as his captain looked briefly at him, with what seemed like a smile. 'The bear had knocked him over with his enormous shoulder, as easily as you would snap a branch when you march through the undergrowth.' Sven's healthy eye scanned his loyal troop – sixty men and women, sitting or standing in a semicircle before him, their spellbound faces shadowy masks as they warmed themselves behind the blazing fire. Each of them was holding a wineskin, wine that he had bought and paid for himself as an additional reward for all their hard work. He hadn't told them, of course, that he had found the barrels in a burned-out tavern, thanks to some useful information provided by a Moonrunner. Nobody had questioned how he had managed to buy wine in the middle of the Borderlands – proof, if ever it were needed, that the people around him were eating out of his hand. 'I knew I had to do something, or the beast would have yet another good man on his conscience,' he continued, the words slipping easily out of his mouth. 'And so, I acted on instinct. I steered my horse directly towards the Glower Bear's jaws and as the monster's teeth dug into my trusty steed, I leaped out of my saddle and thrust my spear into the greedy Dark One's unprotected throat. My arm was strong, and my aim was true. The gods were surely with me, for this one thrust drove through the life-veins of the bear, killing him on the spot. As the beast sank to the ground, breathing his final death rattle, I managed to pull Ben out from beneath the monster's heavy body.' He slowly scanned the scene before him. But for the crackling of the fire and the nightly sound of the open fields upon which they were going to sleep, there was not a sound to be heard. Sven was sure that some of his listeners were even holding their breath. You can stop breathing completely later, he thought contemptuously, the Thing in his head squirming with delight. Everything in its own good time. 'And you brave men and women protected my back, defeating the horde of Low Fangs and scattering them like ashes in the wind.' There was a full-throated cheer as he turned his victory into theirs with his few simple words. Time for one final, contemplative sentence. 'Just as well that I had found an ownerless horse, or Ben would no longer be with us,' he said in a throwaway manner, seemingly letting his mind wander, his story having finished. A murmur arose amongst the militia. 'We should all have horses, Captain,' said one of the braver soldiers, his determination doubtless due to his emptied wineskin. Enthusiastic cries filled the air as the other members of the militia shouted their agreement, and Sven had to fight hard to suppress a smile. It's like playing with puppets on a string, he thought contentedly. 'A nice idea, but the Baron sees the militia as foot soldiers. After all, you are considerably cheaper,' said Sven, his face the picture of deep humility so that nobody here would believe he would dare question their leader. The discontented murmuring grew louder until Sven raised his hand. 'That is enough for tonight,' he commanded. Another seed had been planted, and as the men and women retired to their various tents, Sven remained for a moment by the fire, staring into the flames until everyone had gone. A quiet scraping noise on the ground behind him and he broke into a smile. 'Hello, little friend,' said Sven in a low voice before turning around. The fox-like Dark One was sitting on its hindlegs, its large ears twitching back and forth as it listened. Its eight small eyes glimmered red and formed a half-moon on the Moonrunner's head. The creature had come across Sven more than two weeks' previously and was now his spy and messenger, giving the High Fang considerably more opportunities to drive his plan forward. There were only a few more weeks until summer, and it was high time things started moving. Sven whispered urgently to the creature. 'Find a horde of Low Fangs. Lead them to one of the farms in the Borderlands that have horses. The more nags, the merrier. The Low Fangs should surround the inhabitants but not attack. Then come back to me and tell me where the farm is. As soon as I have led my bumpkins to the location, then the Low Fangs must attack, but tell them to keep the horses safe. I will give the remaining orders when I am on the scene.' No sooner had Sven finished talking than the creature was already shooting off into the night, but Sven stopped it in its tracks with a rapid impulse of his will. It turned to face him again. 'And tell them to kill the farmers in as brutal a way as possible,' he added. The Moonrunner disappeared into the darkness, leaving Sven grinning into the embers of the campfire. The spark that he had ignited would soon become a little flame.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 15

'Can you repeat that, please?' asked Uldini in disbelief. 'There is an island to the south of the Crow's Nest where the Adversary corrupted a certain species of simian,' said Fisker, stroking the shivering Cassobo. 'Presumably, Aluna particularly enjoyed the irony of depositing my things there.' 'Shadow Simians?' asked Falk, tilting his head sceptically. 'Never heard of them.' Fisker shrugged his shoulders. 'Simian Island was something of a local legend, you know yourself – the cursed island from whence no visitor returns. I never really believed it until Aluna transported my armour and weapons there – but it really does exist. The creatures living there are deadly.' A shiver ran down his spine before he continued. 'I lost three shiploads of experienced men and women attempting to get back my equipment. I gave up after that.' His eyes twinkled brightly, and he straightened up again. 'But with your help we may be able to fight our way through to my belongings.' Falk leaned back and glared at Fisker. 'You've really got us into hot water, you windbag,' he growled. The blond Paladin was about to retort, but Trogadon cut him off. 'I may well be the most sympathetic person towards you of all the people around this table, because I too…have a…lust for life, as it were,' said the dwarf, screwing up his eyes. 'But even I will say this – don't even try to defend your actions.' Fisker nodded silently, stroking Cassobo all the while. The little animal looked at the others sadly, his little monkeyface appealing silently for some sort of understanding for the situation his friend was in. 'Even if we don't like it, we have no choice,' said Uldini disdainfully. 'We can hardly let you run around the place without your armour in the upcoming Dark Days. That would be far too dangerous.' Ahren cleared his throat and folded his arms before his chest. 'But you let me run around the place in ribbon armour that's bursting at the seams, and that's alright, is it? he asked in an exaggeratedly self-pitying voice, causing everyone around the table to laugh. The ice was broken. The young Paladin found it impossible not to like Fisker, even though the man had acquired more weaknesses over the past few centuries than all the other champions of the gods put together – at least the ones that Ahren had got to know. In his defence, he didn't expand an empire with inhuman laws, interjected Culhen, and Ahren shuddered at the thought of having to deal with Quin-Wa at some future date. 'Alright then, we will set sail for this mysterious ape island,' said Falk as he stood up. 'Our rascal here has given us enough to be thinking about, and I think we should call it a day, now that Ahren has made us all laugh.' He gave Fisker a long, cold look. 'It would only be downhill again if we stayed, believe me.' The pirate Paladin nodded hesitantly. Humbled yet grateful, he stood up as Cassobo climbed nimbly onto his shoulder, from where he grinned and bared his teeth. 'We will make our own way out, thank you very much,' said Jelninolan firmly. They left the self-proclaimed pirate in their wake, Culhen being the only one to acknowledge Fisker and Cassobo with a nod of farewell, the monkey making some peculiar gestures in return. Now that was funny, the wolf mentally chuckled. Ahren raised his eyebrows in surprise as they stepped out into the fresh night air, the wind in their faces strengthened by the ship's movement through the water. The stars were particularly bright, and after the revelations in the opulent cabin below, Ahren felt as if he were entering another, quieter world, where everything was in order. You could understand Cassobo? asked Ahren once he had overcome his surprise. Somehow his gestures made sense to me, said the wolf. Probably because he and I are cleverer than you. Ahren suspected that the monkey had his own form of communication, common to his own kind, something like Selsena's empathy, but as he had no desire to argue, he quickly put it out of his mind. Fisker stood at the doorway, watching them leave, a shadowy silhouette in the light coming from within the cabin. The others were gathered on the quarterdeck waiting for Uldini to send them back to the Queen of the Waves with his magic. 'It's very dark now,' said Trogadon nervously, looking at Uldini uneasily. 'You're absolutely certain you won't miss the deck when you toss us back over?' 'There's only one way of finding out,' said Uldini smirking, and already the dwarf was in the grip of an invisible force and being flung through the night, his arms flailing wildly. His screams grew quieter in the darkness, and then they saw by the light of the lanterns on the other ship, the broad body of the warrior landing heavily on the deck and crashing into a couple of water butts that had been fastened tight to collect the rainwater. 'Completely uninjured,' shouted Trogadon, groaning loudly as he picked himself up gingerly. Uldini chuckled and then sent Khara flying in a decidedly more elegant arc towards the Queen of the Waves. She was followed by Jelninolan, by which time Ahren had taken Falk aside. 'Why are you so hard on Fisker?' he whispered. 'You yourself are always saying that the last few centuries were no bed of roses for our brothers and sisters.' He deliberately referred to the others using the familiar address that the Paladins used among themselves in an effort to find out what Falk was really thinking. The old man really could be very secretive sometimes, and anyway, Ahren like the idea of being part of a large family – even if he was coming to realise that its members weren't half as admirable as he had hoped they would be. Falk seemed unusually upset. He rocked from foot to foot which, thanks to his frightening clothing with its blackened plate armour, not to mention the feathers in his beard, lent him a particularly bizarre appearance. 'He reminds me of myself,' he admitted. Wine, women and poor decision-making to beat the band. The loss of all idealism. He resembles the way I was when Jelninolan condemned me to carrying out my penance in Evergreen.' The old man's face was inscrutable as he continued. 'When I see Fisker in front of me, then I am looking at what I would have been had I not received help. And that terrifies me and makes me furious. I just want to grab him and shake him until he becomes again what he once was.' 'You know as well as I do that it doesn't work like that,' said Ahren above the noise of the howling Culhen, who had been thrown by Uldini's magic in an impossibly high arc towards the Queen of the Waves. 'You yourself are no longer the Paladin of those days, and I think that's good. Think of all the lessons you had to learn anew.' Falk frowned as he thought back, and Ahren continued. 'You were helped by Jelninolan, decades later you helped me, and now we are going to help him,' he said, trying to sound as logical as possible. 'That's a tradition that I would like to continue.' Falk instinctively embraced the young Paladin – a gesture he almost never made – only for Uldini's charm to take possession of Ahren at the same moment, slinging him into the air, with Falk hanging onto him, while the Arch Wizard behind them snorted and ranted. The two figures held onto each other for dear life as they flew in a low arc over the dark water, both realising to their horror that the momentum would not suffice for the pair and they were going to smash into the side of the ship. Ahren braced himself for impact, determined to hold the heavily armoured Falk above water until help arrived, when suddenly another invisible burst of energy thrust them upwards, from where they crashed over the railing before completing their journey by tumbling along the deck. Trogadon and Khara helped them up while Uldini, surrounded by a protective corona of sparkling flashes, floated over to them furiously. 'Next time you're cuddling up to each other, give me a bit of notice,' snarled the childlike figure furiously, the sweat glistening on his bald pate. 'The whole idea was to preserve my powers you sentimental simpletons, not to expend them all on rescue missions!' Then the Arch Wizard swept below deck, leaving his relieved companions grinning behind him. 'Now you know why I embrace people so rarely,' said Falk with a wry grin, before following Uldini down. Trogadon and Jelninolan headed for the cabin too, leaving Khara and Ahren alone on deck, along with the wolf, who had already curled up on his accustomed spot at the prow, where he was waiting for them. 'What was all that about?' asked Khara curiously. 'What? The embrace at just the wrong moment?' replied Ahren. 'Just two Paladins who had agreed to help one of their brothers recover his old splendour and fame.' She punched him lightly on his arm with her fist. 'You're such a show-off, aren't you?' she scolded playfully. Ahren slung his arm around her waist and steered her towards the stem of the ship. 'It's a beautiful night, the stars are twinkling, and we know that Aluna is alive and sailing on the Cutlass Sea, somewhere within our reach. We are only a mediated conflict away from having won two Paladins over to our cause. How about staying together for the rest of this beautiful evening? I have a very cuddly wolf who would only be too delighted for us to snuggle up to him.' Khara's eyes sparkled as she drew his head towards her and kissed him. 'I like your idea,' she said quietly. Ahren was so pleased with himself that he even managed to ignore Culhen's voice complaining in his head about being reduced to the status of a fluffy pillow. The next morning Ahren trimmed his beard back to its normal length using a little mirror and his dagger. Khara had ordered him to do so in no uncertain terms following a night full of kisses and warm embraces. The young Paladin mentally calculated how many weeks it would be until the Menug-Anan was finally be over, and from the way Khara was looking at him, it seemed she shared his impatience. However, he respected her wishes too much to try to become even more intimate. The only thing you respect is her ability to break five of your fingers in two heartbeats if you dare to let your hands wander to where they haven't been invited, said Culhen, commenting bitterly. That's not true, retorted Ahren. At least not completely, he added as the wolf laughed mockingly. Fingers can heal, but not necessarily relationships, he explained mentally. Think of Fisker and Aluna. The pair destroyed their love for each other to such an extent that the Cutlass Sea became their battleground. That won't happen to you two, said Culhen in a soft, comforting voice. The wolf was well aware of Ahren's fears ever since the young man had learned of the lovers' tragic story. Your love is strong, and you have me to prevent you from doing anything really stupid. The animal's self-belief had returned to being as indestructible as ever. Although Culhen still hadn't been able to reach the Void, the silent contemplation of his preparatory exercises had seemed to assuage his self-doubts concerning his ability to control his instincts. Ahren wasn't sure yet whether he approved of this development. I'll take you at your word, he said solemnly. If I am about to say or do something stupid in connection with Khara, then please warn me. As if that were a new job for me, said the wolf, and Ahren heard the animal yawning behind him. He poked Culhen's side in playful annoyance and was rewarded with a low, deep growl. Ahren finished shaving and stood up to turn his attention to his training. His body was keeping supple, extending Fisiniell was no problem to him, he was hitting the target nine times out of ten, and every now and again he would score a hit in his mock fights with Khara. All in all, he was quite happy with himself, even if he still had Trogadon's warning at the back of his mind. So long as Ahren merely maintained his abilities, he wouldn't make progress. He shrugged his shoulders. For the moment it would have to do. He looked around, spotted Jelninolan standing on the deck of the Buoyant Spirit, and stopped short. A young man in a fiery-red robe was kneeling before the magician and beseeching her passionately. He went over to Trogadon, who had just rested his crossbow on the bulwark. The dwarf was using a little tool to make tiny adjustments to the spanning mechanism consisting of a thick steel lever, which on account of its size and weight could easily pass for a weapon in its own right. 'What's going on over there?' asked Ahren, gesturing to the kneeling man, whom the elf seemed to be reprimanding royally. 'A fervent admirer?' Is he proposing that she enter into a conjugal contract with him?' Ahren thought his suggestion amusing, but Trogadon spat into the water without showing any emotion. 'Don't know,' he responded, his lips pursed, placing a bolt made of steel a finger in width on the crossbow. 'And I don't care.' Ahren pushed the weapon on the bulwark sideways a little, for the bolt in the groove was pointing directly at the man as if by accident, but before he had the chance to reprimand the dwarf, Jelninolan floated upwards, her robe fluttering as she began to fly towards them. Her red hair seemed to blowing as if in a whirlwind around her head, and as she approached, the young Paladin realised that the magician was surrounded by a mini-tornado that was carrying her across the water. 'We'll soon find out what was going on,' said Ahren, winking at the dwarf before walking towards Jelninolan. The elf landed in the powerful storm that vanished as quickly as it had manifested itself, only to find Ahren standing before her, smiling. 'A new charm?' he asked, starting the conversation off on a harmless note. Jelninolan nodded absently, then shook her head. 'Not really. Just a modification of the floating magic that Uldini uses all the time. I adapted it to the Storm Weaving, which makes the magic much less tiring for me.' The elf rubbed her pointy ears. 'But when you're inside, it's very loud, so I'm almost deaf now. I'll have to tweak it.' 'Is it a consequence of the present that your age-old friend gave you?' asked Ahren, lowering his voice. He and Jelninolan had agreed to avoid using the word 'Leviathan' if at all possible, so as to avoid causing panic among the crew. 'But of course,' said Jelninolan, smoothing her robe. 'But you and Trogadon were certainly not watching me on account of my new hover-magic.' Her knowing look was kindly but also strict, and suddenly Ahren felt like a godsday schoolchild. 'Your distaste for battle wizards is no secret,' he said with as much confidence as he could muster. 'If one of them is going to kneel in front of you, then I simply have to ask what he wanted of you. Are we going to be celebrating a conjugal contract soon?' Jelninolan waved her hand gruffly. 'Linan rather overdramatises things,' she said irritably. 'He asked me to take him on as my pupil. Begged would be putting it more accurately.' This was not the explanation that Ahren had been expecting. 'And are you going to consider it?' he asked in consternation. 'If it were to happen, then it would be my decision entirely,' she responded tartly. 'I told him that I would not teach a battle wizard, and he would have to unlearn everything he had been taught thus far if he wanted to pursue the healing arts.' 'Is that even possible? Can you unlearn magic?' Ahren was gobsmacked. 'Not in the normal manner, no,' said Jelninolan. 'But I am one of the Ancients. Of course I know a way of reforming a willing magical spirit.' 'And what did he say?' asked Ahren, now really interested in finding out the outcome of this unusual request. 'He agreed immediately,' said Jelninolan peevishly. 'I wasn't reckoning on that. Now I have to really consider if I should train a foolish young man in healing magic.' She snorted indignantly. 'I've fallen into my own trap.' 'Then turn him down,' said Ahren, shrugging his shoulders. 'The world won't end if you do that, you know.' Jelninolan didn't seem convinced. 'I can hardly complain that there are too many battle wizards in the world and then leave one who has discovered the error of his ways to his own devices,' she snapped. Her power flashed momentarily, Falk raising his hands to protect his face. Then the moment was past, leaving Jelninolan crestfallen. 'Sorry about that. I hate these moral predicaments and I urgently need some rest to regain my strength and stabilise my magic.' Ahren snapped his fingers and gestured towards the Buoyant Spirit. 'Say exactly that to Linan,' he suggested. 'That will give you a couple of weeks to consider his request, and your magic can recover itself in the meantime.' Jelninolan looked at him sharply, only for her features to soften once she had considered his idea. 'Do you know what, Ahren?' she said, reassured. 'I will do that, the next time I'm on board the Buoyant Spirit.' The elf gave him a light kiss on his forehead in gratitude and then stepped below deck. Pleased with himself, Ahren returned to Trogadon, who was strangely relieved on hearing that the business only involved a tenacious would-be student. Several days passed by in pleasant monotony. Ahren enjoyed his time with Khara and their companions, meditated with Culhen, and went on board the Buoyant Spirit from time to time in order to have conversations with Fisker. Ahren wanted to get to know the Paladin better now that he understood the full scope of the conflict that Fisker and Aluna had brought about. His original motive had been purer than pure, trying to help the pirate out of his current difficulties, but if he were honest with himself, he also had a selfish reason – he wanted to learn from the mistakes of others so that he could in timely manner circumnavigate the most dangerous rocks that might manifest themselves in his relationship with Khara. One afternoon, he was sitting in the shade on one of the two comfortable high-backed chairs which the captain had the sailors bring up to them on the Buoyant Spirit's quarterdeck. They were sipping cool wine, and Ahren had to admit to himself that he felt right at home in Fisker's company. When the blond-curled man displayed his mischievous personality he seemed to Ahren to be more of a contemporary than anything else, and the Forest Guardian found himself taking on the role of the protector towards his elder during their chats. The rigging was creaking in the wind above them, but aside from that, and the sound of the pirates working on the main deck, it was very quiet and secluded in their little hideaway. Fisker had ordered the man at the wheel to fix it with ropes and then sent him away so that they could talk undisturbed. The Paladin came across as a majestic sovereign among his pirates. None of them would dream of questioning his decisions. 'What can you tell me about this Simian Island?' asked Ahren, breaking the peaceful silence. Fisker scowled in disgust, then took a deep draught of wine before passing his wineskin on to Cassobo. 'You've been spending too much time with Uldini and Falk, I fear,' he said, evading the question. Then he demanded the wine back from his monkey, who chattered in protest. 'Greedy guts,' he scolded, then laughed as Cassobo took another generous sup before handing back the vessel. 'That's what I often call Culhen too,' said Ahren in amusement, whereupon a howl of protest wafted over from the foredeck of the Queen of the Waves. 'Although my companion animal is louder at complaining than yours,' he added, rolling his eyes. 'You've never heard Cassobo screaming loudly,' joked Fisker before becoming serious when Ahren's look suggested he needed an answer to his original question. 'Alright, alright, Simian Island' said the Paladin, caving in. 'To be honest, there isn't really much to be said about it. Both times I attempted to retrieve my armour, I left Cassobo behind on the ship as he was too terrified. He is a fine strategist but a terrible fighter, you know.' At that, the little monkey bared his teeth, hid his bowed head behind his hands and pulled up his legs defensively. 'That's exactly what I mean,' said Fisker with a chuckle. 'Anyway, the first attempt was a complete disaster. The island is surrounded by treacherous reefs, and one of our three ships was holed before we had even noticed. The rest of us landed on a lovely wide beach surrounded by a dense forest. We rescued the crew from the sunken vessel, and it was late evening before we had brought everything and everyone safely on shore. We positioned guards strategically and built a large campfire in the hope that it would be a deterrent to Dark Ones. But it proved ineffective.' Fisker took another draught of wine and having emptied the wineskin he tossed it down onto the main deck and screamed, 'more wine! Your admiral is sweating and thirsty!' Laughter and hollering could be heard from the crew as Fisker turned to face Ahren again. 'Our guards were dragged away into the forest, screaming terribly as they were killed, and yet we still hadn't seen a single simian. Two or three of our men swore blind that they had seen furry white creatures over two paces tall but were unable to give further details. The crew's morale had completely collapsed, and so we set sail again immediately.' He leaned in towards Ahren conspiratorially. 'Pirates are fearless but also stubborn. If they don't want to fight, there is nothing you can do about it.' 'Your tales remind me of the time we hunted two Fog Panthers a few moons ago. They were a good team and while one of them distracted us, the other dragged away one of the hunters,' said Ahren grimly. That fact that he was now volunteering this episode as an anecdote proved how much he had experienced since the beginning of his adventures. 'Fog Panthers?' asked Fisker in amazement. 'Tough creatures, especially the older ones. Did you catch them?' 'Trogadon killed one of them, the other one fell victim to Culhen and me. We were the better team.' Ahren hadn't intended to be so boastful, but Fisker seemed to appeal to his weaker character traits. Culhen, on the other hand, was chuffed that at last Ahren was presenting their deeds in their proper light. A young she-pirate brought them two new wineskins, admiring Ahren's figure quite shamelessly, her eyes resting on certain parts of Ahren's body, to the point that he squirmed with embarrassment. Fisker laughed uproariously and the pirate giggled gleefully as she left. 'Don't worry about it. There's a wager doing the rounds among my crew, about which one of my buccaneering lasses will be the first to unhitch you from your swordswoman.' Ahren's eyes widened in horror. As he looked at Fisker pleadingly, the pirate clapped him knowingly on the shoulder. 'Take it as a compliment,' he said. 'Words like faithfulness and honour are rarely heard in the company of pirates.' 'Put a stop to it,' said Ahren firmly. 'If Khara hears about it, there will at best be a rise in the number of broken bones among the females in your crew, at worst a succession of bloody murders.' Fisker burst out laughing at the joke, only to stop when he saw the trepidation on Ahren's face. 'Are you serious?' he asked, and Ahren hesitated. 'It depends on whether she happens to be holding a weapon in her hand when she gets wind of this bet. Then it could certainly get nasty,' he elaborated. 'You do live dangerously,' said Fisker admiringly. 'Not really,' said Ahren. 'I'm perfectly safe by Khara's side.' Fisker sighed and was silent for a while. Then he spoke again: 'Aluna and I were like you once. Well, not exactly, but similar. Before our soul-mates came into our lives. She and I, we cleansed the east coast of Jorath of all the Dark Ones that the Adversary had allowed to crawl onto land, not to mention several dozen monstrosities that were wreaking havoc in the ocean. A giant octopus, a deadly swarm of jellyfish, snag sharks, anything you can imagine. We felt invincible.' Fisker knocked back some more wine, his voice becoming less distinct as he talked on. 'HE, WHO FORCES enslaved the islands where Aluna was born long before my time and transformed their inhabitants into the Lost Tribe. That cut her to the quick, for she felt that it was her fault. Her people had lived in seclusion, keeping away from the fight against the dark god. Nobody was interested in the fact that Aluna was going to become a Paladin of the gods, it was a war that they thought had nothing to do with them. The islanders were easy prey for the Adversary. He put on a mask, brought them gifts, won over their hearts, and then stole their freedom with those damn necklaces – all that, just to harm Aluna.' Fisker stared into space, and Ahren was convinced that the drunken pirate would carry on talking even if the young Paladin were to slip away. 'In the beginning, Aluna was a force of nature, full of vengefulness, but over the years she became more and more fearful and possessive. She was afraid for everyone and everything that was important to her, especially her soul animal Fjolmungar. It became increasingly difficult to persuade her to take part in audacious battles, but the more I cared for her, the closer we became. She became less fearful once we had become a couple, but the gods must have already sensed our waning will for combat, for they sent us our soul-mates Telina and Wankuro.' Again, he raised the mouthpiece of his wineskin to his lips. 'It went downhill from then on. We fell head over heels in love with them, of course, but our feelings for each other remained. What followed was a maelstrom of tears, anger, and squabbling. Shortly before the Night of Blood, we decided to submit to the will of the gods, and our plan was that Aluna and I would go our separate ways after the final battle against the dark god so that we could all find some peace.' Fisker stared into Ahren's eyes. 'You know what happened then. With the Ancients we created the Pall Pillar, buried our slaughtered soul-mates, and now that we were together again, Aluna and I moved here to begin a new life.' He laughed self-ironically. 'In the end we created our own eternal war against each other.' 'Which we are going to bring to an end,' stated Ahren categorically and with more confidence than he really felt. Fisker's doubtful look spoke volumes, so Ahren quickly changed the subject. 'Tell me about your second visit to Simian Island,' he said curiously. 'Oh that,' croaked Fisker. 'To be honest, I was so drunk that I don't remember much. I needed some Dutch courage after the first fiasco, and once again Cassobo remained on the ship. I only know that we did go on shore and make our way inland, heavily armed. It was hot and there were no signs of Dark Ones anywhere. I carried on drinking, partly through nerves and partly because of the unbearable heat. In the end I was so drunk that I hardly noticed the ambush, which was maybe just as well. My drunken body must have given the impression that I was dead, because when I recovered consciousness, I was lying between two pirate corpses that had been torn asunder. That sobered me up, I can tell you. I raced through the trees and back to the nearest dinghy. Then I set sail for the Crow's Nest – the only survivor. On the way I met an allied captain who gave me a few of his mariners, and that was that. From then on, my people followed me everywhere, but nobody wanted to go anywhere near Simian Island.' He pointed down to the deck. 'I haven't mentioned the place for years, and these sailors are young enough not to be influenced by the old stories. For the first time in ages, I have the ways and means to recover my armour. And thanks to you lot, more than the courage born of despair to attempt it.' Ahren said nothing and considered what he had heard. Going onto this island would be far from easy, not to mention recovering Fisker's armour and weapons. 'You really don't know much about these Shadow Simians,' he said disappointedly. The blond-curled man raised his wineskin and toasted him exuberantly, clearly relieved at having reached the end of his story. 'Look at it positively, little brother,' he said jovially. 'When we go ashore, I'll be just as surprised at everything as you'll be.' Then Fisker laughed so exuberantly, and with such an air of derring-do, that Ahren couldn't help but ask himself how the irresponsible inebriate could possibly have survived the preceding centuries. They sailed for more than a week on their south-westerly course towards the southernmost island group known as the Shattered Poniard. Uldini and Jelninolan slowly regained their strength while Ahren carefully nurtured his developing friendship with the swashbuckling Paladin who regaled him with all sorts of stories from the Dark Days, causing the young Forest Guardian's hairs to stand on end. Ahren spotted Falk on more than one occasion looking over at them from the Queen of the Waves as they amused themselves on the quarterdeck of the Buoyant Spirit with stories and wine. One evening he was flown back to the Queen of the Waves courtesy of Uldini's magic, only to find his erstwhile master waiting for him, his hands clutched together behind his back. 'A word, boy,' he said gruffly. Ahren looked at him in surprise. Falk had rarely used that form of address since the young Forest Guardian's apprenticeship had come to an end. He walked towards his mentor, who was trying to smile at him but failing miserably. 'You look as though you've bitten on a lemon,' joked Ahren, but Falk sighed. 'His cockiness seems to be rubbing off on you,' said the old man cautiously, indicating over to Fisker, who was waving his wineskin exaggeratedly at Ahren before entering his cabin. 'Be careful that you don't adopt all his bad habits.' Ahren frowned irritably. 'I am establishing a relationship with a Paladin who is in urgent need of a genuine friend, and you're criticising me for that?' His voice came across as rough and overbearing but seemed to have no effect on Falk. 'That's exactly what I mean,' responded the old man calmly. 'You're beginning to sound like him – loud and overbearing. It doesn't have to be like that. You can become his friend but still remain yourself. I'm sure he comes across as very likeable to you, and you are accustomed to looking up to Paladins and learning from them, but Fisker is a different case.' Now Ahren was confused. 'Why do I have to make an exception of the one Paladin in whose presence I don't feel young and foolish?' Falk smiled. 'For that very reason. You are on the same level as he is.' Falk placed his hands on the young man's shoulders. 'Ahren, think about it. You two are of equal standing, therefore you don't need to imitate him. He has his way of journeying through life and you have yours. Or do you think his example is one worth copying?' Ahren thought for a moment, then shook his head. It was true that he didn't feel the same respect towards Fisker as he did to Falk, Bergen or Sunju. At first, he had thought that this was down to the Paladin having been so approachable and fair-minded ever since they had healed Cassobo. But Falk was right in one respect: Ahren was enjoying Fisker's company because they were on the same level and he didn't feel he needed to prove himself to the pirate captain. Falk had been his master and was in many ways more of a father to him than his real father, who was drinking himself to death in Deepstone. Bergen's charismatic manner reflected his true leadership qualities, which were so attractive that Ahren would have happily followed him anywhere. Ahren's short acquaintanceship with Sunju had not developed any further than a few brief sentences between them but it had been sufficient for him to value and admire the caring manner of this quiet woman. When he compared Fisker to the three others, then it was true that he was nothing more than a rascal. Nevertheless, Ahren had found it a relief that the Paladin didn't present himself as yet another awe-inspiring, heroic figure. Falk seemed to understand that he had got the message through to Ahren, for he took his hands off the young man's shoulders and winked at him encouragingly. 'By all means, spend some time with him,' he said. 'But maybe you can give Fisker a reason to look up to you. What do you think?' Ahren blinked in surprise and then nodded. Falk patted him on the back without saying a word before turning and walking away towards Trogadon, with the intention of playing dice. Falk is telling the truth, said Culhen, throwing in his tuppence ha'penny worth. You're slowly developing into an alpha. If a very naive and awkward one. A quiet wave of gravitas accompanied the animal's thought, suggesting that his friend had just been meditating. The wolf was spending a lot of his time in contemplation, which helped him counter the long, frustrating hours of boredom. Thanks for the compliment, responded Ahren as he walked over to Culhen. As was usually the case when he wanted to think things over in peace and quiet, he pulled out the thick comb and began grooming his friend's fur, which was encrusted with salt and dishevelled by the wind. 'First Fisker, then Falk, now Culhen,' said a familiar voice behind him as the sun, golden-red behind a narrow ribbon of cloud that lined the horizon, continued its journey downwards. 'When will you find time for me?' asked Khara. 'Whenever you want, Your Highness,' replied Ahren eagerly as he glanced lovingly back at her over his shoulder. 'Get a brush and then you can work on Culhen's other flank. That way I'll be finished quicker and we can do whatever you wish.' 'Nice try,' she laughed. 'But seriously, I've spent the whole day doing sword practice and now my arms are numb.' She frowned in frustration as she continued. 'I'm trying to incorporate the Void in my swordplay, but the moments of slipping in and out are causing me problems. I pause for too long in one position, and that would be fatal in a real fight.' 'Use a focus as an anchor,' said Ahren, realising as soon as he had spoken how meaningless the sentence sounded to her. 'I mean, concentrate on an ideal, a goal or a feeling that you have selected. Use that as your focus so that you can achieve the Void more quickly. It worked for me.' Khara smiled gratefully, stepped up to him and kissed him on the cheek. 'I'll fetch us some wine, you work away on your wolf and then it will be my turn, alright?' Ahren held up the comb with its broad, thick teeth and frowned. 'You want to be groomed too?' he asked, his voice sounding exaggeratedly incredulous, which resulted in him receiving a playful cuff on the back of his head before Khara sauntered off. On the spur of the moment, he called after her: 'Just water for me. I've had more than enough wine already.' If he wanted to be a role-model for Fisker, then he needed to start working on it. It was another eighteen days before they reached their destination, during which time Ahren made every effort to inspire Fisker into imitating him. He trained with the surprisingly mollycoddled Paladin, who would collapse after only a few training exercises and require long breaks to recover. Ahren mixed healing herbs into his wine and encouraged Fisker to reduce his consumption of alcohol a little. Whenever the self-proclaimed pirate rested his weary body, they would joke and exchange stories. Ahren would use them to highlight his motives for taking particular courses of action and to reawaken in Fisker his memories of compassion, goodness and the importance of protecting those who were weak. Amazingly, the blond-curled Paladin gave him plenty of free rein in his efforts to present himself as a role-model, and Ahren began to suspect Fisker was secretly eager to follow someone that he really believed in. Finally, one gloomy late spring evening, Captain Orben announced that they would soon reach the island group in whose midst, Simian Island lay. 'Tonight, we shall anchor and only sail on tomorrow,' he explained to the companions, who had gathered to hear the news. 'The tiny islands are too close together to risk sailing in among them at night.' 'Then I suggest everybody check their armour and prepare themselves for tomorrow,' said Falk tensely. 'If Fisker's description of the creatures on this island are true, our visit will be no walk in the park.' There was general agreement, and the rest of the evening was spent in silent concentration as everyone packed their belongings, examined their armour, inspected every buckle and loop and sharpened their weapons. The air was replete with the smell of oil and greased weaponry when they lay down to sleep, and Ahren felt the butterflies in his stomach, which he always experienced before an imminent battle. 'Well, well, well,' said Trogadon drily the following morning as he looked out into the thick blanket of fog hanging over the tiny islands, which the ships were navigating around with the minimum of sails up and moving very slowly. The steersmen of the two ships were constantly shouting back and forth to each other, relating their course and position. From time to time, the shadowy outlines of the Buoyant Spirit could be made out in the banks of fog, making her appear like a ghost-ship. 'Captain Orben says that fog is common in dense island groups like this one,' said Yantilla, who was standing with Ahren and Trogadon at the bulwark. 'He thinks it will rise at around noon.' 'Let's hope so,' said Ahren. 'It's impossible to see from the prow to the poop on our ship,' He gestured in annoyance at the thick, seething mass, which covered the ocean like a heavy woollen blanket. 'Are you so eager to race into battle against these mysterious Dark Ones, Squire?' Yantilla underlined her somewhat stilted question with a heroic pose that made Trogadon snigger. Ahren reacted instinctively with a sour look, causing the one-time mercenary to become extremely serious and bow apologetically. 'Forgive my forwardness, sir…' she began only for Ahren to cut her off. 'I must apologise to you, Captain,' he said curtly. 'This waiting around before a battle is making us all short-tempered.' Trogadon stroked his beard, his eyes twinkling wisely. 'The curse of every warrior,' he said understandingly. 'I'll go and get Khara, Falk and the dice. One of those will surely cheer up our sullen Paladin.' Ahren stared out to sea so that he didn't have to see the smirks on those around him. He said nothing. 'Am I completely out of my mind,' exclaimed the dwarf behind him, who was already standing at the hatchway that led below deck, 'or shouldn't the Buoyant Spirit be on the other side of us?' Ahren spun around and followed the direction of the dwarf's stubby finger, which was pointing through the fog towards the portside of the Queen of the Waves. For half a heartbeat he could make out the outline of a sail and the insignia of a familiar flag before the fog covered everything again. Ahren blinked irritably, then it hit him like a punch in his stomach. 'Down!' he roared as he heard a treacherous hissing sound. 'They're shooting at us from the portside!' He ducked behind one of the wooden structures on the warship that had been constructed for just such a purpose, pulling Yantilla in beside him. Trogadon dropped down through the hatch and banged loudly below deck, shouting out Ahren's warning to those who hadn't heard it. Deadly crossbow-bolts flew through the fog towards them as the ambush was sprung.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 16

The missiles bored into the thick wood behind which Ahren and Yantilla were hiding with a dull thud, as well as ricocheting off the deck or slamming into the ship's masts. Unfortunately, they were not merely hitting inanimate objects. Ahren could hear screams of pain all around him – at least a dozen voices – and Yantilla was gritting her teeth beside him. 'The idiots need to stop making such a racket – they're turning themselves into easy targets. They're providing the perfect directional assistance for the shooters in the fog.' Even as she was pointing this out to Ahren, a second volley of bolts was showering them, causing much of the screaming to suddenly stop. 'Whoever is attacking us, their tactics are dirty and hard,' said the gaunt woman, her mouth pursed. Meanwhile, Ahren had pulled himself back up onto his feet and taken Fisiniell from his shoulder. 'At least I'm ready for the fight,' he said grimly. He placed an arrow on his bow and waited for the insidious fog to reveal a target for him to shoot at. All around him he could hear low groans and whispered conversations – clearly, the crew had realised that any noise would betray them and lead to certain death. They could hear fighting coming from the Buoyant Spirit all the better now. It seemed they were under attack from more than one ship, for Fisker's crew found themselves in the middle of a bloody battle if the clash of swords and the screams of the wounded were anything to go by. Everything alright with you, big lad? Ahren asked his wolf, turning towards Culhen with concern. He could sense no pain coming from the wolf, which reassured him, but unfortunately the animal was only seeing the same grey as he was. Apart from the fact that I'm lying spreadeagled on the deck like a whelp, feeling absolutely useless, I'm fine, growled the wolf. 'We have to help them somehow,' said Ahren grimly. 'I'm all in favour of any suggestion that doesn't involve us all being turned into pincushions, Squire' said Yantilla beside him, in her customary commanding tone. Her response was accompanied by two dozen bolts slamming into the ship within sight of them, causing the thick wood to tremble and individual boards to splinter and begin to weaken under the aerial attack. Ahren looked at the gaunt woman in alarm, who nodded silently towards the Buoyant Spirit, before shrugging her shoulders. Much as it pained him, Ahren had to admit that the woman was right – in their perilous situation, the first thing they had to do was take care of themselves. He was about to creep along the deck towards the hatch so that he could consult with his friends, but then he realised that they had already begun to formulate a plan, for he could hear Mirilan as Jelninolan began playing a song filled with sunshine and warmth, drawing her bow along the strings of the Storm Fiddle. The melody echoed with the memories of sunburnt grass and dry steppes. Ahren could feel it getting warmer on board the ship, and now Uldini's crystal ball flew out of the hatch, shining brightly as it soared straight up into the fog. He heard the tell-tale hissing of the bolts as the enemy crossbowmen and women shot at the peculiar target that was offering itself to them, but no matter how many missiles hit the ball, the Arch Wizard's artefact remained intact. Uldini's crystal ball shone brighter and brighter until the light within it exploded in a silent bang, spreading out in all directions, ever so slowly in all its strangely muted glory, as if it too were fighting against an unknown enemy. Then the real sun broke through the fog and within three heartbeats the swathes of mist had vanished completely so that at last Ahren could see clearly. He gasped in amazement. Forty paces portside was a pirate ship, a row of crossbowmen and women in a line along its starboard railing, who had just been preparing their weapons to send the next volley, but were now confused by the dramatic turn in the weather. On the Queen of the Waves, however, the sailors and pirates who had escaped the missiles by lying flat on the deck and not saying a word quickly got back on their feet to find safety, for now they were without cover. While Ahren was still finding his bearings, Falk came storming out through the hatch onto the deck of the Queen of the Waves, his bow in his hand and shooting as he ran. 'Shoot!' he screamed at the top of his voice. 'Pepper as many of them as you can before they've reloaded!' Ahren raised Fisiniell upwards and let his bowstring sing repeatedly, drawing it again and again as fast as he could. The pirates on the opposing boat were standing there in an unprotected line, fighter beside fighter, and the following few heartbeats were to the young Paladin like a macabre game of skill in which he was trying to hit as many of the upright targets as possible. Arrow after arrow raced towards the opposing deck, and by the time the crossbow-fighters had overcome their surprise and fled in search of shelter, ten of their number were already dead, lying on the deck having been pierced by Falk's and Ahren's arrows. Then there was a dull banging noise from the Queen of the Wave's hatch, and a blink of an eye later a large piece of railing split on the opposing ship. The unfortunate soul directly behind it was lifted into the air and thrown across the deck while splinters of wood were driven into the trunks of the pirates left and right as they scattered in every direction. Trogadon let out a yell of victory, and when Ahren quickly looked to his side, he understood what had happened. The dwarf had dragged his heavy crossbow onto the deck of the Queen of the Waves, remaining all the while on the steps leading down to the inside of the ship so that only the top half of the warrior could be seen. He had shot with his new weapon from there, its heavy metal bolt having caused all the damage Ahren had just witnessed. Now the dwarf was struggling to cock the crossbow again, pulling at the metal lever that pointed upwards from the centre of the weapon. 'Imagine the damage I can do once I've learned to aim the devilish contraption properly,' he yelled enthusiastically. 'Salvo!' roared Falk, throwing himself on top of an unprotected sailor as the opposing crossbow-warriors began shooting again. There was the recognisable hissing sound, followed by the bolts smashing into their targets. There were two bell-like clangs as the iron missiles ricocheted off Falk's armour, while from the poop came the sound of a woman's scream as a sailor was hit. 'I don't want to hurry you, but you need to finish off those crossbow-fighters more quickly, Squire,' said Yantilla, gesturing starboard. Ahren had been concentrating completely on the port side, but when he risked a quick glance over his shoulder to starboard, he cursed loudly. A small, fast vessel was gliding between them and the Buoyant Spirit, which was being boarded by pirates from two other Hunting Dogs. He had no time for a more detailed look, for he had to concentrate on shooting at the crossbow-fighters while they were still reloading. 'Yantilla, order your people to take up position on the starboard side. Fight off the enemy if they try to board!' I can help you, said Culhen, who had been cowering all the while, but now positioned himself majestically on the prow. The sight of the enormous animal caused gasps of fear from the attackers on the pirate ships both port and starboard. Ahren allowed himself a grim smile as he emptied his quiver. The animal would be dining out on the fearful reaction of the buccaneers for moons to come. 'No ammunition!' roared Ahren, and Falk gestured to his own quiver, which only had three arrows left. 'You've become faster at shooting than me, boy,' shouted Falk as he continued to concentrate on making his bowstring sing. There were only four crossbow-fighters left and they seemed to have lost their hunger for battle, for the man at the wheel heaved to and brought what was left of the decimated crew to safety. Half-hearted cheers rang out from the deck of the Queen of the Waves, but already the Hunting Dog had crashed into her side and she was being boarded. Ahren spun around, drawing Wind Blade as he did so, and placing Fisiniell on the deck. Yantilla and her soldiers managed to fight most of the pirates off as they sought to gain a foothold, but a few managed to swing on board using ropes, trying to land behind the defenders. Ahren waited for his opportunity as a powerful, moustachioed man let go of the rope and drew his sword. Three quick thrusts from the young Paladin and the man was in serious difficulty, not having regained his balance after landing. Ahren continued to press, unwilling to lose his advantage. Finally, he found an opening in the man's defences, and with his next thrust Wind Blade was glittering red. The pirate collapsed, mortally wounded. Ahren drew breath while he quickly scanned the scene. The line of soldiers was holding, and now the Queen of the Wave's sailors were joining in, attacking the pirates with machetes and cutlasses. No sooner had the close combat fighting begun than Khara leaped up onto the deck and danced her way through the stunned attackers as they flinched back fearfully or were cut down by her blades. Khara's fighting style had always reminded Ahren of water – smooth and flowing, always searching for an opening, and adapting to the reality of the situation. But now there was also a calmness in her movements which strengthened her style, and he understood that she was using the Void to ease her way through the chaotic battleground. For a heartbeat he was jealous, but then he heard a defiant howl from behind, and as he spun around, he just caught sight of Culhen leaping across to the enemy ship, where he ran in among the panicked pirates. The wolf was the essence of power, biting all around him, shoving the sailors overboard and even making mincemeat out of one pirate who had hoped to catch him unawares from behind. Ahren cursed loudly and grasped onto a climbing rope, intending to swing over and help his friend, only to be stopped in his tracks by the wolf. Stay where you are, commanded Culhen sharply. I'm using your eyes to get a better overview. You can see everything that's going on here from your position, and that's more useful to me than an additional sword. Ahren stopped dead, stunned. This was the first time that the wolf had ever issued an order to him, and alongside his customary vanity and cockiness, his friend was also displaying an assurance in his present actions that was new to Ahren. The young Paladin trusted that Culhen knew what he was doing and so he continued to watch the battle between man and wolf from his position at the bulwark of the Queen of the Waves. The remaining five pirates on the smaller ship were now trying to coordinate their attack on Culhen, but thanks to Ahren's vision, the wolf anticipated their every move and one opponent after the other fell victim to the animal's teeth and claws. The battle to the left and right of Ahren was also nearing its conclusion, for no reinforcements were arriving from the pirate ship, and the rest of the attackers were easily picked off by Khara's blades, and by the weapons of the other defenders. Twenty heartbeats later and every attacking pirate on both decks was either dead or incapacitated. Culhen returned to his companions with an almighty leap, shaking himself vigorously as he landed, spattering blood in all directions. 'You could have done that over there,' scolded Trogadon, the other sailors and marines murmuring their agreement. Now you all look terrifying, said Culhen to Ahren mentally. This will help you, for the battle has not yet been won. His yellow eyes stared intelligently over at the Buoyant Spirit, which was now in serious difficulty thanks to the crews of the two Hunting Dogs. Ahren looked in disbelief and then gestured towards her. He had completely forgotten about their sister ship in the heat of the moment! 'We have to help them!' he shouted urgently. Everyone immediately set to work, using any available boat stake to push themselves away from the defeated Hunting Dog, and the steersman finally managed to turn the battleship in a slow arc. Ahren, meanwhile, hurried below deck to pick up additional quivers filled with arrows. Luckily, Trogadon had prepared sufficient weapons for Fisiniell over the previous few weeks so that Ahren did not need to worry about minimising their use. Arriving below deck, he ran into Uldini and Jelninolan, both of whom seemed completely exhausted. 'We could really do with your help on deck,' said Ahren as he rushed past them. Uldini responded with an angry snort. 'Do you realise how difficult it is to force your way through fog?' he asked angrily, only for Jelninolan to interrupt the childlike figure before he could launch into a tirade. 'We will gladly go up, but don't expect any miracles from us,' she simply said, and Ahren nodded. When he stormed back on deck, he grasped Fisiniell and looked across at the Buoyant Spirit, which was slowly nearing the Queen of the Waves. Ahren could see bodies lying scattered on the deck with more floating on the water and realised that the fighters on both sides of the raging battle were showing absolutely no mercy. The injured were being barbarically butchered and what he was looking at was a maelstrom of bloody swords and hacked limbs. 'The hatred between them is unfathomable,' said Trogadon grimly. Falk gripped the railing and leaned forward squinting to see more clearly. 'They are reflecting the hatred of their leaders – with just as much passion,' commented Falk darkly. 'I can see the flag of the Cold Woman but, where is she? Did she really order this ambush on Fisker without being here personally?' Clearly, Falk was keeping Aluna's name out of any talk for the moment in order not to demoralise the crew around them, referring to her pirate name instead. 'The question is: how did she know where we wanted to go?' grumbled Uldini. Surprisingly, it was Captain Orben who came up with the answer. 'Admiral Bocasso's next destination was hardly a secret in the Crow's Nest. And thanks to our ritual mountain detour, the Cold Woman would have had more than enough time to prepare this ambush.' 'All the odder that she isn't here,' added Yantilla. 'She will certainly come,' said Khara firmly. 'She just wants to soften up her enemy.' As if to underline the words of the swordswoman, an extremely fast and nimble little ship with hardly room for twenty mariners came from behind one of the nearby islands. A figure was standing on her prow. It was difficult to make out who it was in the distance, but Ahren recognised the tell-tale gleam of Deep Steel reflected in the sunlight. 'That has to be her,' he said, pointing towards the boat. Uldini squinted at the battle on the Buoyant Spirit. A fireball flew up from her deck and smashed into one of the Hunting Dogs, causing the ship to burst into flames. 'Fisker's battle wizards seem to be turning the tide in his favour at last. I think we should intercept the Cold Woman before she gets to him.' 'Maybe we can persuade her to stay away from him so that the two of them can avoid each other. She can protect Northern Jorath and he can protect the south – or something like that,' suggested Ahren helpfully. 'Yes,' said Falk in a monotone voice. 'Maybe.' Then his eyes glazed over. 'In any event, we need to be careful. Selsena says there is something enormous near her in the water.' He gestured the steersman to turn the ship's course so they could intercept her. The Queen of the Waves altered her direction, leaving the Buoyant Spirit, with her battle still raging, behind her on the starboard side. The sails billowed in the wind as they changed course. Ahren peered over at Aluna, trying to make out details that might help them better figure out the strange woman. The first thing he noticed was the large trident she was holding, clearly made from Deep Steel too and sparkling in the sun. Aluna's armour seemed to consist of some kind of scaly mesh, which protected all of her body, but for her head, which was uncovered for now. Long blond hair wafted in the wind, looking for all the world like a banner of war, and the upright pose of the Paladin reminded him more of a general than of a pirate queen. 'That looks promising,' he said quietly. 'Don't speak too soon,' warned Khara. 'Remember – of the two pirate fleets, hers enjoys the considerably bloodier reputation.' They exchanged looks, and Ahren briefly took hold of her hand. The thought that the conflict which had been afflicting the Cutlass Sea for decades had begun with a love like theirs filled him with unease. 'Poor Aluna,' whispered Jelninolan, and Ahren looked over again at the Cold Woman. She was now staring in their direction, and he could see that she was small in stature and terribly thin. Her face looked austere and deeply lined, like the furrows on a parched field, her dark eyes deep in their sockets. She raised her trident with surprising speed above her head and the boat slowed down as the crew hastily gathered in the sails. 'At least she wants to parley before the fun begins,' said Trogadon. 'Just to be sure, I'll cock my crossbow.' 'She is a Paladin for the love of the THREE!' said Uldini furiously. 'We will not touch a hair of her head.' 'That wasn't my intention,' responded the dwarf sulkily. 'But if I hit the ship's wheel, they won't be going anywhere if the talks don't go our way.' Ahren was uneasy at the thought of disabling Aluna's vessel, but as chasing her around the Cutlass Sea would clearly be a difficult task, he remained silent. 'Jelninolan, Uldini, what are you doing here?' The voice was cold and embittered, causing everyone to turn their eyes to the little woman in her scale armour. 'Did that louse hire you as battle wizards? He always had a weakness for such creatures. Have the Ancients, too, become corruptible in this messed-up world?' 'I am here as well,' said Falk, pushing himself forwards so that she could see him better. 'And our motives for coming here are good.' 'Dorian?' asked Aluna, her voice dripping with sarcasm. 'You have joined the ranks of the pirates? The last I heard was, you were wasting your life with drink and in the company of paid-for companionship, as is only right for anyone calling themselves a Paladin.' 'If only the news of good deeds would spread so quickly – even just once,' growled Falk through gritted teeth. 'Wishful thinking,' muttered Uldini quietly. Then he gestured towards Ahren with both arms and raised his voice: 'We have found the Thirteenth Paladin, and meanwhile the Adversary is stirring within his prison. We need all of you if we are to eradicate him off the face of Jorath before the dark god fully and finally awakens.' Aluna's eyes flashed as she took in his words. 'Spare me your theatricality and your superior language, little Wizard. I am no longer a simple fisher-girl who will run to do your bidding when you and your august words command it.' She pointed over to the Buoyant Spirit, where the battle was still raging not two hundred paces from them. 'The only surprising news you have for me is that the gods can send new Paladins out into the world when the old ones die.' A look of madness lit up her eyes. 'Which means that I can beat this useless good-for-nothing Fisker into a pulp without qualm and a superior specimen will take his place.' 'Don't even think about it, Aluna,' said Jelninolan severely. 'Almost eight hundred years had to pass before Ahren was born. Can you imagine how long it will take the gods to come up with another Paladin? Jorath does not have the time for that.' 'Damn it, we hardly have the time to entice you away from your disgraceful time-wasting before HE, WHO FORCES wakes up,' interjected Uldini furiously. 'This is not a waste of time!' screamed Aluna, almost out of her mind. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and the furrows on her face were drawn in an almost inhuman manner. 'Fisker must die!' Jelninolan gasped and shrank back a little. 'Uldini, her spirit!' she whispered. 'Do you sense it too?' While Aluna was signalling to her people to sail around them, Uldini was examining the wild-eyed pirate queen through his crystal ball. 'Her understanding is completely wrapped up in something. But in what? Revenge? Scorn?' Jelninolan shook her head. 'There is something working on her from outside,' she said. 'Time for plan B,' said Trogadon, heaving his monstrous crossbow onto the railing. 'I'm not so sure about…' began Ahren, but the dwarf had already aimed and squeezed the trigger. The wheel literally exploded under the force of the impact – the unfortunate steersman skewered by its shards in an instant. Ahren quickly looked away and even Falk was a little green around the gills. 'Am I seeing things or do the tips of the bolts burst when they hit the target?' Trogadon seemed genuinely chuffed and caressed his crossbow. 'For soft targets like wood or something similar I use a bolt with a softer metal tip. The hardened ones are especially for targets like Glower Bears or Sicklehoppers.' Aluna, however, was staring in disbelief down at the remains of her steering wheel and the bloody corpse of the man who had just been holding it. 'So, you are allying yourselves with Fisker then,' she said an a peculiarly flat voice. 'We are allying ourselves with no side,' said Ahren hastily, waving his arm to draw attention to himself. 'We all need to stick together until the Adversary has been overcome. Surely you can put aside your rancour until we have fulfilled our task.' 'So full of righteousness,' said Aluna, raising her free arm above her head as if she were summoning up a spirit. 'First, you must experience two lifespans of grief, loss, rage and betrayal, little Paladin. After that, let us discuss the purpose of our existence.' 'We have all experienced hard times and have had to overcome crises,' began Falk severely, but Jelninolan shook her head. 'She doesn't hear you,' said the elf sadly. 'Not really. Her own thoughts are being weighed down by the wishes and desires of another.' 'What does that mean?' asked Khara, puzzled, at which point the sea around the Buoyant Spirit exploded and a creature arose from the depths, whose size pushed the two Hunting Dogs aside, where they bobbed like toy boats. 'Impossible,' gasped Uldini, staring in horror at the water snake, whose deep blue scales were shimmering in the sunlight. The creature's body must have been at least four paces across in diameter and the mouth in its flat head was large enough to swallow a horse. While Fisker's pirates screamed in terror, the creature wrapped its extraordinarily long body around the Joi-de-vivre several times and began to squeeze the vessel. Ahren couldn't believe his ears as her timbers began to creak. 'The snake will break the ship into a thousand pieces,' he said despondently. 'How could a Dark One like that appear out of nowhere?' 'That isn't a Dark One,' said Jelninolan in bewilderment. 'It's a soul animal – Aluna's soul animal.' Falk blinked, flabbergasted. 'Are you sure? Her snake was at most four paces in length the last time I saw it, and no thicker than my torso.' Uldini looked at it through his crystal ball, only to utter a scream and avert his eyes. 'Blood Magic,' he said, appalled. 'Look for yourselves.' His crystal ball began to glow, its light shimmering weakly as it spread outwards. But when the light hit both Aluna, who was standing in a triumphant pose, and her enormous snake, the scales on her Paladin armour, as well as those of the mighty creature, shone brightly, revealing toothlike, blood-red patterns, decorating each individual scale. Jelninolan's face paled and she covered it with her trembling hands. 'Magic of the Ire Elves,' she gasped from behind her fingers. 'And a botched job too,' said Uldini, horrified. 'Just look at the way the power-lines are…' 'No time for that,' said Ahren urgently. 'We've got to get Aluna to be reasonable or the Buoyant Spirit will go down with all her crew.' The pirates from the Cold Woman's fleet dived off the constricted vessel's deck and swam back to their comrades just as the snake was lowering her head to the poor devils left on the Buoyant Spirit, who were now totally at the mercy of the creature. Ahren watched in horror as one of the red-robed battle-wizards disappeared screaming into the enormous gullet, having plied the beast in vain with sparks of lightning. 'Wasn't that…,' he began, but hadn't the heart to complete his question. 'Yes, that was Linan,' responded Jelninolan, ashen faced. 'And I never had the chance to tell him if he was to become my student or not.' 'Aluna, stop this madness!' roared Falk imploringly, but the women didn't seem to hear him. 'Dear Fjolmungar, darling Fjolmungar,' she murmured lovingly, 'you may feed on them all, but bring me back my Fisker so I may slaughter him myself.' Her voice was suddenly like that of a small girl begging her parents for sweets, and the change in the relationship between woman and beast was as dramatic as it was disturbing. Jelninolan breathed in sharply. The snake hissed aggressively before screaming back at Aluna. The enormous creature redoubled its squeezing action and the first planks of the Buoyant Spirit snapped loudly, another screaming pirate disappearing down the snake's gullet. Suggestions, anyone?' asked Falk weakly, while they all watched Fisker's ship beginning to implode. 'Captain Orben – bring us closer to the Buoyant Spirit!' commanded Ahren, waving his arm helplessly. 'We can at least rescue those who are trying to flee the beast.' He pointed at the few pirates who had escaped the crossbow bolts and were furiously swimming towards them as the Cold Woman's jeering crossbowmen picked them off. 'And Aluna?' asked Khara, gesturing down towards the woman on the deck of the ship below them, babbling away to herself and the snake. 'Her wheel has been destroyed, she won't be travelling anywhere,' responded Falk, his voice severe. 'We can try to bring her back to her senses later – but for now, we need to get those people away from the furious snake.' The ship slowly began to turn. Ahren could see Trogadon tautening his crossbow again. 'What are you planning on doing?' he asked sharply. The dwarf pointed at the enormous snake. 'A bolt won't kill him but it might help to persuade Aluna that we are not taking this lying down, while her soul animal sinks a whole ship,' explained the dwarf, groaning as he turned the tensioning lever bit by laborious bit. 'Unless, of course, Paladins are now allowed to eliminate more things than we normal mortals.' Ahren chewed his lip in consternation. Fisker's behaviour had been questionable enough, but Aluna seemed to be completely out of her mind. Was the dwarf right? Were the pair getting special treatment because Jorath's future depended on all the Paladins? Ahren had no plan, no flash of inspiration which might help them out of this jam, and so he stared first at the dwarf, then at his other companions, a look of helplessness on his face. 'Can we chase Fjolmungar away be means of magic?' he asked finally. 'Before he surfaced and attacked aggressively, we were at least able to talk to Aluna.' Uldini shook his head decisively. 'Those runes on his body protect him from charm attacks. Doubtless, they were added as a reaction to Fisker's fondness for battle wizards.' Falk gestured to his bow and shrugged his shoulders. 'There is no way I can pierce the snake's scales with my weapon,' he said regretfully. 'If we are going to act, then we will have to make do with Trogadon's crossbow and Fisiniell.' They were gliding closer to the stricken Buoyant Spirit. She was leaking in three places and clearly couldn't be saved. The sound of the snake chewing with relish was now reaching their ears, and as soon as Ahren heard the sound of grinding teeth, his attitude altered. 'Why is he chewing?' asked Trogadon with a pained expression. 'Snakes only swallow, don't they?' 'Fjolmungar has teeth,' said Falk darkly. 'And I would hazard a guess that he's masticating slowly on purpose. He's enjoying the terrified looks on his victims' faces.' Ahren wrenched Fisiniell from his shoulder in reaction to Falk's prompt and the ferocious glare burning in Fjolmungar's eyes. The companion animal really seemed to be relishing the pain and fear that he was spreading. I'm not like that! said Culhen, bridling as the memory of the wolf wreaking havoc among the pirates a moment earlier flashed through the young Paladin's mind. I did it to help and to protect you all. What's happening here is pure butchery. Ahren mentally reassured his friend as he nodded to Trogadon and the two of them aimed at Aluna's companion animal. They were still a good forty paces from the sinking Buoyant Spirit. Orben had cleverly used the burning Hunting Dog as visual cover, protecting themselves from the missiles coming from the other pirate ship as they drew nearer. 'Anyone have any better ideas?' asked Ahren glumly, not at all convinced that shooting at Aluna's companion animal would improve the situation. He was quite sure that were anyone to shoot at Culhen, he certainly would never negotiate with them afterwards. But everyone remained silent, and when yet another battle-wizard was bitten in two, Ahren lost patience. This was nothing less than a cold-blooded massacre, and if the creature demolishing the ship had been a Dark One, he would have acted long ago. He remembered back to Trogadon's question regarding how many extra privileges a Paladin was entitled to, and although he still didn't know the answer to that, there was no doubt Fjolmungar had strayed far beyond the bounds of what was permissible. The snake then snapped his teeth at Fisker, who threw himself sideways, and the young Forest Guardian's decision was made. 'Let's try it,' said Ahren, 'but try to injure him only and keep him alive.' 'As if we could possibly miss this enormous monster,' murmured Trogadon, aiming carefully before squeezing the trigger. Fisiniell's arrow bored with pinpoint accuracy into the snake's scales causing him to hiss angrily while the crossbow jolted in the dwarf's hands, having sent the thick bolt to sink into one of the snake's many coils, digging deep into his flesh and tearing open a big hole, from which dark blood began to spurt. Fjolmungar threw his head up and rocked it from side to side, roaring in all directions, his body contracting in a frenzy of sheer rage. The wooden planks of the Buoyant Spirit splintered and snapped, the ship finally losing the will to live as her frame cracked into several sections. Fisker waved at them, panic-stricken and Uldini gestured to Jelninolan to be at the ready. 'I'll bring him here, you catch him,' he groaned, waving his arms in a gesture that seemed to suggest capturing. 'No time for niceties.' Ahren continued to shoot at Fjolmungar, who hardly seemed to feel the arrows, while Fisker felt an invisible jolt that threw him into the air at high speed and sent him flying towards the Queen of the Waves. 'Too fast, much too fast,' wheezed Jelninolan, picking up her Storm Fiddle and playing a wild, high melody full of short, staccato notes. A wall of whirling wind suddenly manifested itself on the middle of the deck, scattering the terrified sailors in all directions. Fisker and the screeching Cassobo smashed against the invisible barrier of air, which caused them to brake in mid-flight, before falling and tumbling along the deck, while saving them from falling into the sea on the other side. 'That looked like fun,' said Trogadon, genuinely delighted. 'When this is all over, I'd like to have a go.' Khara, meanwhile, had run over to the groaning Paladin and his little monkey. She gestured reassuringly to the others. 'They're both fine – just a little winded.' Trogadon prepared another bolt on his crossbow and tautened it, his eyes having taken on an ice-cold look. 'This nasty wretch is showing no mercy.' They all understood what the dwarf meant as Fjolmungar began hunting down the fleeing pirates and either swallowing them or pushing them beneath the water with his body. If I ever turn out like that, said Culhen solemnly and in all seriousness, shoot me. We will take care of each other, said Ahren reassuringly, but the wolf's response troubled him. That's what Aluna and Fjolmungar are doing too. This time Trogadon shot a bolt into what could be classified as the snake's throat, three paces under his enormous head, the beast's eyes leering eagerly at them. Another hole was ripped open, blood spurting forth like a fountain, and the snake's fearsome roar was accompanied by Aluna's scream of pain and fury. 'We will kill you all!' she yelled, her voice cracking. 'You are all our enemies now!' 'So much for diplomacy,' said Uldini drily. 'At least the snake is heaving to. I think he's had enough for today.' Indeed, what the Arch Wizard said seemed to be true. The scaly body turned away and began to head for Aluna's incapacitated ship. 'We should get away from here before we suffer any more damage,' said Ahren, unable to shake off a feeling of failure. It was true that they had found Aluna – or rather, she had found them – but they had nothing to show for it apart from many deaths on both sides and a wounded companion animal that they had peppered with bolts and arrows in a highly personal manner. 'If we disappear from here, we will have to return with a whole fleet,' wheezed Fisker as he struggled up onto his feet. 'She knows that I have to get to this island and will set up a blockade all around it if we retreat.' Captain Orben pointed to the remaining Hunting Dog, whose sails had been unfurled and was gliding swiftly over to Aluna's ship. 'We need to decide quickly. I'd wager my cabin that she's going to cross over so that she can follow us.' 'Can we go ashore at all under these circumstances?' asked Uldini, frowning. 'I thought the surrounding reefs would make safe passage difficult. And with a pirate ship and a furious sea-snake on our heels, I'd imagine it's impossible.' Captain Orben nodded, and a silence fell over the group. Ahren was trying to come to terms with the fact that they were about to sail away empty-handed and with their tails between their legs when suddenly Falk smiled and shook his head. 'I can bring you through the reefs, and under full sail, to boot.' Ahren and the others looked at him sceptically, whereupon the old man shrugged his shoulders with a grin. 'Well, with Selsena's help, I mean.' 'Of course,' said Uldini, immediately shooing the steersman away from the large wheel so that Falk could take over control. 'She can tell you where the reefs are lying, and then you can manoeuvre around them.' Falk nodded and a hopeful murmur arose among the mariners as they realised that they would be steering towards dry land, where they would be safe from the enormous snake. Even the fact that the island had aggressive Shadow Simians didn't seem to bother them at that moment. Falk began to steer the ship towards Simian Island less than two leagues ahead of them while Captain Orben ordered his crew to set sail. Meanwhile, Ahren and Trogadon retired to the stern of the ship from where they could observe Aluna and Fjolmungar. And indeed, the pirates were clambering from Aluna's incapacitated little vessel onto the undamaged pirate ship, leaving the incapacitated barque to her own devices. But when Aluna leaped onto her sea-snake's back, the Arch Wizard and the young Paladin gasped in unison. 'That's not a saddle on the snake's back, is it?' asked Trogadon, flabbergasted. Khara nodded as she looked on, her eyes scrunched together. 'It must have been submerged earlier,' she murmured. Then Fjolmungar began to approach – diving under the waves and re-emerging every so often, his snaky body rhythmically rising so that Aluna could gasp for air every few heartbeats before she was submerged again. 'She's certainly tough – I'll say that for her,' said Trogadon admiringly. 'And she's also completely mad, unfortunately,' added Jelninolan forcefully. 'What do you mean?' asked Ahren. The woman certainly behaved in a wild manner, but the Forest Guardian was surprised by the unusual harshness of the elf's verdict. 'She has strengthened her connection to Fjolmungar,' said the priestess. 'The runes that you noticed on his scales and on her armour are connective glyphs, as used by our Animal Whisperers. Except these ones are of a crudely modified form.' 'You referred to Blood Magic earlier, didn't you?' said Ahren to Uldini, inviting him to provide an explanation. 'Aluna was born without the gift of magic. But anyone can execute Squirmfish Blood Magic once they have submitted their will and a suitable living offering,' he said, his voice laden with meaning. 'Are you telling me that she sacrificed humans so that Fjolmungar would grow, and to protect him against battle magic?' asked Ahren in disbelief. If that were true, then they were certainly doomed. Ahren could not imagine himself ever going into battle beside such a monstrous person. Jelninolan shook her head. 'I'm certain she only sacrificed animals like boar and goats at the start. But as Uldini has just mentioned, the power-lines between the two of them have been badly aligned. I'm fairly sure that Fjolmungar has the upper hand in their connection and that he is projecting his emotions onto her.' 'And that bastard has always hated me,' added Fisker, Cassobo nodding in agreement. 'He always wanted Aluna only for himself.' 'Well, he seems to have got his way,' said Uldini, his lips tight. 'Our Aluna appears to have gone too far in her sorrow and rage over your separation and botched up the bonding ritual. And I'm certain that Fjolmungar egged her along in the wrong direction.' 'But our companion animals are supposed to help us maintain our connection to the creation,' interjected Ahren doubtfully. 'How can he have developed such a destructive attitude?' 'Aluna's heart was broken so many times, and he had to suffer along with her on every occasion,' said Jelninolan, glancing contemptuously over at Fisker. 'It might well have come to the point where he decided to protect Aluna from everything and everybody that might hurt her. And at any price.' Ahren looked over at Fisker and Cassobo. The Paladin and his companion animal were very alike behaviourally and would goad each other on when it came to things like drinking or merrymaking. If there were a similar dynamic between Aluna and Fjolmungar, the maelstrom of rage, sorrow and emotional damage could easily lead to a downward spiral, ending in the very spiritual dependency that Jelninolan had just described. 'We need to separate them from each other immediately,' he said firmly, only to be interrupted by Falk. 'One thing at a time, lad!' he shouted, his face the picture of concentration. 'We are about to reach the reefs of Simian Island, and I could really do with your help, and Trogadon's too. I'm going to have to steer the wheel sharply to get us through here. Captain Orben, I'm depending on you to instruct your crew – after all, I really am no sailor. And you are all going to have to do whatever I command.' The captain saluted and strode to the quarterdeck railing, from where he started shouting out orders, which were immediately followed. Ropes were lashed down, hatches closed, and more than a dozen sailors climbed onto the rigging, ready to unfurl sails when ordered. 'The rest of you had better bind yourselves fast,' said Ahren uneasily. 'This is not going to be a walk in the park.' 'I'll take care of Culhen,' offered Khara, and Ahren threw her a thankful look. 'And I'll keep an eye on our pursuers,' announced Uldini, floating pointedly above the deck. 'There's no chance of me being swept away.' 'I can assist a little when it comes to the wind in case a manoeuvre goes wrong,' said Jelninolan, lifting Mirilan to her shoulder. 'But don't rely on it too much, my dear Falk. I can only help you two or three times at most.' Falk nodded, concentrating intently. 'Stop talking, all of you, unless you have something important to relate. I have to follow Selsena's instructions, and they've been growing more and more cryptic, ever since she's become a fish.' 'A whale,' said Trogadon correcting him – rather unhelpfully. 'She is a whale.' Falk threw him a murderous look. The dwarf responded by pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows but didn't say another word. He was standing to the right of the old Paladin, while Ahren was to his mentor's left, both ready to grasp the large wheel should Falk give them the order. Ahren saw Simian Island in front of them, getting closer all the time, and he calculated that they were no more than half a league from the shore which promised them treacherous shelter. The waters all around them were rippling, a sure sign of the insidious reefs lurking only a few hands below the surface. Ahren had overheard enough of the sailors' tales on deck the previous evening to know that the sharp, rock-hard corals could rip apart the hull of a ship in no time at all if she ran into them at a rate of knots. 'Uldini, how far behind are our pirate friends? Any chance that we can slow down?' asked Falk, his voice on edge. He seemed to be plagued by the same fears as Ahren. 'We're a good distance ahead of them, but if we go any slower, the pirates and Fjolmungar will be able to catch us,' was the sharp rejoinder from the Arch Wizard, who was keeping an eagle eye on their pursuers. 'Oh…and the bastards are preparing Fire Arrows now. I suggest we accelerate rather than decelerate.' Falk shook his head. 'The THREE be with us,' he murmured. 'I really hope the old girl will be able to lead us safely through here.' 'You're not the only one,' added Trogadon quietly, and already Falk was giving the first order and grabbing the wheel frantically. 'Starboard!' roared Falk, beginning to turn the enormous wheel, which was only reluctantly turning, thanks to the resistance the rudder was encountering due to the ship's rapid motion. Ahren and Trogadon threw themselves into assisting the old man while Uldini groaned at the stern and quickly uttered a spell. 'You almost broke the rudder blade,' he said, staggering. 'I've temporarily strengthened it. By the gods, my crystal ball has me spoiled. Conventional magic is hard work.' Uldini's intervention may have saved the ship's steering from snapping, but the three companions at the wheel were struggling against the resistance which was all the greater thanks to the Arch Wizard's spell. 'Selsena says we have to make a sharp left shortly and slow down at the same time. Can you manage that, captain?' groaned Falk. Orben was about to answer but at that moment there was a sharp, penetrating scratching sound from below, so that he merely nodded while gesturing to two sailors to check below deck if the reef had damaged the hull. Ahren could see the colourful coral reefs both port and starboard and it almost seemed as though the Queen of the Waves was sailing directly over the obstacles, rather than following the narrow passageway that Selsena was guiding them along. 'Now!' roared Falk and they immediately began turning the stubborn wheel in the opposite direction. Simultaneously, Orben yelled out a battery of orders which the crew furiously implemented, rapidly gathering in the sails in order to slow down the vessel. 'Not enough!' screamed Falk, struggling with the wheel. 'We're going to hit a reef!' The sailors threw each other terrified looks and more than a few prayers to the gods escaped their lips, but suddenly Jelninolan was playing a long, single note on her Storm Fiddle which lasted for ten heartbeats, blowing a strong wind into part of the rigging. The Queen of the Waves was almost spun around, enabling Falk to immediately turn the wheel in the opposite direction and direct her once more towards Simian Island. There was another scratching sound against the hull of the ship, louder this time and more terrifying, but the sailors under deck shouted up that no water had got through. 'The Queen is still sound but with every collision the likelihood of a leak is growing,' warned Orben, his face bathed in sweat. 'I don't want to be a spoilsport, but Fjolmungar is getting steadily closer. We need to pick up speed again,' warned Uldini. Ahren risked a glance over his shoulder. The sea-snake was only four furlongs away, and the smaller, faster pirate ship with her daring manoeuvres was also bearing down on them. Folk nodded doubtfully. 'Full speed ahead! Selsena says we can manage the next five furlongs with only minor course adjustments before we reach the next bottleneck.' Orben had his crew sweating in no time and soon the fresh coastal wind was blowing the fully unfurled sails. Falk was turning the wheel with the help of his companions, first this way, then that. Ahren's breathing was becoming more laboured, and his arm and shoulder muscles were burning from the effort. Falk was suffering too – only Trogadon seemed totally unaffected. 'Damn it, this is not good,' said Uldini behind them. When Ahren turned around to look, he knew saw what the Arch Wizard meant. The pirate ship was racing towards them – her greater nimbleness and her shallower draught were to her advantage compared to the Queen of the Waves, who was ploughing forwards as best she could. The first oil-dipped fire bolts were already being shot from the deck of the Hunting Dog although as yet, they were splashing harmlessly into the water behind the larger ship. 'They're catching up with us,' said Ahren, gritting his teeth. 'The next salvo could well cause our sails to burst into flames!' Uldini cursed and raised his crystal ball over his head. 'There's nothing to be done for it, I must try something. Everybody, close your eyes. Now!' he commanded. Ahren quickly covered his eyes with his hands, but nonetheless made out through his closed eyelids a blinding flash of light, which shone for roughly a heartbeat. He heard cries of pain all around him and knew that some of the sailors had either ignored the warning or not reacted quickly enough. Ahren opened his eyes, blinked and saw several men and women from the crew kneeling on the deck, tears streaming from their eyes. Ahren was wondering what effect the light charm might have had on their pursuers when he heard an ear-splitting cracking and crunching behind him. He spun around and saw the pirate ship in the distance on its side in the water. Her planks had been ripped apart the whole length of the ship, and water was pouring into her. The blinded steersman was hanging like a rag doll on the smashed remains of the bulwark and the rest of the pirates were leaping and tumbling blindly and aimlessly overboard, but the treacherous reef gave them no hope of survival. Those who hadn't jumped onto the corals immediately below the surface of the water were thrown repeatedly against the razor-sharp formations by the waves. They had no chance of survival. Ahren felt pity for the unfortunate pirates but then remembered how they had laughed as they had shot at the people fleeing from them in the water, and his heart hardened. They had deserved their fate. Instead, he looked over at Fjolmungar, who had slowed down considerably and was throwing his head from side to side, clearly blinded by the light charm. 'Hold the wheel,' said Trogadon before storming away. 'Where are you going?' shouted Falk furiously, as both he and Ahren became grimly aware of how much harder it was too steer without the dwarf's assistance. Trogadon didn't respond, concentrating instead on tautening his crossbow and gesturing with his chin towards the enormous sea-snake. 'I want to give Aluna a reason for disappearing. Fjolmungar won't let the reef put him off, and even if we make it onto dry land, he might make it close enough to the shore to cause real damage to the Queen.' 'Portside, Ahren!' commanded Falk, and the two of them struggled to turn the wheel, which now felt as if it were a defective millwheel that they were attempting to pull with their bare hands. With every crashing wave Ahren felt as though his arms were being torn out of his shoulders, and his feet kept slipping along the deck as he braced himself with all his might against the stubborn circle, which was at that moment deciding their fate. 'We could really do with your help,' gasped Falk, but Trogadon was already aiming over the railing at the enormous snake. 'No time,' shouted the dwarf. 'I have to shoot before he starts moving on again. My marksmanship has…well, room for improvement.' Then he shot, there was a loud bang as the crossbow's string hit the rebound plate, which was followed by a cry of triumph from Trogadon. 'Good shot,' said Uldini admiringly. Ahren only wished he could turn around and look, but every sinew in his body was tensed up, and he didn't dare to change position for fear the steering wheel would hurl him across the deck, or smash his hands if it started spinning uncontrollably. 'Tell us what's happening!' gasped Ahren. 'Our good dwarf has hit Fjolmungar cleanly. The blood is spurting nicely,' announced Uldini in a satisfied voice. 'I would say they've had enough for the time being.' The crew let out a cheer, but Falk roared at them. 'All well and good, but we still have a problem. Selsena cannot find an opening between the reefs wide and deep enough for us to get any closer to the island. We have to turn around or the ship will be smashed to pieces.' The joy on deck vanished like a solitary breath of wind on a hot summer's day and was replaced by a feeling of gloom and doom. 'If we turn around now, Aluna and Fjolmungar might have second thoughts and attack us,' said Ahren, expressing aloud what everyone else was thinking. 'We would be sailing right into their path.' 'I don't see any other alternative unless you can think of a way of getting us over this reef,' said Falk sharply. 'Ahren can't but perhaps I can,' said Jelninolan, immediately beginning to play a gently swelling melody. 'But you must hold the wheel completely still.' Already the waves of the sea seemed to be growing wilder and mightier, and when Falk and Ahren fell to their knees under the sheer power of the wheel, Trogadon rushed to assist them. 'Are you sure?' asked Uldini uneasily. 'You are attempting a powerful piece of water magic all on your own.' 'It's only a wave,' responded Jelninolan, her brows furrowed in concentration. 'The Stormweavers of yore were even able to influence the tides – I should be well able to bring a wave under control.' As Ahren struggled with might and main to maintain his grip on the straining wood, he couldn't help picking up on the hint of doubt in the voice of the priestess. Worried, he exchanged looks with Falk and Trogadon, who were clearly similarly concerned. He gritted his teeth and continued his struggles with the wheel. 'Khara and I can take over,' suggested Fisker, but Falk shook his head. 'Jelninolan's wave is churning, and shaking the rudder. If one of us lets go, the others will lose control.' He glanced left and right. 'The three of us will have to persevere, I'm afraid.' Ahren nodded grimly and summoned up all his remaining strength. The more the wave swelled under the hull, the greater the resistance on the rudder. The Queen was bucking now, and the first of the sailors began to bind themselves fast. 'You must keep the ship straight,' warned Jelninolan, pearls of sweat running down her face. 'If she turns sideways, she will smash against the reef and burst like an overripe fruit that has been thrown to the ground.' 'Thanks for the pep talk, darling,' gasped Trogadon. 'What would we do without your words of encouragement?' 'Shut your trap,' grumbled Falk, groaning. 'We're almost there. I can see the reef already.' Jelninolan nodded, Storm Fiddle's melody rising to dizzying heights. And as the notes were ascending, so too was the wave under the hull of their ship, and Ahren saw the water level raising one and then two invaluable paces. Jelninolan dropped to her knees, saying nothing but continuing to play, and Ahren screamed in pain as the ship's wheel seemed to develop a life of its own, deluding the exhausted Forest Guardian into believing it wanted to pull back from his embrace. His world was reduced now to a circle, two paces in diameter, and everything depended on his efforts to stop it from moving even a finger's breadth... His back felt as if it were about to snap in two, and beside him Falk let out a furious cry as the old man struggled to maintain control of the wheel. The sea whipped around them, and directly under them they heard a prolonged, terrifying scrunching sound, leading Ahren to the inevitable conclusion that the ship and all her passengers were about to be lost forever. Jelninolan broke off her magic, exhausted. Ahren expected the worst, but then the scrunching sound stopped and the reef, both starboard and port side, was replaced by a golden beach below them, the ship's sails billowing in the wind, as she shot onward. 'Hold tight!' roared Ahren instinctively, and suddenly he was glad that his hands were practically glued to the wheel. The Queen of the Waves hit the sand with a violent jerk, digging deeply into the soft island beach which the storm had catapulted them into. Ahren's strength abandoned him, his hands surrendered, and he was thrown across the deck until he crashed into the railing, which he held onto for dear life. Pain shot through his body, but at that moment his mind was full of Culhen's impressions as the wolf flew through the air, howling. The animal had been crouching down on the foredeck beside Khara, having had no opportunity to tie himself fast, and so the wolf was helplessly subjected to the decelerating force caused by the violent impact of their unusual docking. 'Culhen!' screamed Ahren fearfully before his friend landed with a thud on the sand, his heavy body somersaulting several times before it came to a dead stop. 'Culhen!' screamed Ahren again, not receiving any messages from his companion animal. For a moment he feared that the unthinkable had happened, but then he sensed the wolf's dull pain, which Culhen felt throughout his body, but thankfully only superficially. Ouch, said Culhen, struggling up onto his legs and then shaking the sand off thoroughly. Let's not do that again for a while. 'Report!' commanded Captain Orben. Soon it was clear from the answers that everyone had survived their rough landing more or less intact. A couple of broken bones but nobody had been flung into the water or been killed by the impact. Ahren struggled to the prow of the ship, rubbing his bruised ribs. He looked down with concern at Khara, whose head was bleeding, but she waved him off when she saw the look on his face. 'Just a scrape,' she said as she struggled to her feet. 'I tried to hold onto Culhen, but he is ten times my weight and so I abandoned it as a silly idea. He flew onto the beach and I crashed into the bulwark.' Ahren took her gently into his arms, breathed a sigh of relief and kissed her on the forehead, causing her to flinch. 'Apologies,' he said quickly and let her go. 'There's going to be a nasty bump,' said Khara, smiling crookedly. 'But at least we're here.' 'Yes, we are,' said Ahren. A chorus of angry voices coming from enormous simians reverberated through the dense vegetation of the island, promising them a bloody end. The young Forest Guardian frowned and added, 'Although I'm not really sure that's a good thing.'

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 17

Sven looked around at his subordinates and smiled. They had gained in self-confidence and now they looked up at him loyally as they sat around on a grassy knoll, where they had set up camp in the northernmost Borderlands. His plan to equip them, seemingly accidentally, with horses had worked brilliantly, and once his people had rescued the first few from the Low Fangs, it hadn't been long until they had come up with the idea of riding on the animals themselves, something normally only reserved for true knights. Sven's speech, exhorting the benefits of horsemanship and of how they might persuade the Baron that a mounted troop would be the ideal protective force for him, had persuaded the last of the doubters, and so he had sent the Moonrunner on missions to deliver messages to the Dark Ones in the region, that they should desist from killing horses but let them fall, accidentally, into the hands of the men and women now under his patronage. Spring was coming to an end and every one of his subordinates now possessed a horse, which ensured that they could travel quickly and comfortably from farm to farm, where Sven would orchestrate one heroic rescue mission after another, all the while diverting the most dangerous Dark Ones into the paths of other, less fortunate, captains. The results were proving very satisfactory. Now he looked down at the piece of parchment that a messenger, dressed in the Baron's livery, had presented him with on this beautiful sunny morning.  Urgent message – for the attention of Sven, Captain of the sixty-third platoon militia in the name of the merciful THREE.  On account of the reports to hand regarding the excellent performance of your troop, it is Baron Aconus's express wish that you report to him personally of the changes in your fighting techniques so that he may consider the implementation of said changes throughout the army. For this reason, you and your troop are to travel to the assembly camp ten leagues northwest of Three Rivers and await the arrival of the Baron with his guard, who will accompany you on a patrol through the Borderlands.  The protection of the Baron remains the utmost priority and it goes without saying that any contact with the enemy must not endanger his person.  Sincerely yours  Aide-de-camp, Miss Cosin,  The THREE Militia High Command. Sven feasted his eyes on the letter, and his heart jumped for joy at the success of his plan. The thought of escorting the leader of the militia into the Borderlands, where he would be under Sven's protection, pleased him no end, horror-vision after horror-vision flooding the High Fang's intoxicated mind as he imagined the multifarious ways he could end the life of that foolish little man. But that is not the plan, mused Sven, reining in his thoughts and reassuring the Thing within his eye socket that was twitching at his violent fantasies. The ending will be all the sweeter for it. 'Right, lads and lassies, listen to me!' he called out to his loyal followers who were just at that moment breaking camp. Heads turned towards him, and he savoured the admiring looks of the people looking up at him. 'We have been invited to accompany our beloved Baron through the Borderlands.' Gasps of astonishment rang out, and he raised his hand for silence. 'He wants to see for himself whether we are indeed the best damn unit that the whole militia has to offer,' he proclaimed and waited for the inevitable cheer to subside. 'This will simultaneously be our chance to prove to him the advantage of our brothers and sisters in the other regiments having access to their own horses too,' he added, his words being met with another cheer. 'Let us show him that we have found a way of saving lives, those of our fellow soldiers, and those of the innocent souls we have sworn to defend.' An even greater cheer rang out, which Sven allowed to die down with a smile before the soldiers began murmuring among themselves. 'This does NOT mean that you can relax!' he roared in a severe voice. 'I want you to check every strap, I want you to polish every buckle, I want you to clean every saddle! No holes in the tents, no tears in your clothing! If I find anyone bringing disgrace to our name, I will have you thrown out of our troop and transferred to another one, where you can march until your shoes have worn away and your feet have become blistered. Do I make myself clear?!' The soldiers scurried about, carrying out his orders, and Sven allowed himself another grin when he saw that in spite – or perhaps because – of the sting in the tail of his speech, they were glancing at him almost adoringly. These idiots would follow him anywhere. He realised that he enjoyed the taste of power. Soon he would lead an entire army, and they would follow him blindly. Whether they wanted to or not.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 18

'Shit, shit, shit,' said Trogadon once the primate sound had died down. 'We've jumped from the collapsing mine into the flooded cave.' 'The metaphors of like a true miner, but nonetheless apt,' said Uldini. They were all standing on the beach but for a few sailors who were checking out the hull of the Queen of the Waves inside and out for any signs of damage. Yantilla's marines had taken up a defensive semi-circular position around the companions and the sailors, their swords and spears pointing outwards just in case the animals who were making the racket might launch an attack. Falk and Ahren were standing beside each other, heads inclined. 'What do you think, boy?' asked Falk as he scratched his beard ruminatively. 'How should we proceed? We have a stricken vessel and are surrounded by Dark Ones, on whose territory we shall have to trespass in search of Fisker's armour,' he summarised. Ahren thought aloud. 'Fisker said that on their first visit they were only attacked on the beach when night fell. The second time they were attacked during the day but only after they had entered the forest. Perhaps that suggests a pattern. For the moment, they are making do with yelling, but they are not coming out from beneath the foliage. Is it possible that they avoid direct sunlight?' Falk nodded slowly. 'It is,' he responded. 'We really don't know enough, but your reasoning makes sense. Let's say it's correct – where does that leave us?' Ahren shrugged his shoulders. 'It means that we are secure for the moment,' he said. 'That gives us breathing space, during which time we can recover from the last battle and our flight. Perhaps our captain can get the Queen of the Waves back into reasonable shape by this evening so that at least we can anchor offshore. Hopefully, that will keep us safe from an attack at night, and then we can set off on our search tomorrow.' 'Sounds like an idea,' growled Falk. 'Let's discuss it with the others.' They turned around and saw the dour looks on their companions' faces. 'So?' asked Uldini snippily. 'What plan have the good Forest Guardians cobbled together?' 'Well, now at least you know how we feel whenever yourself and Jelninolan knock heads together to think up some charm or other,' replied Falk calmly. 'We are the Forest Guardians, and any fighting against unknown Dark Ones in there is definitely our domain,' added the old man sternly, gesturing first to the jungle behind them, and after that to himself and Ahren. Then he explained their suspicions and their rough plan while the others listened in silence. 'Why don't we just head off now and look for Fisker's stuff?' asked Trogadon, wielding his heavy hammer and swinging it from side to side. 'Because those simians know the island inside-out,' said Ahren firmly. 'If it gets dark while we're in there, we'll be feeling our way blindly without knowing exactly where we're supposed to be going. They'll have no problem encircling us and having us for supper before we get the chance to say, "Heroes' stew".' Then, why don't we create light?' suggested Yantilla, but Ahren shook his head. 'Then we might as well run through the forest waving our arms wildly, shouting: "Eat us alive, why don't you!". The light will lead them to us even faster.' 'Alright then, we'll go during the day,' decided Uldini, the others nodding their agreement. 'Captain, how is the ship looking?' Orben raised his three-cornered hat and scratched his head. 'We should be alright. Her hull is leaky in three places, but we'll be able to seal the gaps. The tar is going to have to dry first, though, which means we can't put her to sea until evening.' 'I can help you there,' said Trogadon. 'I have a few substances in my workshop that speed up the drying process. At least, so long as they survived our crash landing.' Khara looked thoughtfully towards the forest, from where angry simian sounds were echoing from time to time. 'A small group will make faster progress and less noise. And anyway, we need to guard the Queen of the Waves. Who knows how long Aluna will need to ride Fjolmungar before she meets a ship of her fleet, on which she can then pursue us again? If we are all exploring the island at the same time, then she can burn down our means of escape without us even knowing it.' 'Good point,' said Falk. 'Orben, Yantilla, your people will protect the ship.' The ex-mercenary was on the point of objecting, but Falk continued. 'That is an order, Captain,' he said firmly. The gaunt woman looked pleadingly at Ahren for support, but he merely shook his head. She gritted her teeth, saluted, and turned away to join her soldiers, who would be undertaking the watch. Trogadon chuckled. 'The good Yantilla seems just as unwilling to remain on the outside as I would.' 'I am going to stay here, anyway,' said Jelninolan, who seemed to be exhausted. 'I will heal the injured during the day and then I will rest. If pirates really do turn up, I can help out with one or two spells if necessary.' Uldini was about to speak but was interrupted by Falk. 'You are coming with us,' he commanded. 'If Ahren's suspicions are true that the simians don't like sunlight, then you and your crystal ball will be invaluable.' Uldini did not exactly look pleased, but he nodded hesitantly, nonetheless. 'My magic will hardly reach the heights of this morning but sending you in there without any back-up charms would be madness. Just don't expect miracles from me.' 'As if we ever would,' said Trogadon with a grin, which immediately led to a verbal duel between the two which, surprisingly, relaxed the tension. Their plan having been roughly agreed upon, Ahren went over to the sleeping Culhen and stroked his white fur gently, trying not to wake him. 'He's only concussed,' said Jelninolan behind him. Ahren turned around to face her. 'I've put him into a deeper sleep to accelerate the healing process. He should wake up right as rain in a couple of hours,' she explained. A wave of relief overcame Ahren. He inhaled deeply, only to experience a sudden sharp pain in his chest. He gasped and held onto his side. 'I think I must have a few bruised ribs,' he said. He had been instinctively taking shallow breaths since the impact, but now that he had become aware of the pain, it remained like an uninvited guest no matter what he did. Jelninolan frowned, ran her fingertips along his chest and the pain vanished immediately. 'I really need to find a way of incorporating classical healing magic into my Storm Weaving,' she said, panting with exhaustion. 'But for the moment, the old ways will have to do.' Ahren nodded thankfully, leaving his sleeping friend and then heading over to join Khara and Falk. The old man was plucking the feathers from his beard and throwing the sticky things gleefully onto the sand. 'At least we won't be needing Captain Featherbeard anymore,' he said, relieved. 'We don't have to deceive anyone here.' Ahren looked glum, for Falk's statement reminded him that, apart from Cassobo and Fisker, they had been unable to rescue anyone from the Buoyant Spirit. 'We really didn't come up trumps, today,' he said bitterly, but Falk shrugged his shoulders in seeming indifference. 'Get used to it,' said the old man coldly. 'You cannot win every battle – sometimes a retreat, unscathed, is a victory in itself. We didn't stand a chance against Fjolmungar today – he wanted to kill us, and yet we had to protect both him and his mistress to the best of our ability. None of us could possibly have known how greatly Aluna had changed.' Ahren looked over at Fisker, who was sitting sadly and speaking quietly to Cassobo. The little monkey was sitting on his friend's knees, looking up at him with compassionate, clever eyes. 'We should spend the rest of the day preparing our armour for a camouflaged march into the forest,' said Ahren absently. 'I think the three of us should set about doing that.' Falk and Khara agreed, at which point he excused himself and went over to Fisker. 'How are you feeling?' he asked gently, preparing for the worst as he anticipated the Paladin's response. 'The woman I loved over the centuries has fallen, thanks to Blood Magic, under the control of her companion animal, and only because we hurt each other to the point where she saw Fjolmungar as her only friend in the world.' The words, filled with self-loathing, spilled out of him. 'How do you think I feel?' Ahren said nothing but sat down beside Fisker. Cassobo stared at the young Forest Guardian, wide-eyed and pleading. No gestures were needed for Ahren to understand that the little monkey wished him to free Fisker from his spiritual anguish. But Ahren didn't know how to proceed. 'Maybe Uldini or Jelninolan will think of something,' he said lamely, but Fisker simply shook his head. 'You heard her. Aluna and Fjolmungar are protected against any magical intervention,' said Fisker wearily. Ahren mulled the situation over. They had to separate the two, far enough so that Fjolmungar's influence over his companion's spirit would disappear, but Ahren had no idea how they were to achieve that. 'Is there any way that we can lure her onto an island so that she has to leave Fjolmungar behind her?' Fisker seemed to know what Ahren was driving at. 'Their connection was always incredibly strong,' he said doubtfully. 'There could be twenty leagues between them, and they would still sense each other. And that was before the Blood Magic was added.' Ahren puffed up his cheeks, blew out the air, and closed his eyes in disappointment. They had already been forced into fighting Aluna and injuring her companion, albeit not seriously. He wanted to avoid another confrontation with her at all costs until there was absolutely no hope of her allying herself to their cause. 'Does she really want to burn down the whole world just to punish you?' he asked quietly. Fisker was the picture of misery as he raised his hands helplessly. 'That's what it looks like. Ever since the Adversary placed her people into bondage and forced them below the waves, she has felt herself to be abandoned by the gods. The Night of Blood finished her off entirely. She only had me and Fjolmungar.' He punched his chest angrily. 'And you know how helpful I was to her.' Ahren placed a hand on Fisker's shoulder, unable to come up with the right words. The relationship between the lovers was too muddled, the war between the two anguished Paladins too intense for a few words from Ahren to have any effect. He was simply there for the desolate man, and they both stared into nothingness, caught up in their own thoughts. Night had fallen and was now accompanied by a continuous, heavy rain, which drummed down heavily on the deck of the Queen of the Waves. Captain Orben and Trogadon had kept their word and patched up the hull of the ship as best they could, and she was now anchored just offshore, having been dug out of the sand by the crew in record time by allowing water to flow into the newly-formed channel. Even Selsena had helped with her powerful whale's body, by taking a rope in her mouth and assisting as they had dragged the structure back into her natural element Ahren and his companions were sitting together in the cabin, discussing their plans for the following day, and enjoying a hot wine that Jelninolan had prepared. They were all thoroughly wet from their labours in the rain, and although the Cutlass Sea was a very warm area, the rain drumming down had cooled the night air considerably. And nobody gives a second thought to the poor wolf, grumbled Culhen from his place on the foredeck of the ship. The animal had refused to join them in the narrow confines within and was now lying soaking wet in the rain and feeling terribly sorry for himself. For the love of the THREE, you're an Ice Wolf, Ahren responded, repeating himself for the twentieth time. A bit of lukewarm water isn't going to kill you. Says the fellow knocking back his hot wine, said Culhen in a whiny voice. Ahren rolled his eyes and was just coming up with a suitable retort when he was distracted by Uldini. 'Right then, we have an island teeming with unknown Dark Ones, which are mutated from some kind of simian or other. Nobody has ever seen them properly, and nobody, apart from Aluna, has ever escaped from here scot-free. The question is: how did she manage it, and can we repeat it and recapture Fisker's armour?' he asked in a scolding voice, addressing everyone in the cabin. Fisker shrugged his shoulders, the others looking similarly nonplussed. Ahren had spent the whole afternoon mulling over the dilemma of Aluna's condition and he had to force himself to concentrate on the task in hand. 'I think that she slipped past them, somehow,' said Ahren. 'Perhaps Fjolmungar distracted them at the shore somehow while she went off and hid the armour and weaponry.' 'He wasn't as big then as he is now, but impressive enough to draw attention to himself,' admitted Fisker. 'And she just had to come across some random place that struck her as a good hiding place, drop Fisker's things and then disappear again,' added Khara. 'Whereas we will have to actively comb the place in search of his possessions, and if we're unlucky, we'll end up searching the whole island.' There followed a period of silence until it was broken by Trogadon clearing his throat. 'Deep Steel is one of the rarest materials in the world,' said the dwarf, musingly. 'Is there any way you could cast a charm net that would track it down?' He looked at Uldini and Jelninolan, both of whom pricked up their ears. While the elf was frowning and considering the matter, Uldini was already rubbing his head enthusiastically. 'I can modify the charm I use for tracking down Dark Ones with my crystal ball. It can work as a compass to show us the way.' 'That would save us a lot of time and unnecessary fighting,' said Falk, relieved. 'But then we'll be going in there blindly,' said Khara anxiously. 'Or can your crystal ball look out for both simultaneously? For Dark Ones and Deep Steel?' Uldini shook his head. 'We will have to depend on our Forest Guardians.' 'Of course,' said Falk, scratching his beard. 'Right then – no sparkly objects when we head off tomorrow morning. I want everything metal to be either covered in grime or taken off and left on the ship. No armour that rattles. All clothing should be green or brown. Khara, Ahren and I have already prepared the rucksacks and picked out suitable pieces of clothing. Take whatever you need of them. We will slip through the forest like ghosts and get out of there before the simians notice us.' Uldini threw Trogadon a challenging look. 'Wouldn't it be better if you stayed here?' The dwarf's beard positively bristled as the squat figure sat up, his back straight as a ramrod. 'What are you trying to say? A dwarf cannot be quiet? What a cliché!' retorted the squat warrior furiously. 'Just because I like being loud does not mean that I can't tiptoe along. Ask Khara and Ahren if I was a problem that time when we scaled the walls to get into the Brazen City.' Uldini dropped the subject. 'Are we setting off at the crack of dawn?' he asked, but Ahren shook his head. 'I think they're somewhat allergic to the light. It would be better to wait until the sun has almost reached its zenith,' he objected 'Great. That means there'll be time for a decent breakfast,' said Trogadon, smacking his lips meaningfully. 'That's that, then,' announced Jelninolan, nodding at the same time. 'I'm tired beyond belief and would like to extinguish the light.' Ahren would have liked to pursue the subject matter of Aluna, but everyone drained their goblets and retired to their hammocks. Khara gave him a silent kiss before leaving him alone at the table. He sighed, blew out the last candle and settled down, thinking the whole time of Aluna, and wondering what he could say to bring about a change of attitude in her. But when he fell asleep, he was still none the wiser concerning the matter. Except for Falk, Culhen and himself, all the companions were sitting on the beach looking for all the world like decrepit scarecrows. Ahren had to smile as he looked at Fisker, Khara and Trogadon, standing there disguised in the shreds and patches they had salvaged from an assemblage of garments. Many of the items were chosen on account of the suitability of their colours for disguise purposes, none fitting their wearers particularly well. Annoyed, Trogadon raised his right arm, which was hidden within a sleeve that was far too long. 'Do I really have to?' he pleaded. 'I won't be able to fight with this covering my armour.' 'The whole point is that we won't need to fight,' answered Falk in a voice that brooked no opposition. 'We are going to remain as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. If we do it properly, we won't need to use our weapons at all.' 'I'm sure we heard several dozen simians yesterday,' added Ahren. 'It could well be that they live scattered around the island, but if we charge in wildly, we run the risk of being outnumbered.' 'The only reason why Ahren and I are not entering the forest alone is because we have no idea of the enemies' strengths and weaknesses,' said Falk glumly. 'If tiptoeing doesn't succeed, then our group will have to be large enough for us to be able to fight our way to safety if necessary' 'Very reassuring,' murmured Uldini, the only member of the group not wearing camouflage. The Arch Wizard had simply taken off his black robe and was now floating in his loincloth beside them, so that it looked as if Uldini, the mighty Ancient, and Uldini, the frolicking child of the jungle, had metamorphosed into a curious symbiosis. Ahren guessed that the ageless Arch Wizard's time among the jungle tribes several moons earlier had influenced him to a far greater degree than the crotchety magician would ever admit. 'We know from what Fisker's pirates have related, that the simians are over two paces tall and have white fur,' Falk recapitulated, having responded to Uldini's comment with an icy stare. 'Which means it should be easier for us to spot them than the other way around. Culhen will try to pick up their scent and lead us along a safe route. You will follow wherever we go. We will proceed slowly and carefully. Make sure your unfamiliar clothing doesn't get caught on branches anywhere, and hopefully with a little luck we will manage to evade the Dark Ones.' 'Don't move now, please,' said Uldini, floating his crystal ball along the bodies of his companions. When it was Ahren's turn, he felt a certain warmth coming from Sun as the crystal ball brushed along Wind Blade in passing. 'A goodly amount of Deep Steel within the group,' murmured the Arch Wizard in a low voice. 'But not enough to distract my search charm.' He released the crystal ball which floated here and there like a dog following a scent, before finally disappearing between the trees. Ahren looked worried. 'Isn't that a little too conspicuous?' he asked doubtfully. Uldini shrugged his shoulders. 'At least it won't be glimmering. Better than if it's glowing in my hand all the time.' You can follow the ball now, reported Culhen, who had been busy checking out the edge of the forest for potential enemies. No gorillas nearby. Ahren nodded and gestured to the marines in the dinghies, who had been awaiting further instructions, that they should row back to the Queen of the Waves. He could see the look of relief on the men's and women's faces as they left the island behind them. Ahren ignored the nagging thought that he would only have been too happy to accompany them. 'Right, then,' he said quietly. 'Culhen says the air is clear for now. Let's proceed before the situation changes.' They left the sandy beach and slipped into the forest filled with Dark Ones who had hitherto conquered all those who dared to enter. The trees were tall and broad, their leaves long and unusually thick. The undergrowth in contrast was sparse with soft, thin branches and few thorns. The vegetation was nothing like Ahren had ever seen before, and he found himself stopping on more than one occasion to examine an unknown flower or vine. Somehow, this forest seemed to him to be a cross between the Southern Jungles and the familiar northern forests, but it was one in which he didn't recognise anything, which made him feel increasingly uneasy. His glanced at Falk, whose face suggested that the old man felt the same, but as total silence was the requirement of the moment, Ahren was left alone to his own thoughts. Well, almost alone. Smelling anything, big lad? he asked Culhen silently, his friend somewhere nearby, hidden by trees. Lots of things, but no large animals, said the wolf absently. 'I'm feeling exactly the way you are – the smells are all new to me. Do you have the feeling that there is something unnatural about the vegetation? asked Ahren in alarm. He thought of the Death Runner, the vine in the Southern Jungles that the pair of Fog Panthers had used as their lair. That plant, corrupted by the Adversary, had almost become a death trap, and the thought that there might be something similar here made a shudder run down Ahren's spine. No, nothing that doesn't belong to the gods' creation, said Culhen reassuringly. It's just that everything is strange. Well, that's something, thought Ahren, breathing a sigh of relief, Trogadon had once quoted the Dwarfish proverb: 'A stranger is only somebody you haven't drunk under the table yet.' It was the same here. Falk and he only needed to get to know the forest better, then they would manage perfectly well. At least there were no plants here under the influence of the Adversary. Ahren was pushing his way further through the undergrowth when suddenly Culhen transmitted a warning. Nobody move! ordered the wolf. Ahren raised his hand. Everyone stood, rooted to the spot. They pulled their green and brown head coverings lower over their faces and peered carefully through the trees while Ahren submerged himself in Culhen's awareness. The wolf was lying flat on the ground, looking up at a white shadow, twenty paces east of the waiting group, and swinging from branch to branch in the thick canopy above. The wolf's eyes could make out powerful shoulders, a barrel-shaped chest and a grotesque hump before the shadowy creature disappeared behind the leaves. That was close, thought Culhen. Ahren could only agree with his friend. Did you notice anything in particular? asked Ahren silently. Just the outlines of a damn big white ape with red eyes, said Culhen anxiously. But there was something not quite right about his proportions. The dark god loved forcing the unfortunate creatures he had subjugated into his grotesque notions of an ideal form. Ahren would have been surprised had these primates been spared such physical mutilations. Did you recognise anything else unusual? asked Ahren, continuing to probe. Their sense of smell is not particularly good, otherwise he would have noticed us, concluded Culhen. And I was right – my white fur didn't attract his attention. They clearly consider me to be one of them if they don't look too closely. As long as I am merely a white spot in the darkness of the forest, so hopefully they won't give me a second glance. This was a great relief to Ahren. They had found neither Earth Paste nor anything else to camouflage Culhen. His first encounter with one of the apes had proven that the wolf's colour was not a weak point in their general camouflage. Tell Uldini to call back his crystal ball, said Culhen. The thing seems to go at only one speed, which is far too fast for creeping along. Ahren reported back in a whisper to the others what the wolf had related to him, and Uldini called back his crystal ball, only to send it off again, but this time at half the original tempo. Quietly and carefully, they continued their way into the forest, led by Ahren, who was now continually relating the messages Culhen was sending to him. Now that the wolf had found the scent of one Dark One, the animal could concentrate completely on the simians' tracks. Ahren's human sense received the smell as waves of scent hanging below the branches of the trees, revealing the previous comings and goings of the corrupted primates. It seemed as though the creatures both walked along the ground in the undergrowth and swung along the branches above. Ahren pointed upwards, a half-broken treetop, which clearly indicated the size and weight of the creatures. Thick branches were hanging from tendrils, and here and there were clearly splashes of blood. Ahren couldn't tell whether one of the apes had mistimed its jump from tree to tree, or whether a fight had taken place up there, but either way, there was no doubt as to the power of the creatures. Trogadon and Khara instinctively clutched their weapons harder, and the two Forest Guardians exchanged concerned looks. In view of the destructive force visible above them, their secretive approach was indeed the only correct one to have taken. Uldini pointed forward urgently and whispered: 'My crystal ball has located Deep Steel, a lot of it, not five furlongs from here.' Ahren and the others exchanged relieved looks. They had travelled no more than that distance up to now, which confirmed their suspicion that Aluna hadn't gone any further inland than was absolutely necessary to enact her revenge of finding a suitable hiding place for Fisker's armour. They crept onwards in the direction indicated until Ahren suddenly stopped, the others doing the same in alarm before looking around furtively. 'Culhen has discovered a bundle,' said Ahren in a whisper. 'But that's the end of the good news.' He carefully led them on to where Culhen was lurking behind some thick shrubbery, staring at the scene in front of him. Ahren had already seen the sight through the wolf's eyes, and the rest of the company were now in the same state of shock as he had been. He beckoned them towards an area behind some thorny scrub, where they then cowered, silently taking in the details before them. In front of them was a deep crevice stretching through the forest, bordered by thick undergrowth. It had clearly been created a long time ago by an earthquake, and from their position along its overgrown edge, they could see that the rift was over thirty paces in depth and a dozen wide. On the other side of the crevice was a jagged sheer scarp, rising twenty paces into the air and crisscrossed with vines. The earth had not merely separated many years previously but had also risen towards the sky. All these things made for a spectacular view but were not the cause of their cowering fearfully in the undergrowth. The disbelief on their faces was related to the splintered rock shelter on the other side with its ledge of five paces upon which lay a weather-beaten leather bundle. A thin, rotten, fallen tree trunk led over to it like a wooden finger pointing towards the priceless treasure – their reason for being here in the first place. All of this would not have been a problem were it not for the enormous gorilla sleeping beside it, whose mountainous torso heaved up and down as it slumbered. Its face looked calm and peaceful and reminded Ahren of the dignified features of a normal gorilla. The only tell-tale sign of its being a Dark One was the strangely deformed and knotty hunchback of the primate, which spread just below its neck from one shoulder to the other. Every time Ahren looked at the ape, his eyes were drawn to the growth, his instincts telling him that, along with the clear and present danger presented by a raging gorilla three paces tall, the hunchback had another nasty surprise at the ready for them. That gorilla is much bigger than the one that I saw earlier, said Culhen timidly. He's probably the alpha male. Ahren's relation of the wolf's assessment to the others was met by a stunned silence. Finally, Trogadon summed up the situation succinctly. 'Shit,' he said. Falk threw him a warning look, for the dwarf's deep voice echoed across the fissure even though he had spoken quietly. 'We need to get over there and collect the bundle but without waking this enormous primate. None of us will be able to fight properly on that small ledge. If the beast wakes up at the wrong moment, he will smash us against the rock or hurl us into the abyss.' Uldini rubbed his bald pate ruminatively. 'Let's see if my crystal ball can glean any more information,' he murmured, pointing at the orb hovering over the crevice. He closed his eyes and directed the artefact closer to the ape, who immediately stirred restlessly and opened one of its eyelids a little, revealing a red glimmering eye. Uldini hastily allowed the crystal ball to drop, stopping it just before it reached the jagged bottom of the crevice and then directing it to float back up and land on the Arch Wizard's outstretched hand. The ape slept on. Uldini wiped the sweat from his brow. 'I hadn't expected that,' he murmured quietly. 'They can sense magic even if only when it is in their immediate vicinity.' 'Maybe that's the reason that the chap is sleeping over there of all places, beside the Paladin armour,' suggested Trogadon. 'Maybe he can sense its power.' Fisker shook his head. 'No, this is Aluna's handiwork. She must have discovered his sleeping quarters and dragged the bundle over there to ensure that I would fail in any attempt at retrieving my armour.' 'She must have been really angry with you then,' interjected Khara, throwing Fisker a critical look. He responded by shrugging his shoulders guiltily and raising his hands apologetically. 'Our arguments got more and more destructive over the centuries. And you can see the result of one of our last ones in front of you,' he whispered, embarrassed. 'Right then, so we can forget about fighting and magic,' murmured Falk. 'That leaves us with stealth – which has served us well thus far.' Ahren chewed on his lower lip. 'This rotten tree that leads across the crevice won't be capable of supporting any of us safely – especially not when we're carrying a heavy bundle of armour.' 'I just wonder how the gorilla got over there in the first place,' wondered Trogadon, speaking in a whisper. 'Probably just climbed down from the other side,' responded Falk. 'But that won't work for us – we will simply be too loud.' Fisker looked down at Cassobo, who had leaped off him and was now scurrying directly towards the tree trunk which crossed the crevice. 'Cassobo says he will have a look on the other side and see if he can find anything that might assist us.' Even as Fisker was speaking, the little monkey was already flitting over the natural crossing without causing the rotten tree to do any more than emit a little squeak. Ahren held his breath, but the enormous gorilla slept on, while the little figure scampered past the giant body and looked around alertly. Well, he's certainly brave, admitted the wolf, an undertone of jealous recognition in his voice. The fact that the cute little monkey, with his calculating, funny face, always won the affection of everyone who saw him nagged at the vain wolf, and it must have been difficult for him to express his praise. Ahren could only agree – Cassobo showed no fear and no hesitation as he performed a thorough examination of the rocky ledge and its surrounds, taking absolutely no notice of the sleeping monster. Fisker, meanwhile, had closed his eyes and was concentrating completely on the sense-impressions of his little friend. 'There is no other access point to the plateau, big or small,' he announced finally. 'The walls are steep and the rock crumbly. If anyone were to climb down from the other side, they would certainly cause little stones to loosen and fall.' 'What other choice do we have? Wait until the ape leaves his lair?' asked Trogadon in frustration. Falk shook his head. 'Everything so far has pointed to the Dark Ones being afraid of the light. Look at his choice of sleeping place. The sun never shines directly onto it, the rock wall behind him ensures it is always in shadow. I think he will sleep until dusk and then go off hunting for food. And I really don't want to tiptoe around nocturnal gorillas in the dark.' 'Do you want to lure him with arrows and then slay him?' asked Ahren uncertainly. 'Apart from the fact that a fight with the monster will surely end badly for us, there's a very good chance that we will attract the other gorillas with the noise we make or that he will call for reinforcements.' 'I see no other possibility…' began Falk, only to stop when he saw Fisker opening his eyes and smiling. 'Cassobo has an idea. If it works, we won't need to engage in combat, and if it doesn't, he will distract him for us,' he said with a grin. 'What does the little tearaway have in mind?' asked Trogadon, picking at the material in which his hammer was wrapped so that he could quickly gain access to his weapon if necessary. Cassobo, meanwhile, had undone the weather-beaten knots of the bundle, and his nimble little hands reached under the cloth. Ahren couldn't believe his eyes as the little monkey pulled out a delicate-looking vambrace, raised it over his head and began to walk across the rotten tree trunk. The little animal was clearly struggling under the weight, but continued to walk until he finally pressed the piece of armour into Fisker's waiting hands with a toothy grin, the Paladin having gone down on his haunches to greet his loyal friend. While the blond man was still caressing the smooth surface of the Deep Steel with his fingers, Cassobo turned and scampered back across the tree trunk to pick up the next piece of armour. 'Well, I never,' said Trogadon, stunned. 'He really intends to pilfer every last piece of armour from under the terrifying giant gorilla's nose?' He shook his head. 'If he manages that, I am going to officially name him my favourite companion animal.' Offended, Culhen snorted, and the dwarf reached behind the bush beside him to tickle the wolf's fur. 'Apart from the companion animal in our midst, of course,' he added quickly. Ahren shared the warrior's admiration for the nerve of the little monkey, already on his way back with the second vambrace without the sleeping Dark One on the plateau having stirred at all. Mesmerised, he and his companions watched Cassobo crossing the tree trunk again and again, bringing back piece after piece of the invaluable armour. Fisker put on the sections as they arrived, much to the annoyance of Falk. 'Don't worry, I'll hide them under my clothing,' whispered the blond-curled Paladin in his defence. But it's been many decades since I've worn my armour, so please forgive me if I can't wait any longer. And if things go wrong here, I'll be only too happy for any piece of plating I have to protect me.' Falk nodded sourly. Ahren looked on in amazement as, with Cassobo's help, Fisker the Paladin was gradually resurrected before him. The man's armour seemed to be made up of extremely thin vambraces and cuisses, now accompanied also by a long, ultra-thin rapier. This was followed then by a parrying dagger, and ten long, sharp throwing knives, carried over individually by Cassobo before the blond Paladin placed them into a specially-sewn sash, which Ahren had initially taken to be just a normal part of Fisker's dress. Then, Ahren's eyes were drawn to the far side of the crevice. Cassobo was clearly struggling with the next piece of armour, extracting it from the leather bag with difficulty. 'That's what I was afraid of,' said Fisker fearfully, his face drawn. 'There are only two parts left, neither of which he will be able to carry.' 'You mean the breast plate, don't you?' suggested Trogadon, tapping the partially armoured Paladin on his unprotected ribs. He nodded and gestured across. 'And my cape,' he said. Ahren was astounded to see what Cassobo was pulling behind him – a glittering, short, silver cloak, which reminded Ahren at first of Keeper Jegral's shimmersilk gown, with which the old man had presided over the festive ceremonies when Ahren was a boy. But this material resembled liquid metal, reflecting the rays of sun while Cassobo dragged it along the tree trunk. The clanking of the heavy metal echoed far and wide, and on the other side of the crevice, the giant gorilla stirred in his sleep. Ahren placed an arrow on his bow in anticipation. Were the Dark One to open his eyes now, he would certainly see the little monkey with his booty and spring into action. Fisker pushed his arm out through the protective undergrowth and quickly took the cape from Cassobo. With a skilful flick of his wrist, he whipped it over the recalcitrant shrubbery where it landed in Trogadon's surprised arms. 'Everybody duck!' whispered Falk as the gorilla on the other side of the crevice opened his eyes and sleepily turned his head. Cassobo was still on the fallen tree, but to Ahren's astonishment, the little monkey simply dropped off and down into the abyss! He was on the point of springing forward to assist the little fellow but was stopped by Fisker's mischievous smile. Everyone was cowering behind the thick vegetation while the gorilla yawned loudly, giving Ahren the chance to see long fangs, each one the size of a large dagger, in the Dark One's mouth. Then the creature curled up again and closed his red-glimmering eyes. Nobody moved for what seemed an eternity, fearful that the monster might reawaken, but then Ahren noticed a nimble movement at their end of the fallen tree trunk. He craned his neck and spotted Cassobo swinging himself onto the top of the trunk, from where the agile little fellow had previously dropped and presumably been hanging from with one arm until the coast had become clear. 'Well done, my little fellow,' said Fisker, delighted with the antics of his animal companion, who was now grinning toothily back at him. The blond Paladin grabbed the cape from Trogadon, who had been examining and touching the material all the time with furrowed brows. Now the squat warrior scratched his head in bewilderment. 'What is that exactly?' he asked curiously. 'It feels like silk, is as heavy as brocade, and it shimmers like Deep Steel.' Fisker hung the cape around his neck, at an angle so that the left half of his body was covered down to his hip. 'It's a fencing cape made from threads of silk that were dipped in Deep Steel before weaving. Exceedingly difficult to manufacture, or so they say.' Uldini snorted. 'Two Ancients were involved in the manufacturing process that time to protect the silk from the heat of the molten metal. We were all fascinated to find out if it was worth the considerable effort involved.' He shrugged his shoulders sadly. 'And indeed, it wasn't. The material is practically indestructible, but the force of every thrust pushes through it none the less. Fisker broke his left arm no less than two dozen times in battle before a considerate dwarf forged a vambrace for him that he could carry under this cape – and then it took another two fractures before Fisker agreed to wear it.' 'My fighting style depends on speed and flexibility. Not everyone can haul around an armoured house with him, like our good friend Falk here.' The old man grunted and looked disapprovingly down at the metal material. 'Throw your normal cloak over it,' he said curtly. 'You look like a copper scarecrow every time you move.' Cassobo chattered quietly as he climbed onto the shoulder of the Paladin, who was just carrying out Falk's order. 'Now I'm just missing my breast plate,' said Fisker quietly. 'Cassobo will not be able to get it because it's simply too heavy.' 'At least we have most of your things already,' growled Falk. 'Nevertheless, one of us will have to go over and collect it.' 'Falk and I can't, unfortunately,' said Trogadon. 'We're much too heavy.' 'Khara or I can cross over,' suggested Ahren, but Fisker shook his head. 'My armour, my responsibility,' said the Paladin firmly. 'Anyway, Khara with all her armour and well-formed muscles weighs more than a little weakling like me.' He tapped one of his vambraces. 'At least I have some protection, and carrying over a single breast plate is nothing compared to hauling a heavy leather sack all the way across this tree trunk.' Ahren wasn't quite convinced, but he could see the rekindling of a little fire that he had never previously noticed in Fisker's eyes, and, as he didn't want to undermine the Paladin's rediscovered self-confidence, he said nothing. Somebody had to take the risk. If Fisker wanted to do this as part of his rehabilitation, then who was Ahren to stop him? 'Well, brother,' said Falk in a serious tone. 'We will be ready should the monster wake up. You just need to make it back here safely somehow.' 'Wait…' said the dwarf doubtfully. 'We can at least secure you.' With that, Trogadon pulled out a length of thick rope from his bulging rucksack and passed one end of it over to Fisker, who tied it gratefully around his stomach. Then the Paladin walked gingerly towards the rotten trunk, accompanied by the anxious looks of his companions, causing it to creak dangerously when he stepped onto it. Weighing up every movement, he gingerly inched along, placing one foot carefully in front of the other while the eyes of his companions glanced from the tree trunk to the sleeping gorilla and back again. The Dark One flinched in his sleep, but whether on account of a dream or the light, clinking sounds of Fisker's boots on the rotten wood, or even the falling bits of bark, Ahren couldn't say. Time and again he had to remind himself to keep breathing – quietly and calmly, with Fisiniell at the ready in his hand, while Khara and Trogadon held the rope securely. Falk, too, had his bow primed and ready. What's going on around us, big lad? asked Ahren nervously. The last thing we need is an unexpected visit from behind. All quiet here, responded Culhen, his nose in the air, alert for scents. Relieved, Ahren concentrated on the drama in front of him. Fisker had arrived at the other side, slipped past the sleeping ape, and was now reaching into the leather sack. He raised the breast plate above his head, turned to face his companions and grinned mischievously. That was the moment that the ape's eyes shot open and glared red at Fisker, standing in front of him. Quick though the Dark One's reactions were, Fisker's were even quicker – much to Ahren's surprise. He threw the empty leather sack over the monster's eyes and sprinted forward, one nimble bound after another. By the time the furious gorilla had disentangled himself from the bag, Fisker was already haring across the tree trunk, now creaking dangerously. 'Khara, help me to tauten the rope,' grunted Trogadon. 'I don't think it will be long before the tree…' The trunk gave way with a snap before the warrior had finished speaking, and Fisker tumbled with the rotten wood into the abyss. Ahren could only admire the Paladin for not uttering a sound. Instead, he held onto the breast plate for dear life while Khara and Trogadon pulled on the rope with all their might, hoping Fisker would hit the wall of rock as close to them as they could manage. Their muscles were strained to the utmost and they groaned at the weight of the falling Paladin, who finally slammed against the rockface five paces below them, gasping quietly. Ahren and Falk had in the meantime been shooting at the white ape as he drummed his fists on his chest, Falk's arrows piercing his white fur to little effect. Not so with Ahren's missiles, however. The arrows slammed into the Dark One's flesh with ferocious speed, causing the animal to grimace in surprise and pain, before turning to climb the rockface. 'He's taken flight,' said Ahren with relief, but Uldini shook his head. 'Keep shooting, boy,' he said through clenched teeth. 'He's not fleeing, he's preparing to attack.' Confused, Ahren raised his bow again while Khara and Falk hauled Fisker, totally winded, up over the edge of the crevice, where they helped the staggering Paladin stand up. Ahren was preparing to shoot again, but the monster was already throwing himself from the wall of rock and leaping over towards them with incredible strength! The massive body hurled itself with such velocity that Ahren was too shocked to shoot his already-prepared arrow. Instead, he threw himself to the left so as not to be squashed by the incredible ball of force. The others followed suit, except for Trogadon, who swung up his mighty hammer, waiting to smash it into the approaching Dark One. Falk and Khara were caught by the enormous flailing arms of the gorilla and flung into the surrounding scrub, where they lay stunned. Trogadon, on the other hand, was tossed aside forcefully just as he was slamming his hammer onto the primate as the beast smashed into the brave dwarf. The ground shook with the impact of the heavy body. Ahren was somersaulting wildly along the forest floor until he was brought to a halt between two gnarly bushes. During his roll, he had caught glimpses of Trogadon to his left, being flung several paces through the air while he could see the dwarf's hammer flying away to the right. Like a grotesque competition, the dwarf and his weapon tore through the branches of trees and bushes, each trying to outdo the other in damaging their surroundings until they both slammed into tree trunks and slid to the ground. While Ahren was desperately freeing himself from the branches, he calculated that the hammer had been the winner in the efforts of dwarf and weapon to clear two violently destructive passages through the forest – if only just. Trogadon, seemingly unable to lift his left arm, was already struggling up to his feet by the damaged tree that he had smashed against. He was staring defiantly over at the giant ape, who almost seemed to be the mirror image of the dwarf, the gorilla's right arm hanging uselessly from his damaged shoulder, as he supported himself with his other arm. Ahren was relieved to see that Trogadon's audacious manoeuvre had severely handicapped their opponent, but then to his horror he saw two additional long arms appearing from the beast's hunchback, where they had previously been folded! These arms ended in long, sharp claws and were considerably more flexible than their natural counterparts. Falk threw himself sideways with a curse as one of them reached for him with the intention of skewering him with its claws. The other, meanwhile was about to dig into Fisker, who was still completely dazed. Uldini muttered a spell that flung his crystal ball at the ape's head, but the impact had little effect. Ahren shot at his opponent, the arrow boring deep into the massive creature's side, causing the animal to become even angrier. The attack on Falk had been futile, but the creature's arm hit Fisker with an almighty blow. Ahren heard an appalling scraping sound and he was sure it was the sound of ribs being smashed, but then he saw that Fisker's ridiculous cape, with the help of the vambrace, had indeed deflected the beastly claws, even causing them to break due to the force of the impact against the impenetrable material. The blow had, it seemed, injured the Paladin but at least he had not been bored through. Culhen bounded forward growling and locked his jaws around the ape's damaged arm while Khara took on the other arm with her two blades. Ahren shot at the Dark One's right leg, weakening the gorilla's right side even further. Perhaps they could force him to flee or buy enough time for themselves to take flight. Falk, too, seemed to be of the same mind as the arrow slammed into the monster's knee, causing him to let out a scream of pain. 'Let's get out of here!' roared the old man. 'My arrows are useless, and the beast is almost unstoppable in close combat.' 'For you, maybe,' called out Trogadon defiantly, but Ahren could see how the dwarf was limping towards his hammer before shouldering it with his right arm, his left arm pressed closely to his body. Khara was then slapped by the back of one of the slim, swifter arms, which caused her to spin away like a leaf blown by the wind. 'Khara!' screamed Ahren, horrified. He was about to run to her, but Falk raised his hand in warning. 'You have to keep shooting him!' he shouted. 'I will get Khara.' Ahren shot another three arrows at the ape's head, but the beast simply raised his massive left hand, and the arrows landed in the flesh of his forearm, causing no further damage. 'The creature is remarkably sly!' shouted Ahren in warning. 'We really should get away from here as quickly as we can.' Culhen, who had been holding onto one claw-equipped arm and keeping it in check, quickly jumped away and into the surrounding trees once Fisker had dragged himself out of reach of the raging primate. Uldini then cast a weak healing charm on him, which enabled the Paladin to walk properly again. To their right and left they could now hear the screams of other Dark Ones, who had reacted to the battle sounds of their fellow primate. Ahren ran over to Falk, who was trying to help the limping Khara move as quickly as possible, but the Forest Guardian slapped him away. 'You deal with the ape,' the old man barked, his voice raw, and his face bloody from a laceration on his head. 'We others will be fine.' Ahren spun around and shot another arrow, this time into the ape's left foot. The beast was blundering forward and leaning heavily on his right leg as he gave chase. The tip of the arrow bored between the creature's toes and through his sole, causing the gorilla to scream again and slow down even further. Culhen was jumping around between the beast's legs, confusing the wounded monster, and holding him back in his laboured pursuit. 'We're still not fast enough,' gasped Falk, who was carrying, rather than supporting, Khara. I know what we can do, said Culhen and, much to Ahren's alarm, the wolf simply stopped and stood there, growling, challenging the ape to sweep him out of the way with his muscular left arm. 'No, Culhen!' shouted Ahren as soon as he recognised the wolf's plan in his head, but it was too late. With tears in his eyes, he could only look on as the fist, no smaller than a carriage wheel, slammed into the wolf's flank, and he sensed his friend's ribs giving way. He ignored the pain of the howling wolf and took advantage of the opportunity his companion animal's self-sacrifice presented. Full of rage he extended Fisiniell until its tension threatened to break the weapon and let the arrow fly towards the distracted creature, whose left arm was temporarily unable to serve as a shield. With a dull impact, the arrowhead sank into the nape of the ape's neck and a shudder ran through the enormous body of the Dark One. Blood shot out of the primate's mouth, and Ahren, who had seen enough carnage already in his young life, knew beyond a doubt that the beast had been finally conquered. He quickly looked around for Culhen, who was running between the trees, yelping and whining until he finally caught up with the others. Ahren glanced one last time at the primate, who was lying in a crumpled heap, then followed his companions through the forest. They were all battered and bruised, but now was not the time to lick their wounds, for dozens of Dark Ones were rampaging through the forest in search of those who had killed their alpha male. Culhen, yelping, led them in this dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, which they simply had to win if they wished to remain alive. They ran in wild snaky lines, always following the route of their white-furred companion, and on more than one occasion they only narrowly escaped encountering a raging, screaming Dark One, ploughing his or her way recklessly through the undergrowth, or swinging madly from treetop to treetop. 'At least we've finished off their alpha,' murmured Falk, wiping the blood from his face. 'They seem to be quite confused and their behaviour is erratic.' 'Aren't we the lucky devils,' responded Trogadon, Uldini having just placed his hand on the dwarf's arm so that he could ease the warrior's pain. The Arch Wizard was like a rubber ball, bouncing from one injured party to the next, casting doses of healing magic just weak enough so as not to alert the apes. Finally, the white beach came into view. Ahren was about to let out a sigh of relief when Falk stopped, stock-still, beside him. 'It's Selsena,' he said in alarm. 'She says that Aluna and Fjolmungar are here – at our ship.' Ahren hesitated and looked over at the others. Khara's right ankle was badly swollen. Blood kept running into Falk's eyes, and Trogadon could hardly move his hammer. Fisker was in agony every time he breathed, and Ahren noticed that Culhen, too, could not breathe without wincing. Only Ahren and Uldini were still fully capable of taking any necessary action. But if the Arch Wizard were to really let rip with his healing charms, then they would have all the island apes down on top of them. 'We can't fight her,' he said ruefully. Falk shrugged his shoulders wearily. 'Selsena says, the Queen of the Waves is under attack. And the ship is our only hope of getting away from this cursed island. So, we really have no choice.' They staggered out of the forest and along the beach, the angry screams of the gorillas echoing from the trees behind, the beasts continuing their pursuit of the invaders. Ahren tried to hide his despair as he beheld the scene playing out in front of them. Fjolmungar had wrapped himself around the Queen of the Waves and was holding her in a chokehold while Jelninolan was trying to prevent the snake from crushing the ship by casting a charm shield around the vessel, which seemed to be too near the shore to manoeuvre herself away. As the exhausted companions approached the shore, Fjolmungar's head spun around, the triumphant figure of Aluna, standing astride it. She waved her three-cornered hat down at them in a commanding gesture. 'I told you that from now on, you are all my enemies,' she called out scornfully. Ahren was not at all sure who was speaking from her mouth – the woman or the enormous snake. 'Surrender and deliver Fisker to me or this ship with all your friends will be crushed, and you will be left behind on this island with its horde of furious simians.' The companions stood on the beach, staring at each other in bafflement. Ahren's mind was spinning with questions. What could they possibly do now? What should he do? It was clear from the expression on Uldini's face that he was on the point of losing his self-control. The wild look in the Ancient's eyes was quite terrifying to Ahren, who had never seen the Arch Wizard that furious before. What if he had an Unleashing in their present dilemma? If there were a danger that Fisker would die at Aluna's hands, then the Arch Wizard would certainly not hold back, for if one Paladin were to fall, then they were all lost. Ahren himself had only two arrows left in his quiver, and none of his companions were in any fit state to fight – perhaps Falk if absolutely necessary – but he was just binding a piece of torn clothing around his head, and the old man's eyes looked unfocussed, suggesting that his one-time teacher was suffering from concussion. 'I think I should go,' said Fisker wearily, handing the protesting Cassobo to Uldini. 'Perhaps she will show mercy at the last heartbeat, once she realises that she has been victorious over me.' 'She, perhaps, but not her snake,' said Khara. 'I can only see a thirst for revenge, and fury in his eyes.' The Queen of the Waves trembled as Fjolmungar squeezed her tighter. Jelninolan's protective charm flickered and the elf dropped to her knees and groaned. Ahren could see that she too was on the point of unleashing her true power, and visions of horror flooded his mind – of how they would begin their final battle here on this beach, with two unleashed wizards hurling their elemental forces against the Blood Magic that protected both woman and snake while the ape-like Dark Ones would begin their onslaught. He could see the shoreline being swallowed up in a ferocious storm of fire and blood, an outcome that would help no-one but the Adversary. No good could come out of their raising their weapons. 'We are not going to fight,' he said, looking at the others. 'We must not fight. Not without losing Aluna for our cause and bringing us all into mortal danger.' He looked particularly sternly at Uldini, who with much effort brought his feelings back under control. 'But she cannot have Fisker,' said the Arch Wizard. 'That would be the end.' The blond Paladin was about to object, but Ahren nodded. 'He is right. We need you just as much as we do her.' Then he gave the surprised Khara a quick peck on the cheek, dropped his bow, raised his hands up and walked towards the sea. 'What are you doing?' hissed Falk from behind, but Ahren continued to walk. The fact was, he didn't know what he was going to say, for the terrible truth was – he had no idea of what he was doing. He could mentally hear Culhen whimpering in pain, but then his friend was limping along beside him and the voice of the wolf filled him with courage and gratitude: I'll be with you – whatever happens. They looked up at Aluna, still standing in a triumphant pose atop the head of the enormous snake, her scale-armour glittering in the sunshine as she examined Ahren critically. 'You are not Fisker,' she said angrily. 'It is not any old Paladin that I desire, but that one!' She pointed her three-cornered hat angrily towards Fisker, who seemed on the point of acquiescing to her demand. 'You may not have him,' responded Ahren in a calm but firm voice. He was going to try telling the truth, in the hope that this tactic would get the message through to the emotionally damaged woman, who had surrendered her feelings to her companion animal. 'If you kill him, then you kill us all. You, me and Fjolmungar, everyone on this beach. HE, WHO FORCES will soon arise, and nobody will be able to stop him because the full complement of the Thirteen shall be no more.' 'Twelve Paladins have held him back before. Let the Ancients construct another Pall Pillar!' retorted Aluna, spitting out her words while Fjolmungar's icy stare focussed on Ahren, the enormous head of the snake pushing itself closer to him. He tried to ignore the mouth with its sharp teeth and concentrate completely on the woman above. At least she was talking to him, which was a good sign. 'Do you really think this trick will work a second time?' asked Ahren forcefully. 'That the dark god will permit himself to be imprisoned once again following nearly eight hundred years of incarceration?' Ahren could make out a flicker of uncertainty in the woman's eyes, but Fjolmungar was clearly losing patience, for he squeezed again, causing Jelninolan to let out a scream before strengthening her charm shield laboriously. 'I want Fisker!' screamed Aluna furiously, and now Ahren was sure it was the snake who was uttering the words coming from her mouth. He's holding her in an iron grip of rage and revenge, warned Culhen. Look at him. His spirit must be much stronger than hers. His unnatural size must have thrown their connection off kilter. Ahren was amazed yet again by the wolf's intuitive ability to reduce complex situations to simple truths. What do you suggest? he asked silently. Turn the discussion away from Fisker, suggested Culhen. I think Fjolmungar is dominating her by using her negative feelings towards the fly-by-night Paladin. 'The gods have entrusted us with a task,' said Ahren aloud. 'Our mission is to free this world from the mark that has stained Jorath for millennia. Is that not more important than a broken heart and a centuries' old quarrel?' Aluna laughed bitterly – a laugh so sorrowful and scornful that it touched Ahren to the quick. 'The gods? What do you know about the THREE? I have seen more horrors and wars than you could possibly imagine, pipsqueak. Spend a decade fighting in muck and blood and tears, then we shall talk again. But all I know is this: the gods do nothing but command, yet they never reward. No-one is spared, not even those innocents who simply wish to live their lives in peace and quiet.' Ahren's hands and face were dripping with sweat now. He was running out of ideas, and Aluna out of patience. It was as plain as day that Fjolmungar was dominating the woman's reason with his own wishes. At the same time, Jelninolan's charm shield was flickering more desperately now. What do I do? he asked in despair. The two of us sometimes have our own individual concerns, responded Culhen hastily. Think of her experiences. Of what is important to her alone. Ahren racked his brains feverishly. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Fisker slowly walking along the beach towards Aluna, his head hanging and his eyes downcast. First Ahren thought it was terror that was slowing the blond man, but then the penny dropped – the Paladin was positively enjoying his role. Fisker was playing for time! The sight of the defeated Paladin seemed to calm Fjolmungar down and distract him. This would be Ahren's last chance to get through to Aluna, but unfortunately the young Forest Guardian's mind was failing miserably. The same pleas that he had used with Bergen simply ricocheted harmlessly off Aluna's stubbornness, and if she wasn't convinced by his argument for saving the world, what then? Fisker, now almost within reach of the snake's head, threw him a desperate glance. Fjolmungar opened his mouth greedily – the long, needle-sharp fangs would bring Fisker's life to a quick, bloody end. Ahren was thinking furiously. Culhen's piece of advice echoed through his mind. What was there that was only important to Aluna, that could only appeal to her and have nothing to do with Fjolmungar? The snake pushed himself forward, ready to strike at any moment. It had to be something from her past, something that had been important to her, before she had formed the connection with the snake. The thought hit him like a thunderbolt, and as he had no time to consider the matter, he simply spewed it out. 'Stop!' he screamed at the top of his voice. 'Spare him and we will free the Lost Tribe!' Aluna stiffened at the words and her hand shot up, commanding Fjolmungar to desist, who squirmed and hissed in protest. Her body language suggested that there was a furious debate taking place between them. Ahren sensed that at last he had struck a nerve. 'We have two Ancients among us – one of them is Uldini Getobo, their powerful leader, the other is Jelninolan the Stormweaver who has resurrected an ancient Elven form of magic,' he intoned. 'We also have three Paladins who can assist you on this mission. Has your tribe ever had a better opportunity than this to throw off their shackles?' Aluna hesitated. Ahren could see her inner struggle as the chance presented itself of freeing the descendants of the island folk from which she had come. 'I…' she began, but then fell silent. Ahren gestured towards Fisker. 'There he stands – defeated, humiliated. Isn't that enough? Must you sacrifice the whole world in your thirst for revenge, instead of saving your own people?' Ahren stressed every syllable of every word in an attempt to sway the woman – the fate of Jorath literally depending on her decision. Fjolmungar trembled as Aluna struggled with him over the control of their connection. The squeaking timbers of the unfortunate Queen of the Waves, the furious screams of the approaching primates, and the rhythmical crashing of the waves against the shore were the only sounds to be heard. For Ahren, the world seemed to be standing still – a frozen moment in time that lasted for several heartbeats. He looked over lovingly at Khara, and she looked back at him the same way. Then Aluna rose to her full height on Fjolmungar's head and threw her trident onto the sand, where its fork landed not a hand's breadth away from Fisker's feet. 'Tell me that I have won,' she demanded imperiously. 'Victory is yours,' responded Fisker, his eyes downcast. 'Tell me that you are sorry!' she screamed, her voice agonised. Fisker now raised his head and looked directly into his one-time lover's eyes. 'I am so sorry. Genuinely and candidly sorry.' His tone of voice and body language left no doubt in Ahren's mind that the man was speaking truthfully and openly, not caring that his life was on the line, and it seemed to the young Forest Guardian that he was listening in on a final conversation between a pair of lovers. 'I am sorry for every fight and every hurt. We should never have allowed it to come to this pass. People have died thanks to our squabble, and we have done each other enough damage to last for two eternities.' He placed a hand on his heart. Tears were streaming down his face. 'We shall never love each other again – that much is true – but must we hate each other forever and lead both ourselves and the world into the abyss?' Now a solitary tear was rolling down Aluna's cheek, altering the features of her normally severe face. 'No,' she said, her voice hardly audible above the grumbling of Fjolmungar. 'It is enough.' The snake seemed to contort as Aluna threw her will onto the weighing scales, tipping the balance in her favour and overcoming her animal companion. The snake relaxed his grip on the Queen of the Waves, and immediately Jelninolan's charm dissipated, causing the elf to gasp one last time and her eyes to roll before she fell into a state of unconsciousness. 'I shall take up your promise,' said Aluna, turning to Ahren. 'We shall sail northwards forthwith and not leave the Lost Islands until my people have been freed. Do you swear to do this by the THREE?' Ahren nodded. 'I do swear by the gods,' was all he said, but the words seemed to echo powerfully within him. Aluna nodded solemnly. 'No prevarication, no diversions,' she commanded. 'Should we fail, our agreement is null and void. If the Lost Tribe cannot be saved, then I see no reason why the rest of the world should survive. If you keep your promise, I shall follow you into battle and fight alongside you against the Adversary.' Fjolmungar snapped threateningly in Fisker's direction as he moved his head forward, enabling Aluna to reach down and draw her trident out of the sand. Then the enormous snake swam out through the reefs, where the woman waited impatiently for the Queen of the Waves to follow her. Ahren's companions walked over to him as if in a daze. Khara kissed him firmly and ruffled his hair. 'I knew you would do it,' she said with a smile. 'Don't be so sure,' said Ahren, embarrassed. 'The fact is, I have absolutely no idea how I am going to keep my promise.' He looked over at Uldini for help, but the Arch Wizard merely shrugged his shoulders despondently. 'Don't look at me like that. We know hardly anything about the curse with which the dark god enslaved the poor tribe that time,' he said helplessly. Falk pointed his thumb back over his shoulder towards the forest, from where the screaming was approaching. 'I don't want to rush you, but I think we should really try and get on board ship. Our dishevelled troop is hardly able to take on a horde of furious apes. 'Just once,' grumbled Trogadon. 'Just once I'd like to leave an island without having to flee.' 'Well,' said Falk drily, 'we haven't quite managed that yet.' Then the first Shadow Simian broke through the trees and came racing towards them, screaming, and the sound of his companions could be heard from the trees as they followed in hot pursuit. Although the midday sun was causing the Dark One to blink continuously, his rage seemed to be driving him forward over the sand towards them. 'No time for dinghies,' said Uldini. 'The injured are too disabled for me to simply toss them over, and Jelninolan is in no state to catch them. So, buy me a little time, please!' he gasped over his shoulder. Then he charmed Trogadon and Khara up into the air and let them float over to the Queen of the Waves. 'Just like the old days,' said Falk with a crooked grin as he drew his broadsword. 'Ah, if only I had my shield to hand,' he added with a sigh. Culhen was about to trot forward too, But Ahren held him back. 'I can sense your broken ribs, big lad,' he said aloud. 'Stay back, watch the beach. Be my eyes and ears.' If you insist, said the wolf immediately, which confirmed to Ahren how much pain Culhen had to be in. But if you get hurt, then I will help you out. Instead of answering, Ahren raised Fisiniell, taking the penultimate arrow from his quiver. He aimed at the onrushing ape, who had raised his additional, slim arms with their sharp claws above his head and was running straight at them. Falk prepared his mighty blade beside Ahren and gave the young man a nod of encouragement. Really, he should have been terrified, but his mind was calm and clear. Compared to the imminent danger that he had just deflected – or at least delayed – this raging Shadow Simian seemed small and irrelevant. Don't get cocky now, warned Culhen, and the fact that this normally supercilious animal was chiding him in this manner brought Ahren back to earth with a bump. He concentrated hard, extended Fisiniell to the maximum and fixed his eyes on the target. 'Falk, a distraction, please,' he murmured, and when the old Paladin yelled challengingly at the primate and the beast responded in kind, Ahren let the arrow fly. The missile slammed into the gorilla's thick skull, but the journey was short enough for the arrow to penetrate right through. It bored deep into the ape's brain, causing the Dark One to collapse in a heap where it remained, motionless. 'A good shot at last,' growled Falk, breathing a sigh of relief. 'You're not disgracing me after all.' Ahren smiled fleetingly, but suddenly three more apes were coming screaming out of the forest, their roars of fury rising to a crescendo when they saw their dead companion. 'Three apes and only one arrow,' he called out before shooting with Fisiniell one last time just as two Shadow Simians were crossing each other's path. He directed his shot so that the first ape was blocking the second one's view, and when the second one came out of the other's blind spot, the arrow hit him in the throat before he could raise his main arms to shield it. 'Good job,' said Falk admiringly as the ape collapsed into an immobile heap. Ahren quickly pushed his bow back over his shoulder and drew Wind Blade. Through Culhen's eyes he could see that Uldini was floating the wolf and Fisker on board, and he screamed over his shoulder. 'We're ready to depart. Whenever it suits you!' 'Should we take one after another on together or will each of us take on one?' asked Falk, focussed on the task in hand. 'Let's take one each,' answered Ahren, his mouth dry. 'We don't need to defeat them. Just hold them off for as long as necessary.' He and Falk stepped away from the waterline, giving each other enough room to manoeuvre. Then they roared their challenge to the ape they had chosen, and the Dark Ones attacked immediately. Ahren's sight narrowed to a tunnel as he concentrated solely on the oncoming beast, not three paces away, whose upper two arms were ready to launch downwards. The gorilla was racing forward, leaving Ahren no choice but to leap sideways and let Wind Blade do the talking. He felt the draught of air as the ape raced past him and he managed to slice off one of the claw-arms bearing down on him with a clean cut, but the other claw dug deep into his chest, spinning him backwards through the air before he landed, most inelegantly, in the breakers, creating a fountain of sand and water. Ahren wiped his eyes and saw that Falk had dropped to his knees so he could skewer the raging ape with his broadsword as the primate stormed towards him, the old man's armour deflecting the impact of the Dark One's claws for the most part. While Ahren was considering that his own leather armour could never withstand such a claw-attack, the wounded ape with his remaining three arms flailing wildly, threw himself at the young man, who was tumbling backwards. There was nothing for Ahren to do but throw himself seaward and hope that he could swim faster than the blood-soaked ape. In the background he could see that Uldini had magically plucked Falk up into the air and was guiding him towards the Queen of the Waves, saving the old Paladin from a wave of Dark Ones that had rushed forward along the beach, threatening to kill him. He who hesitates is lost, thought Ahren sardonically, sheathing Wind Blade so he could swim more quickly. The waves kept trying to drive him back into the furiously hurtling arms of the Shadow Simian, his heavy body pushing forward with more speed than the Forest Guardian battling against the current. A piercing pain cut through his right lower thigh as the long, slender gorilla-arm caught him, slicing his skin with its claws. He let out a roar and redoubled his efforts, trying desperately to reach the open water, but the Cutlass Sea seemed to have it in for him, driving him back with each wave to within reach of the bloodthirsty, shrieking ape. The animal raised its cudgel-like fists for a double blow that would surely crush Ahren's bones to smithereens when without warning the young Forest Guardian was raised up out of the water by an invisible force and spun over to the deck of the Queen of the Waves. He saw the gorilla's fists flailing futilely in the water, just where his head had been an instant before, then he slammed onto the deck where he lay, gasping and blood-soaked. His lower leg was throbbing and felt strangely cold. He heard Uldini curse and saw him leaning over him and dripping with sweat. 'You too?' the childlike figure snarled angrily. 'All of you idiots managed to get hurt, then?' The exhausted Arch Wizard set to work, stanching Ahren's bleeding wound, and all the young man could do was smile as he lay there. He looked over at Khara, who, ignoring the pain in her ankle, smiled back at him, relief written all over face. The gang of primates were screaming and running along the beach as Captain Orben gave the signal to hoist anchor and set sail. 'Steer due north,' he commanded curtly. 'Keep following that damned snake. But this time we'll take the longer, safer route between the coral reefs.' The crew exchanged uneasy looks but followed their captain's commands while the thought struck Ahren that they may have come out of the Simian Island alive, but they still had to survive his own outlandish idea that they he had tangled them up in. How, he asked himself, was he ever going to fulfil his impossible promise of freeing the Lost Tribe from their enslavement?

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 19

The body of Adjutant Cosin lay in a bloody heap in the high grass near the little compound of tents that her men had erected close to the northern Borderlands, and from where they could go on patrols. Sven hummed contentedly, wiping the blood off his dagger by running it along the clothing of the deceased woman. She had been nothing but trouble, and he had been left with no option but to stab her, literally and pleasurably, in the back. Sven and his mounted troop had been accompanying Baron Aconus for a fortnight now, and the fat little man with his impressive moustache had been warming more and more to Sven's urgent request that all the militias of the THREE be provided with horses. Only Cosin's persistent warnings, which she whispered into the baron's ear day and night, had been a thorn in Sven's side. The woman had mistrusted him deeply, constantly looking for hidden meanings behind his words. She had to have stumbled upon something at some point, so Sven had taken the opportunity when he had found her alone and acted. Now he delivered a message to the Glower Bear hiding nearby that the beast should drag the corpse away and feast on it. Sven grinned as he turned around and approached the baron's tent, which was bathed in torchlight. With the fat man's beloved adjutant missing, Sven would have another reason to go riding with the senile old codger, this time in search of the dispatched troublemaker. Finally, they would find whatever remained of her and heroically avenge Cosin by giving the Glower Bear his just deserts – hopefully, not before Sven had secured his position as the militia commander's right-hand man. He was so full of joyful anticipation that he nearly forgot he was still holding the dagger. He quickly hid it under his jerkin and entered the tent, smiling broadly. 'Dear Baron,' he began, after giving the military salute, 'you didn't happen to see Adjutant Cosin anywhere?'

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 20

The night was pitch-black and threatening. Heavy clouds hung from the firmament, ready to dump their thousands of gallons of water. The air was humid and oppressive, even out here on the high seas. Ahren knew that a storm would soon break, but he was long past fretting over the weather. As long as the ship wouldn't capsize, it was the mysterious curse of the Lost Tribe that was now their greatest worry. Uldini and Jelninolan had been in an exhausted sleep for days now, having both staggered into the cabin, where they had collapsed following their magical exertions. The injured companions, himself included, were afflicted by a similar listlessness, which was unnatural in origin. For Uldini, in an effort to save his energy, had simply accelerated the normal healing process, instead of allowing the wounds to heal at their normal pace. This kind of cure afflicted the very essence of the injured parties, making it impossible for them to walk more than ten paces at a time. Ahren was lying beside Khara on the foredeck, both leaning against Culhen's uninjured flank, the wolf having sought out their company. Khara was already asleep, and her steady breathing had a soothing effect on the Forest Guardian's troubled mind, which was constantly distracted by the hopelessness of the coming encounter. You're worrying too much, Stop blaming yourself, said Culhen sleepily before letting out a big yawn. The two Ancients will come up with a way of making your promise come true. And if they can't? questioned Ahren anxiously. Then at least we're away from that awful beach, and by the time we have to confront Fjolmungar again we'll have fully recovered, responded Culhen drily. Ahren shook his head. I don't think Aluna is going to give us another chance. If we destroy her faith in us this time, she will turn her back on us and the gods forever. Did you see how incredibly difficult it was for her to assert herself against Fjolmungar? Any more spiritual damage and she will fall under his influence completely. Ahren could feel a shudder running through the wolf. The way he controlled her was the exact opposite of why the goddess sent us to be by your sides. Culhen never really talked about his role in the plans of the gods. It had never really been necessary, for the wolf instinctively fulfilled the important role that he had been given in Ahren's life. He kept the Forest Guardian's feet firmly planted down on the ground in more ways than the young man could imagine. Ahren reached back and stroked the wolf's fur. The Blood Magic distorted and damaged the relationship between them. Aluna had no idea that it was she herself who was causing the most damage between them, mumbled Ahren sadly. Well, she knows it now, said Culhen firmly, and she's blaming Fisker for having driven her so far. This unhappy thought accompanied Ahren as he fell into a deep sleep. He didn't even notice when the rain began pouring down. Nor did he notice that Culhen, despite being in pain himself, had repositioned his body so that he could protect the two young people from the cold and wet, by lying across them without suffocating them under his weight. Ahren's mouth was full of fur – or to be more precise, full of wet wolf's fur. He spat and coughed as he woke up, pushing Culhen, who was lying across him, down from his body. Ahren's hair and feet felt clammy, but the rest of his body was positively glowing with heat, thanks to the wolf, who got up with a growl, releasing Khara at the same time. 'Good morning,' she sputtered, spitting out some white hairs. Ahren gave her a peck on the cheek. 'Culhen says that he protected us from the storm during the night. I never noticed a thing. Did you?' Khara shook her head numbly, then wiggled her injured foot. 'But the enforced healing-sleep helped. My ankle is as good as new.' Ahren felt his leg wound and grimaced. 'Lucky you. The claws scratched right down to the bone. It's probably going to take me another few days.' Culhen growled in a low voice, and Ahren grinned. 'Thank you so much for your care and attention, big lad. And I'm sure your ribs will soon be back to normal too.' Ahren pulled himself up at the bulwark, placing as little weight as possible on his wounded leg. The ship was sailing north-northeast, continuing the course they had been following for over twenty days. Fifty paces ahead of them, Fjolmungar, with Aluna sitting on his back, was breaching the waves. The woman boarded the Queen of the Waves no more than once a day to eat and drink in silence. All attempts to begin a conversation with her had ended in failure, and every time she spotted Fisker, she would stop eating immediately and return to Fjolmungar. The blond Paladin now deliberately avoided her whenever she came aboard. Watching her now, as she sat on the snake's back, she seemed in Ahren's eyes to be the personification of loneliness. He sighed and then felt Khara's arm moving around his waist. 'That won't happen to us,' she promised him. He smiled and they kissed, only for Khara to break off, coughing. 'Yuck, you still have wolf hairs between your teeth,' she said in disgust. Ahren frowned and turned away in embarrassment. 'I'd better go and wash out my mouth,' he muttered, limping away. 'Good idea,' said Khara. 'And I'll organise us some breakfast and see if those two magical sleepyheads are awake at last.' Ahren had walked no more than five paces when he was stopped by Yantilla. 'Good morning, Squire,' said the gaunt woman hurriedly. Ever since the time he had been wounded when neither herself nor her people had been able to intervene, she had the look of someone with a terribly guilty conscience. Ahren rolled his eyes. 'For the last time, Captain. There was nothing you could have done. I am a Paladin, after all. Apparently, even we are expected to be injured in battle every now and then.' He spat out another wolf hair. 'I'll tell you what. You give me a full water-or wineskin and we'll be quits. Alright?' Yantilla looked at him doubtfully before pulling out a flat, metal bottle, which she always carried on her belt, and pressing it into his hands. Ahren took a mouthful, only to spit it out in a spray of schnapps and wolf hairs. 'for the love of the THREE, Captain! Is that weapon-grease dissolved in lamp oil?' His mouth was burning like fire. The few drops that had run down his gullet seemed to be eating their way through his body. 'Trogadon brewed that over the past few days,' said the gaunt woman, trying to keep a straight face. 'It's supposed to help one sleep.' 'And it's probably good for fusing metal casks too,' grumbled Ahren. 'Well, at least I'm rid of all the wolf hairs. If you're able to drink that, you're even more courageous than I took you for, Captain.' He left the saluting woman standing there and hobbled towards the hatch that led below deck. There he was met by Fisker, who was walking towards him and holding his ribs gingerly, as they were still continuing to heal. 'It's good that almost all the pirate ships on the Cutlass Sea take heed of either you or Aluna,' said Ahren jokingly. 'In the condition we're in, our ship would be easy pickings.' Fisker gave a crooked smile, and then his face became serious. 'Uldini and Jelninolan are awake. They still can't stand up, but we are to go to them. It's time for our first briefing.' Ahren was suddenly afflicted by nerves. As he followed Fisker slowly down into the hold, he couldn't help asking himself if he was about to be told that he had become a fully-fledged liar and oath-breaker, without even trying. His fellow-travellers were sitting in the communal cabin looking at each other in dismay. Uldini and Jelninolan were lying in their hammocks, the others were sitting on the simple, nailed-down stools around the narrow wooden table. The dampness from the storm of the night before still hung heavily in the cabin, and everyone was struggling for air in the oppressive heat below deck. 'No wonder that you always sleep outside,' grumbled Trogadon, beads of sweat dripping from his beard. 'If I had a cuddly wolf to snuggle up against, I'd do exactly the same thing,' 'No, you wouldn't,' snapped Falk, irritably. 'You'd be far too afraid of rolling overboard in the middle of the night and dropping like a stone to the ocean floor.' Trogadon was about to respond angrily, but then thought better of it. 'You know what? You're right,' he finally said, before placing his elbows on the tabletop, and resting his heavy head on his hands. Ahren knew exactly why the two were bickering with each other. Neither of them could think of any way in which they could fulfil Ahren's oath to Aluna, and neither Uldini nor Jelninolan had expressed their point of view regarding this predicament, the elf not even remembering how it had all come to this sorry pass. The maintenance of the charm shield, which had protected both the ship and her passengers from being obliterated by the snake, had demanded her total concentration. 'Let's stop beating around the bush. Did I or did I not irresponsibly put us into an impossible situation?', asked Ahren, coming straight to the point. All the heads in the room spun around to face him. Khara secretly took his hand and squeezed it. She clearly understood all too well the self-accusations that were plaguing him. 'The fact is, we know nothing about the curse that lies upon the Lost Tribe,' said Uldini wearily. 'Neither about the necklaces which force them underwater, nor about the ways and means whereby the dark god practises his control over these poor souls. We know only that they are not Low Fangs, for all of their mutations have been identical. Their gills and their large eyes point to an almighty curse, not to the usual obsessional metamorphosis through his will.' 'But why,' asked Trogadon, 'did he not simply make Low Fangs out of them?' 'That is one of the mysteries,' said Uldini. 'Personally, I believe that the corporeal transformations of Low Fangs are too arbitrary for a focussed metamorphosis. The dark god didn't want to accidentally drown a majority of the original island tribe simply because they had grown no gills.' 'But why give them gills at all?' probed Khara. 'Because they were an island people,' answered Jelninolan in a scratchy voice. 'And a horde of Low Fangs somewhere on an island in the middle of the sea would be pointless. He wanted to create a threat that would extend beyond the coasts of the Lost Islands. Just think of the Simian Island. Those Shadow Simians are indeed terrifying, but for centuries they have been confined there, from where they can wreak no havoc.' 'Unless one is stupid enough to pay them a visit,' said Falk grumpily. The old man had been the quickest of them to recover and now he pointed a warning finger. 'Whatever we attempt, we can be sure that they are going to attack us with their necklaces as soon as we sail into their territory. Part of the curse seems to be their desire to shackle anyone they meet to their own terrible fate and bring them to the depths of the sea.' 'As long as we stay close to Fjolmungar, I'm not worried at all,' said Uldini, shrugging his shoulders. 'What sea creature would dare to challenge such an enormous sea-snake?' 'Then that fleabag isn't all bad,' grunted Trogadon, taking a drink from his wineskin. 'So, we don't know what we're doing?' asked Ahren hoarsely, his voice betraying his self-accusations. 'I've sworn to the gods and now I will break this oath. What a fool I've been!' Fisker's hand slammed loudly on the table while Cassobo chattered angrily at Ahren. 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it doesn't suit you!' said the blond Paladin angrily. 'Your promise gave Aluna hope – the hope that the Paladins really are the champions of the gods, sent forth to bring an end to the Dark Days! If we accomplish our mission, her faith will be restored – and the faith of many others too.' Falk nodded. 'He's right, boy. If we really do manage to free the Lost Tribe, then the Paladins will have returned from the land of legends for once and for all. Every bard will sing our praises, which will suit us down to the ground, for in the oncoming war it will not be merely us who have to believe in ourselves. All the poor souls who will have to take on the Dark Ones without the assistance of magic armour and weapon must also have faith in us.' 'Well spoken,' added Uldini, whose eyes looked cold and calculating. 'The armies of the Eastern Lands will be swamped with volunteers once the news has spread.' 'And we will free a tribe that has been enslaved for centuries,' interjected Jelninolan, putting a stop any political ulterior motives that Uldini might have been considering mentioning. 'So, are we going to give it our best shot?' asked Falk, and everyone in the group nodded. Ahren felt somewhat better now that all his companions were willing to take part in this dangerous venture. It really was something to be considered an equal of the others around the table, but his vow had placed his companions under an obligation, without his having asked them first. The fact that they were going to share his burden without complaint, meant a lot to him. 'The key to such an undertaking is information,' said Fisker, whereupon Cassobo began to chatter loudly. 'You don't need to scream, my good friend,' scolded the Paladin. Then he turned to the others. 'Cassobo says we must camouflage ourselves and watch them. Find out what they do when they're not ambushing ships.' 'Not a bad idea,' said Falk. 'Is that possible?' he asked the two magicians. Uldini and Jelninolan exchanged questioning looks. 'With a lot of effort,' responded Uldini after a moment. 'But not for long, and then they will be back in the depths and we won't. We will just see our own silly selves reflected on the surface of the water.' 'Can Selsena go in among them and spy?' asked Trogadon. 'She will hardly stand out, being a whale.' Falk shook his head. 'She might be able to swim by them once or twice, but I think an extended period alongside them can only arouse suspicions. And anyway, the Lost Tribe must eat from time to time, and I would be quite certain that whale meat is on their menu.' A silence descended on the room, and when Khara finally spoke, a shiver of fear ran down Ahren's spine. 'Somebody has to mingle with them,' she said, her voice trembling. 'Either in disguise or as one of them.' Uldini looked as if he had just bitten into a lemon. 'The girl is right,' he said hesitantly. 'If it works, we can find out about the curse in more detail, which will help us in our goal.' The silence that followed was even heavier than the humid air within the room. 'I'll do it,' said Ahren eventually, having gathered up all his courage. 'It is my oath, my idea. I have to stand up for it.' Even if he was terrified at the thought of being pulled down into the ocean depths with one of those cursed necklaces around his neck, he knew he had to take on the burden of fate if he were going to help Aluna and keep his word. 'Out of the question,' said Jelninolan in a voice of steel. 'A Paladin under the control of the dark god? We know nothing about this curse. Who knows if it will open the way to the Adversary having complete control over your mind? Or what he might do to your blessing of the gods? A Paladin doing this is completely impossible.' 'If I were to suggest myself now, that would sound cowardly, wouldn't it,' said Fisker, making an extremely poor attempt at a joke, which fizzled out in the tense atmosphere within the cabin. 'Well…you can forget about me,' said Trogadon. 'Unless you want to search the seabed for me afterwards.' He gestured straight down with his hand. 'We dwarves drop at the same speed as the iron we like to forge so much.' 'And I'm afraid we Ancients are ruled out too,' said Uldini. 'Either our magical instincts defy the curse, or we fall under HIS control and become terrifying weapons in the hands of our enemy.' 'That just leaves me, then,' said Khara, her voice quaking, and her face a deathly pale. Ahren leaped up, ignoring the pain in his leg. 'No, no, no! I refuse to allow it!' he shouted. Someone else must go – Yantilla or one of the marines…' Khara sat there, saying nothing, her shoulders stooped and her dark eyes downcast. It broke Ahren's heart to see her like that, so he dropped to his knees beside her. 'You don't have to do it,' he pleaded. 'You of all people have already been a…' He broke off, the word sticking in his throat. 'A slave?' asked Khara, looking him calmly in the eye, her face a mask of stoical acceptance. 'At least I will have some idea of what I am letting myself in for. Do you really want to send some poor devil down into the ocean who has no idea of what you are demanding of him?' Ahren shrunk back from the force of her questions. Tears of sorrow and shame filled his eyes, and he could not look at her. 'Her past might indeed be beneficial,' mused Uldini in a calculating tone, at which point Ahren wanted to do nothing more than punch him in the face. 'Khara learned as a child to cope with the mental consequences of enslavement, so perhaps Jelninolan can protect a small section of her understanding against the curse.' The elf nodded sadly and turned to Khara. 'It won't be much, but sufficient for you to be able to send a message to us at the appropriate moment – as soon as you have discovered something essential.' Ahren tumbled backwards as soon as he realised that Jelninolan was willingly siding with Uldini and Khara. Stunned, his wounded leg gave way and he fell with a crash onto the floor of the cabin. 'It was…m…my fault,' he stammered. 'I've done this to you. With my crazy idea.' He waved his finger at Fisker. 'I'm just as much a dirty swine as he is.' He shook his head wildly. 'No, I'm worse. I'm knowingly sending you into slavery in one of the darkest places of this world.' Khara's head was bowed, and her hair was hiding her face as she sobbed quietly, her shoulders shaking. Jelninolan crawled out of her hammock to comfort the young woman, and Falk stood up, a pained expression on his face. Culhen tried to get through to Ahren mentally, but the latter was so upset that he didn't understand the wolf. 'Ahren…' began Falk, his voice soft, but suddenly Trogadon was beside the young Forest Guardian, grasping him hard around the neck with his calloused hand, so hard that Ahren felt he was in the jaws of a Glower Bear. 'Let me take care of this,' said the dwarf firmly, dragging Ahren out of the cabin. The young man tried to regain his balance so that Trogadon wouldn't simply drag him across the ship. He felt stabs of pain in his leg, which darted through his body, but the merciless dwarf refused to loosen his grip, simply dragging the Forest Guardian along with him into his small workshop within the stowage, before throwing the stunned young man to the deck. Ahren slid along it and banged into the workbench from where he looked up at the dwarf, who was glaring down at him murderously. The squat warrior was fuming, and his hands were closed into fists. 'This isn't all about you,' growled Trogadon in a low voice. 'This is about Khara. That brave girl has realised that by offering herself, she will help us achieve our goal of gathering all the Paladins together, and you are doing nothing but feeling sorry for yourself and whining instead of being there for her?' The dwarf stepped towards him and Ahren pressed back into the workbench, terrified that one of the dwarf's fists was going to connect with his face. The shock at seeing the normally cheerful warrior so enraged was like a bucket of iced water being thrown over him, and the fog in Ahren's mind lifted a little, as the sight of the squat man forced the thoughts within him into some sort of order. At last you're listening to me, said Culhen, relieved. There was nothing but chaos in your head for the last few minutes. Wait until you're in a situation like this, retorted Ahren, cowed by the warning finger that Trogadon was lifting as the dwarf took another step towards the young man. 'You have been incredibly adult in your behaviour over the last few moons, and perhaps that has lulled me into a false sense of security, but now is not the time for you to revert to being Ahren the apprentice again. You are now a Paladin and will be confronted by many difficult decisions in the future. Sending your beloved to the Lost Tribe is certainly one of the most challenging, and the gods are well aware of the fact. I hope and pray that none will be more difficult than this one. But you had better get used to it or this mission will tear you apart. I thought that Uldini had already spoken to you in the Brazen City about the inevitable suffering that every prince, every peasant, and every warrior will endure in the oncoming Dark Days. This is Khara's moment, and you would do well to pull yourself together so that you can be there for her instead of making everything more difficult for the girl!' Trogadon's voice had been growing louder all the time and now he was practically screaming. Ahren stared at the dwarf, gobsmacked, and then he heard Culhen's words in his head. This is the moment when you are supposed to nod your head furiously. The young Forest Guardian quickly followed the wolf's advice, and Trogadon calmed visibly. 'Good,' he said. 'I had just become accustomed to the mature Ahren. It would be a pity if he didn't come up to the mark just when he was most needed.' Then he reached out his hand and pulled the young Paladin up onto his feet. 'The next time I'll talk less,' said Trogadon, lifting his fist dramatically. 'You are a man now and I can clarify my points a different way if I feel like it.' Ahren nodded again, then pushed himself past the grim-looking dwarf and walked down the narrow corridor leading back to the communal cabin. He stopped short when he saw Khara, her face tear-stained, walking towards him with a concerned look in her eyes. She's worried about me? The thought stunned him, and he felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. Suddenly, he felt terribly ashamed, and his first instinct was to turn and run away, but Trogadon's words echoed through his mind. Khara was the person who needed all the help and courage she could get. He had to be there for her insofar as that was possible. Well, then. said Culhen, delighted with the turn of events. That worked. Maybe I should drag you across the deck the odd time so that you will listen to me just as you did to Trogadon. Along with the wolf's conceited tone, Ahren could hear a certain pride in his friend's voice, which did him good and gave him strength. Everyone in the pack has their own role. Khara's is the most difficult now, so it's up to everyone else to stand by her. 'Everything alright?' asked Khara, her voice trembling. Ahren bit hard on his lip. 'Of course. I'm sorry,' he said in a low voice. 'I would gladly have spared you what is going to happen, and the feeling of being responsible for it overwhelmed me for a moment.' He stepped closer and embraced her, and she returned the gesture. Ahren stroked her smooth, silky hair and spoke soothingly into her ear. 'Everything will work out fine. Jelninolan and Uldini will find a way of protecting you from the worst consequences of the curse. And with a bit of luck it will take no more than one or two days. You are clever, strong, and determined, and nobody can break you. You are certainly going to reveal the secret of the Lost Tribe in no time at all.' Khara did not look at him but pressed herself closer as if she wanted to melt into him. 'Thank you,' she whispered. Then the pair walked back towards the others. Ahren heard a sound behind him, glanced around quickly and saw Trogadon, leaning against the doorframe of his workshop with his arms folded. The dwarf looked at him and nodded slowly. 'There you both are again,' said Falk, trying to keep his face neutral as the pair entered the room. 'We have just been discussing how we can refine our plan so that we can minimise the time that Khara will be bound by the curse.' 'Falk has explained to me that you have taught Khara how to use the Void,' said Uldini, skilfully skipping over Ahren's emotional outburst. 'That could certainly assist us. We might try to anchor her reason during the Void. That would partially protect her from attacks by the Adversary. At least to the point where we can disguise the fact that she is a spy.' Ahren nodded, trying at the same time to hide the fact that he was shaking all over. He wanted to be strong for Khara, so he smiled at her encouragingly as the two of them sat down beside each other, hand in hand. 'We should keep our plan as simple as possible,' interjected Falk. 'The more complicated it becomes, the more can go wrong. Fjolmungar will certainly be able to keep us safe from any potential predatory raids until we are in position. That should not be a problem.' Ahren nodded intently. 'We should sail right into their midst. I would imagine that the secret of their curse lies right in the middle of their territory.' He realised that he could keep better control of his emotions when he actively helped in the planning process. Falk nodded slowly. 'Good idea. The best thing for us to do is to sail to the group of islands where Aluna's ancestors used to live. Even if the Lost Tribe undoubtedly have control over a considerably greater area now, it will be easier for them to find us there. If Khara can infiltrate them in that location, then our chances of success will be all the greater.' Uldini looked over at Jelninolan, who nodded and spoke in a weak voice. 'Uldini and I will work with Khara during the next few weeks, until we arrive there. We are going to have to sail around the Vortices of Creation anyway, which will give us plenty of time to prepare. I will teach her many helpful techniques to help her against the repercussions of thought control, and Uldini will anchor specific commands in her subconscious.' When Khara heard those words, she pressed Ahren's hand so hard that it hurt. The young man couldn't imagine the effect that those words were having on the young swordswoman. 'Everything we are going to do will be for your protection,' said Jelninolan with feeling. 'I will ensure that no matter what happens you will give a signal for us to rescue you as soon as you have discovered what we need to know,' added Uldini, reassuring the young woman. 'What exactly are we trying to learn?' asked Ahren, still slightly confused by this part of their plan. Much to his horror, Uldini shrugged his shoulders. 'It could be anything at all – something that maintains the curse. An immortal High Fang as King of the Lost Tribe, a charm net that we cannot sense, a ritual that the newly-caught must undergo, or the manufacturing process of those damned necklaces, which as we already know, fall apart as algae once they have been cut through. Somehow, they must be able to create new ones, into which they then inject the curse.' 'And that is precisely our ray of hope on the horizon,' said Jelninolan to the group. 'The curse is actively creating new members for the Lost Tribe. Which means it is not some self-contained charm that was uttered centuries previously and still enslaving the original population. No, it must be a magic that constantly renews itself and spreads the curse. Something permanent is necessary for it to be effective – a place, a person, or an object that represents the source of the curse and equips every new necklace with its unholy force.' Khara stiffened as she heard the words. 'Does that mean I will remain one of them until the source of the curse has been broken?' she gasped. Uldini nodded sadly. 'Unfortunately, yes, my dear. Until now we have never been able to break the curse on individual victims.' 'Can we not simply find the source using magic?' asked Ahren hopefully. Uldini stared at him long and hard. 'Oh, ye gods,' he said slowly in a voice dripping with sarcasm. 'Why didn't we Ancients come up with that idea over all the centuries?' 'What Uldini is trying to say,' interjected Jelninolan, 'is that during the Dark Days there were three attempts to break the curse before the Lost Tribe were given up as a lost cause. All attempts ended in failure.' 'That doesn't sound good,' said Falk. Ahren felt Khara beginning to tremble beside him. He laid his arm around her shoulder and gently rocked her. Uldini made a reassuring gesture with his arms. 'What Ahren said to Aluna on the beach regarding our chances of success was completely true, in fact. I haven't dealt seriously with the curse myself yet, and Jelninolan's Storm Weaving seems to show a strong affinity to wind and water. Working together we will find a way.' 'Why have you yourself never tried to find a way to help the Lost Tribe up until now?' asked Fisker curiously. Uldini's face darkened even more than its normal hue. 'It wasn't high on my list of priorities,' he confessed in an embarrassed voice. 'The islands are of no strategic importance, they can easily be avoided, and the original population consisted of self-willed isolationists without allies. The only one to fight on their behalf was Aluna, and after the three failed attempts to break the spell, the curse was simply taken as given.' 'Then it is high time that we righted that wrong,' said Khara with a brave face, but a trembling voice. Fisker nodded earnestly. 'In the eyes of the gods, you might not be perceived as a Paladin, but as far as I'm concerned, you are one of us.' He smiled at her gratefully, and Ahren could feel her relaxing under his arm. 'Right, then,' said Uldini. 'Jelninolan and I need to discuss which magic to use and how, so that we can put our plan into effect. Don't expect any quick results, this is going to take us quite a while. Everybody, get out now, while we consult with each other.' Everyone stood up to leave. 'You stay with us, Khara. The sooner we begin to prepare you, the better,' said Jelninolan. 'We will start with the Elven training exercises for strengthening your mind's defences. That will give Uldini and me a little time to figure out the best way of proceeding.' 'May I stay too?' asked Ahren, pressing Khara's hand encouragingly at the same time. 'Better not,' said Uldini firmly. 'The techniques are challenging for a human to learn, and if it weren't for Khara's knowledge regarding the Void and her incredible self-discipline, we wouldn't even dare to try it, but we do really require the absence of any distractions.' Ahren nodded. Uldini had been remarkably tactful, and the Forest Guardian didn't want to goad the Arch Wizard into harping on about the young Paladin's previous emotional outburst. 'I'll wait for you on deck with Culhen,' he said quietly to Khara before kissing her on the cheek. She smiled at him bravely, almost breaking his heart. Then he let go of her hand and hobbled up to the deck to go in search of his trusted wolf. The following weeks were particularly monotonous, only made bearable for Ahren by his spending the days training to the point of exhaustion. Uldini would only let Khara out of the cabin and onto the deck in the evenings, where she spent most of the time in silence, occasionally answering questions in monosyllables. Asleep, however, she would hold onto Ahren tightly, and he tried to be the bastion of calm she so richly deserved. Fisker would keep him company during his daily training routines and he seemed determined to regain the agility he had previously exhibited when he had been an active Paladin. Ahren noticed that the ex-pirate was concentrating fully on improving his speed and dexterity, and it wasn't long before he could see that the blond man's reflexes were even better than those of Khara. The young Forest Guardian was glad to have Fisker's company, and the friendship between the two deepened through their brief but honest conversations, which gave Ahren the stability he needed so that he could be there for Khara. Trogadon and Falk left the pair in peace. Ahren suspected that they too felt as useless as he did and were struggling to come to terms with the situation. Culhen and Cassobo, on the other hand, didn't seem to be too worried. The two were developing a friendship, which seemed to consist of playing tricks on each other, but which also reflected the liking they had for one another. While Culhen enjoyed lying in wait behind some corner or other only to terrify the little creature with a loud bark or a howl, Cassobo's tricks were more outlandish. One time, he mixed a particularly strong spice in Culhen's food, which caused the wolf's golden-yellow eyes to fill with tears, and another time the clever monkey managed to tie a rope around the sleeping wolf's tail, so that when Culhen tried to get up the following morning, he fell flat on his stomach. However, one morning when Ahren spotted the monkey dabbing shaving cream between Culhen's eyes, and a razor lying at the ready beside the slumbering animal, he intervened anxiously. 'I really don't think you should mess with his fur,' said Ahren firmly. 'He probably won't get the joke – unless, of course, you'd like to explore the inside of his stomach.' Cassobo looked at him with his big eyes, then hastily wiped the shaving foam from the head of the wolf, who grumbled contentedly in his sleep. 'Good decision,' said Ahren with a smile. 'If you'd like to do something that he'd really like for a change, I'm sure you are skilful and strong enough to use his comb.' The monkey nodded, and by the time Culhen was finally awakened by a comb running carefully down his flank, their firm friendship had become unbreakable. Aluna continued to say nothing until Uldini found a moment to explain their plan to her, once he and Jelninolan had agreed upon how exactly they would support Khara with their charms. From then on, the Paladin spent more time on the Queen of the Waves while Fjolmungar swam alongside mistrustfully, looking over suspiciously through his narrowed eyes from time to time. One evening, Captain Orben issued everyone with a formal invitation to supper, during which the final plan of the wizards was to be presented. Aluna and Fisker sat as far away from each other at the richly laden table as possible. Yantilla was invited too, being the marines' commanding officer. The atmosphere was tense and the anxiety in the air was palpable. Rumours of their scheme had long since circulated on board, as well as the terrible consequences that might be in store for them should their expedition to the Lost Islands run into difficulties. During the first course of their delicious meal, the two Ancients explained the part of their plan that had already been settled for weeks – sailing into hostile waters, where Khara was to become a willing prisoner of the Lost Tribe. 'This is where your people are going to come into their own,' said Uldini, looking directly at Captain Orben and Yantilla. 'We are going to have to send Fjolmungar away so that a raiding party can summon up the courage to ambush us. The sailors and the marines should be trained to the point where they can defend themselves against the necklaces of the damned, and to do so in a manner where they do not have to kill their attackers.' He glanced over at Aluna, who nodded firmly in approval. The ex-mercenary frowned, and the captain too did not seem particularly happy with the condition the Arch Wizard had set – the thought of their men and women having to defend themselves against being stabbed to death or being condemned to a life beneath the waves, while protecting the lives of their enemies at the same time troubled them greatly. 'Our aim is to save the Lost Tribe, not to tear them to shreds,' interjected Falk, supporting the Arch Wizard. 'Trogadon and I will train your people – that will help us to pass the time too.' Ahren, who had been holding the hand of the despondent-looking Khara, was now tensing up, for it was coming to the point in the discussion with which he was not already familiar, 'Jelninolan has made excellent progress in strengthening Khara's will against control-magic. Although that won't prevent the curse, it will considerably alleviate many of its effects,' explained Uldini. 'I myself have anchored an impulse in her mind, which will cause her to send us a signal as soon as she has discovered something important. That is the moment when Selsena will follow her to find out exactly what it is.' Falk looked distinctly worried, and Jelninolan raised her hands helplessly. 'Everyone will be taking a risk here to try to accomplish our mission – including Selsena.' Aluna cleared her throat. 'Fjolmungar can be at the ready too and intervene should Selsena feel under threat.' A silence descended on the room as everyone stared at the little woman in her scale armour. 'I am just as keen for victory as you are,' she responded. 'In fact, I am even keener.' Her eyes wandered to Khara. 'What you are prepared to risk moves me to tears. You are binding your fate to that of my people in your attempt to free them.' Her eyes looked coldly at the others in the gathering. 'It's only a pity that it was outside pressure that has awakened the spirits of the other Paladins present here.' The response to her statement was an awkward silence, during which time Ahren asked himself who was entitled to the moral high ground: the woman, who had been pressurised through threats of the fall of Jorath, or he and his companions, none of whom had given a second thought to the suffering of her people over the previous centuries. Ahren had vowed years previously that he would save all those he possibly could save. Looked at one way, Aluna was now helping him to carry out his vow. Then his eyes fell on Khara, who was ashen-faced, and his doubts came flooding back. 'We should send messages to our fleets telling them that we have reached a truce,' suggested Fisker to Aluna in as polite a voice as he could manage. 'We must try to avoid further bloodshed too.' Aluna's face had hardened when he had spoken, but then she nodded curtly. 'Fjolmungar and I will instruct one of my pirate ships to spread the word. Draw up an agreement and I will sign it.' Fisker looked both relieved and grateful. Uldini then spoke again. 'We don't know how Khara will convey her message to us, so we must keep our eyes peeled for anything unusual. Conjuring can only attract the attention of the Lost Tribe to us, which means Jelninolan and I will have to minimise our input. We neither want them to form an army against us, nor do we want to be lacking in full magical energy when it comes to the moment of breaking the curse.' The rest of the evening was spent in going over the details, resulting in one thing becoming all too clear: nobody really knew what would happen once Khara was pulled under the waves. Ahren tried to keep up a confident appearance, the others also doing their best to support the pale swordswoman. The fact that Aluna was trying to give the young woman courage in her own restrained way, gave Ahren some hope that their enterprise was already bringing about some positive results. They were not exactly allies as yet, but Ahren had the impression that Aluna didn't see any of them as her enemy anymore. Even her exaggerated disdain towards Fisker seemed more of a show to remind everyone of Ahren's promise towards her people, rather than a continuation of her long-standing hatred towards her ex-lover. The two might never become friends again, but so long as Ahren didn't give her cause for breaking her trust in him, then perhaps she really would go into battle beside her brothers and sisters when the Dark Days broke, which was more than Ahren had been banking on only a few days previously. The whooshing and gurgling sounds that woke Ahren up the following morning were loud and terrifying. At first Ahren feared that the Queen of the Waves had sprung a leak and the ship was filling rapidly with water. Culhen was already awake and looking out onto the ocean with his ears pricked up. The ocean is boiling, said Culhen, and Ahren jumped up in alarm. At least, that's what it looks like, added the wolf cheerfully. Ahren rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and looked at the roiling water, consisting of countless rapid whirlpools, which were creating the tremendous noise that had disturbed his sleep. The current was pulling them toward one of the maelstroms, roughly ten paces across, and only the sails which were athwart and catching the wind going the opposite direction prevented the ship from being sucked into its terrifying vortex. Ahren stared in amazement at the ominous phenomena, stretching out before them as far as the eye could see. 'You picked a good time to wake up there,' said Aluna behind him, and he turned quickly to face her. The woman was wearing her scale armour as always. Ahren asked himself if she ever took it off at all. She was spinning her three-cornered hat absentmindedly in her hands and she gestured with her chin out at the bubbling, gurgling ocean. 'You are looking at the Vortices of Creation,' she said as if that clarified everything. Ahren gave her a questioning look, causing her to frown in surprise before she set about giving more details. 'The curse of maritime trade and a blessing for the Cutlass Sea pirates. This field of deadly maelstroms, which is twenty leagues across and twenty long, ensures that ships either navigate their way through the Shattered Poniard and then along the coast, or they sail all the way around the islands of the Splintered Sword. One way or the other, the merchant vessels have the choice between two equally treacherous routes. The same as if you were forced to decide whether to fall into a pit or be caught in a trap net.' 'But that doesn't explain these maelstroms here,' interjected Ahren as he looked back out at the ocean. The masses of water that seemed to be sucked down into the depths had something hypnotic about them, promising certain death on the ocean floor. Ahren was experiencing a force of nature that reminded him of the sandstorm in the Nameless Desert, except that the roaring whirls of water here seemed endless. 'The answer to your question lies in the name,' said Aluna, now standing beside him. 'According to legend, when the gods created the world, they followed a certain web-pattern. They bundled their energies, and whenever they had finished creating a piece of land, they tied its end together in the form of a maelstrom out here. Gradually, hundreds of knots were created until they had finally finished weaving the world. They say that when the vortices disappear, then that will be the end of Jorath too.' There was almost a yearning tone in her voice as she spoke. 'And do you believe that?' asked Ahren. The woman shrugged her shoulders. 'Better than Uldini's boring explanation of flux-equalisation, fissured ocean floors, temperature variations in the water and so on and so forth.' Ahren pondered for a moment and then glanced doubtfully at her. 'Ask what you want,' said Aluna sharply. 'Can you tell me your side of the story?' asked Ahren. 'Fisker did admit that his behaviour was a contributing factor in the war between the two of you, but…' He stopped nervously and Aluna spun around, gripping her three-cornered hat hard as she glared at him furiously. 'But you want to know how I became the person you have got to know?' she snarled angrily. 'The woman who leaves the world in the lurch.' Ahren nodded, too afraid to speak. 'Well, maybe the world left me in the lurch first,' she snapped. Fjolmungar, who had been swimming along the starboard side, reacted to the voice of his companion and raised his head dangerously close to Ahren and stared at him through narrowed eyes. 'Call your snake to order!' roared Orben from the quarterdeck, where he himself was manning the wheel. 'I could do without any disturbances until I have set the correct course, or we'll be sucked into the gullet of this maelstrom.' A shiver ran down Ahren's back at those words, but Aluna placated Fjolmungar with a wave of her hand. 'His protective instinct is particularly strong, and his voice, which is very loud, is always in my head,' said Aluna absently. 'Sometimes I find it extremely hard to think clearly,' she murmured. 'I might not remember days or even weeks of my life – probably whenever I hand over full control of both of us to him.' Ahren was about to suggest that this could hardly be a healthy situation when he thought better of it. 'You wanted to tell me why you think that the world has betrayed you,' he said instead, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible. Aluna looked at him through narrow eyes. 'My homeland was enslaved, my soul-mate assassinated, Fisker hurt me and cheated on me more times than I can remember, and my misery seemed endless. Aren't those reasons enough?' Ahren swallowed hard. 'Fisker told me that you were already battle-weary during the Dark Days. Why didn't you…pass on the torch?' Aluna closed her eyes. 'Are you asking why I did not bear a child into this world, so that my mission would be carried on by one with a heart full of good grace and hope?' Ahren nodded. 'Because it was always: "Only another few years, Aluna – then it will be done." But the few years became many. And the complicated relationships between Fisker and me and our soul-mates hardly made things any easier in the end.' She stood there for some time, her eyes closed, saying nothing. Ahren thought she was finished with her explanation but then she began speaking again and tears rolled down her cheeks. 'I was pregnant, you know,' she whispered, 'during the Night of Blood. We thought we had won the war, and after the centuries of fighting, all I wanted to do was grow old and die – in a world free of the Adversary and surrounded by my children and grandchildren.' Ahren looked at her wide-eyed with horror and wished he didn't have to hear the words she now uttered, shooting like arrows into his heart. 'I lost my child that night. All that death, those that were dearest to us, murdered in cold blood and in the most gruesome manner imaginable. It was all too much for me.' Ahren stood there and could do nothing but listen to the sorrow afflicting the ageless blond woman, who had suffered such loss in her life already and had grown weary of battle long before the centuries of waiting for the Thirteenth Paladin had even begun. 'I don't know why I am telling you all this,' she said with a bitter laugh filled with self-reproach. 'Only Fisker knows the full truth. Perhaps you seem to me too young, too full of an idealism that can have no place in this world. Perhaps I want to tell you how things really work in the world. That it is hard and cold and brutal.' 'Like the Cold Woman,' whispered Ahren, unable to stop himself. 'Yes,' said Aluna in a dignified voice. 'Like the Cold Woman.' The young Forest Guardian felt dizzy. Aluna had literally lost everything. Falk still had his homeland and even the barony that bore his name. Bergen had discovered the Blue Cohorts for himself, and Sunju had slept through century after century so that she could successfully hatch Sun Shimmer. But Aluna had nobody to love and care for except for Fisker and Fjolmungar. The one had gradually betrayed her love and trust, while the other had increasingly dominated her life and her spirit. Even if he couldn't forget the cruelty of the acts she had carried out over the last few decades, he was determined to make a better effort at understanding Aluna in the future. 'Was your time with Fisker really that bad?' he asked, eager to know what it was that his capricious friend had done to earn the wrath of this poor woman. Now she opened her eyes again and looked out over the portside at the maelstrom that they were now passing by at a safe distance. 'In the beginning it was beautiful and healing. He knew me and he knew what was good for me. But the more years that passed, the unhappier we became. The spirits of our soul-mates seemed to be plaguing us non-stop, overshadowing our every moment together. We became frugal with our praise for each other and generous with our criticisms. The arguments became longer and harder. We were both warriors, so acts of physical violence were now included. When we were gutting fish, we would attack each other with knives. We would pour salt into each other's food, and then we would mix in worse things. One time, for example, I criticised Fisker's ability as a fisherman, and so he sabotaged my boat, so that it filled with water the next time I went fishing. It was supposed to be a small but nasty act of revenge, but suddenly a storm blew up and I almost drowned in the sabotaged boat.' Ahren gasped, but Aluna stopped him with a wave of her hand. 'That was relatively harmless. You know what I did to Cassobo,' she whispered, her voice breaking. Ahren's face hardened as he remembered the little monkey's battered body. 'That was unforgivable and inexcusable,' he said firmly. No matter what reasons the woman might present, the little monkey had done nothing to deserve what she had done. She nodded. 'I thought Fisker would manage to get him to a healer – when I carried out the deed, I had no idea that Fjolmungar had swallowed them all, a long time previously.' The snake bellowed defiantly towards the heavens and she swallowed hard. 'He is the cruellest creature I have ever met and yet I still love him.' Ahren understood. It was hard not to love your companion animal and simply accept their qualities as a given. And the Blood Magic between Aluna and Fjolmungar had strengthened their connection further, before finally corrupting it. Ahren exhaled and looked at the roiling, swirling water, the physical manifestation of the pitiful, complicated situation afflicting the woman standing beside him. Then he remembered something, and a cold shiver ran down his spine. 'When we were looking for you and Fisker, we heard tales of lovers who hunted each other down, one story more gruesome than the next. Were all those stories actually about yourself and Fisker?' he gasped, hardly able to get the words out. Aluna gave a crooked smile. 'Yes, those tales concern us,' she said quietly. 'Some of our dubious conflicts even managed to make it into the legendary lore of the Cutlass Sea. Not really something one would wished to be remembered by, don't you agree?' Ahren really didn't know what else he could say. Instead, he stood silently beside the woman and mulled over what he had just heard. The thoughts spun around in his head until finally he could bear being beside the silent woman no longer and fled below deck to seek out the company of Trogadon in his workshop.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 21

Baron Aconus was standing on a more imposing podium this time, than at the gathering in springtime. His appearance, so laughable in Sven's eyes, had a hypnotic effect on the leaders and knights looking on. The air in the large tent was sticky as over a hundred men and women hung on every word the small, overweight leader of the THREE militia was uttering. 'Should you look around you, you will find among our ranks fifty knights, good and true, sent to us by our beloved King Senius Blueground in answer to my humble request. Endowed with both honour and wealth, these brave knights are here to teach us in the art of military engagement on horseback, each one also taking over command of five platoons of fighters.' Murmurs rippled through the audience, not all of them favourable, for it was immediately clear to the captains that the support had arrived not only to train them, but also to compete with their authority. Sven was standing three paces to the right of the baron, forcing his mouth into a friendly, approving smile, as he saw to his satisfaction, the many questioning faces looking back at him from the crowd, wondering if they should accept these new developments. Ever since he had slaughtered the despicable Glower Bear that had torn their beloved Adjutant Cosin to shreds, his popularity had soared throughout the whole militia. Baron Aconus had named him his new adjutant, which meant that he could even order around these haughty, yet impoverished, travelling knights who had joined their ranks. Sven could have danced for joy. Five thousand cavalry and fifty dyed-in-the-wool knights – and all of them under his command! He glanced over to Aconus, still waffling away. Well, nearly all of them under his command. One final, brilliantly audacious step still had to be taken. 'I am not ashamed to say that our new strategy is down to the initiative of none other than Adjutant Sven,' said the Baron, and Sven's ears pricked up, his heart beating faster. It seemed as if the half-wit was walking right into Sven's trap although he had only set it a few days previously. 'With our horses and the new recruits attracted to our ranks by the heroic deeds of our militia, it was he who had the inspirational idea of rooting out the source of this evil which is threatening our beloved borders.' Say it aloud, say it aloud, cheered Sven's spirit, and the Thing in his head stretched itself languorously. 'Because the combined armies of the western lands are shortly to take over custody of the Borderlands, he has suggested a plan, both daring and heroic. Rather than wait for more and more Low Fangs to stream over from the Borderlands, we shall march forcibly to the Pall Pillar and encircle it. We shall ensure that not one poor soul, led astray by false promises, will be transformed into a Low Fang, not to mention a High Fang. We shall simultaneously chase away any wild animals that approach the Pall Pillar and save them from living out the rest of their lives as Dark Ones. Our Keepers shall equip every man, every woman, every horse within our ranks with a protective amulet to help us withstand the will of the Adversary. Our militia, this brave band of loyal captains and knights standing before me today, will be written into the pages of history as a troop of exceptional patriots, who will prevent the Dark Days from occurring even as their dawns are breaking!' Disbelief greeted the vigorous words of the baron, who looked down at the crowd, hardly able to hide his disappointment when he saw the doubt in their faces as they considered the hazardous venture. Sven took a step forward and raised a fist in the air. 'For our homeland!' he roared at the top of his voice. 'For our homeland!' responded the choir of eager voices, echoing his cheer and pumping their fists in the air in response. Cheers of jubilation followed, and Sven couldn't help but revel in the sound of his name being called out several times. He nodded to the baron, who was smiling contentedly, the old codger lost in reverie as he imagined himself immortalised, thanks to the seed that Sven's words had planted in his mind only a few days earlier. Follow me, you sheep, thought Sven maliciously. Follow me – for I am your glorious leader.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 22

Ahren's heart hammered in his chest, and his mind was as exhausted as his soul was sore. The last few gruelling weeks had brought them ever further northward, past the Vortices of Creation and into the remote, abandoned region of the Lost Islands. They had sailed close by more than one of the landmasses, and Ahren had stared in disbelief at the ruined houses, still visible and tucked into any shelter provided by the mainly rocky coastline, revealing that a fishing people had once resided there, who had painstakingly and lovingly built their simple, low houses. The atmosphere on board the Queen of the Waves was positively ghostly, and it seemed to Ahren as though they were sailing through the waters of a time long past, where no mortals had any business being. At night they would hear the splashing sounds of creatures emerging to the surface at a distance, and they were in no doubt that they had long been sighted. Selsena, now constantly in the good ship's slipstream and under the dubious protection of Fjolmungar, confirmed to Falk that the area was teeming with members of the Lost Tribe. She described how the accursed folk lived in battered coral reefs, deep underwater caves and rotting shipwrecks, apparently sunk by their own hunting teams after overpowering the crews and forcing them, along with their vessels, below the waves. Ahren shivered at the thought that the ruined islands surrounding them were merely the tip of a small mysterious kingdom hidden beneath the surface. But now the fatal day that Ahren had been dreading was upon them. According to Aluna, they had sailed into the centre of what had formerly been her home islands, and the young Forest Guardian saw for the first time the pain she had to have felt that time, for it was reflected in the eyes of the blond woman. His heart sank at the thought that soon Khara would be diving into the water to be deliberately caught. Now he understood the horror Aluna must have felt that time when she learned of the fate that the Adversary had caused to befall her family, her friends and her neighbours – the very same fate that was now to afflict his beloved. And Aluna had been feeling this pain for centuries while the rest of the world had carried on living, oblivious of the tragedy that had played out in the vasts of the Cutlass Sea. Ahren rubbed his eyes wearily. Perhaps the gods had fed him this insane idea which he had tossed before the avenging woman because they wanted to right this age-old wrong. He hoped that this was the case. Khara stretched beside him, and he forced himself to look at her. The swordswoman got to her feet. She was dressed in a loose garment of Elven silk, without weapons or armour. They didn't quite know what an accursed person was to expect, but they did not want to risk her being hindered in her swimming through the weight of armour or weaponry. Khara would enter the water encumbered by no more than her silk costume. She was trembling slightly, as she had done the whole night through while she and Ahren had tried to sleep in vain, wrapped in each other's arms, each seeking out the comfort of their beloved. Time and again, Ahren had promised her that everything would be alright, as if uttering a mantra to protect her from her coming misfortune. Her companions were standing in a semi-circle around Khara, and now Aluna placed her hands on the young woman's shoulders. 'I am completely in awe of what you are willing to do for me and my people,' she said in a solemn voice. 'In honour of your sacrifice, let me promise you this – no matter how things turn out, I shall do Fisker no harm. Our feud is hereby ended.' Fjolmungar let out a howl of protest from his enormous mouth. Aluna swayed slightly, as though she were struggling internally. Then she gasped and continued to speak. 'This is my gift to you, so that you know your deeds will not be in vain.' Fjolmungar screamed his unhappiness again, and the tip of his tail slapped against the Queen of the Waves, causing everybody to lose their balance temporarily. Aluna looked paler than normal. Ahren feared that she might submit to the snake's strength of will again, but then Cassobo leaped off Fisker's shoulder, raising himself to his full height before the little woman. He chattered away solemnly before bowing deeply, one arm upwards in a courtly gesture, while he looked steadfastly at her with his dark, clever eyes. 'He...' began Fisker and then broke off with tears in his eyes. 'He says, he forgives you,' gasped Fisker, his fists clenched. He clearly did not approve of the monkey's words. 'He forgives you for doing what you did to him.' His voice was little more than a whisper, but it echoed in Ahren's heart like a thunderclap. Aluna seemed to be deeply moved and completely taken aback. When at last a girlish smile stole across her face, she curtseyed graciously before Cassobo, and the monkey straightened up and scurried back onto Fisker's shoulder. The little monkey's absolution seemed to have given Aluna inner strength, for she waved her hand at Fjolmungar, indicating to him that he should stop his protest, and although the snake hissed furiously in response, he then became quiet. Ahren was beginning to suspect that Cassobo was indeed cleverer than the lot of them, as Fisker had asserted to him before. With his generous gesture, he had given Aluna the strength of mind to bend Fjolmungar to her will. 'And you will fight side by side with us?' asked Falk urgently. 'No matter what happens?' 'Yes,' she said. 'No matter what happens.' Suddenly, Ahren was gripped by a wild hope. Perhaps they could persuade Aluna to do without the rescue mission. They could simply sail away, leave the Lost Islands behind them and go in search of Yollock…but then he looked at Khara, who gazed back at him with understanding, but sad eyes. She shook her head and Ahren's heart missed a beat. Khara was going to do it. The realisation was like a sudden block of ice in his mind, freezing his doubts and fears in a moment of brilliant clarity. She had resolved to help, whatever the pressures from without. She would never be able to look at herself in the mirror again, said Culhen gently. And neither would you. His friend was right. How could Ahren maintain his own vow to save as many lives as possible if he were to turn his back on hundreds or even thousands of martyred souls, and for totally selfish reasons? He felt hollow and brittle as he took Khara's hand and squeezed it gently. 'I am going to swim away with Fjolmungar now,' said Aluna. 'It won't be long before the Lost Ones attack you.' She nodded respectfully to Khara, who returned the gesture, then the Paladin climbed onto the sea-snake's back before they quickly moved away from the Queen of the Waves and quickly disappeared from view. 'Positions, everybody!' roared Captain Orben. 'I don't want to lose anybody to the sea today. Everybody, watch out for the person behind you, just the way Baron Falkenstein has practised with you!' The marines and sailors quickly went into their formations, which prevented the possibility of enemy surprise. In this way they thwarted the preferred tactic of the Lost Tribe, which involved slipping the cursed necklaces over their unwitting enemies from behind, thereby transforming them into one of their own. Uldini gestured to the ocean. 'It is time, Khara,' he whispered. The young woman nodded, then pulled Ahren into her and gave him a last, all-too-fleeting, kiss. The Forest Guardian wanted to hold onto her forever, flee with her to the ends of the earth and never look back. But finally, he released her hand from his grip. 'I love you,' he whispered, whereupon she smiled and stroked his cheek. 'As if I didn't know that already,' she said quietly, before her eyes took on a harried look. She spun around, strode pluckily to the bulwark, up onto the plank, and without saying another word, dived into the water. Ahren didn't know what took hold of him, but in an instant he was at the railing, ready to hurl himself down into the ocean when suddenly he felt hands on both his shoulders as Falk and Fisker prevented him from putting his plan into effect. 'Stay strong, little brother,' said Fisker. 'Together, not alone,' he intoned. Already Ahren could see the pale outlines under the surface, like malevolent spirits approaching the young woman as she swam. She craned her neck towards the ship and their eyes met for what seemed like an eternity. Pale hands broke through the waves and grasped Khara just as Ahren was about to call out something, but already a necklace had been slid around her neck from behind. Ahren collapsed as the water closed over Khara's head and her upraised hand sank below the surface. He wept bitter tears and the world seemed to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces, leaving behind a blanket of darkness. 'Together, not alone,' said Falk, his voice breaking. Ahren cowered on the deck under the hands of his fellow Paladins and cried for the love of his life who had surrendered herself to a fate that was worse than death itself. Ahren experienced the attack that followed, as if under a thick covering of fog. He was completely incapacitated and unable to act, protected by Falk and Fisker, who pushed back the Lost Ones clambering aboard every time they came within reach. All over the ship, marines and sailors were fighting back their attackers with blunt spears or broad shields, using non-lethal manoeuvres while Uldini charmed his crystal ball, now glowing, to float up into the skies, signalling to Fjolmungar and Aluna that the first part of their plan had been put into operation and that they should return to the ship. Khara was under the waves. And accursed. The tears kept pouring down, and no matter how bravely Ahren had borne himself over the previous few weeks, now that he could no longer see her, the floodgates opened, and he just couldn't control his emotions. Only when he saw one of the female sailors struggling with one of the attackers, who was trying to force one of the cursed algae chains around her neck, did life come flooding back into the young man. He jumped up with a roar and stormed across the deck before forcing the pale man down onto the ground with an almighty kick. His fists were clenched so tightly that they hurt, and he rained down a shower of punches on the Lost One who found it impossible to fight back. The Lost One's body slackened, and Ahren was on the point of continuing with his onslaught but was stopped by the sailor herself. 'No, Squire,' she said, wide-eyed. 'We don't want to kill them.' She gestured to the lifeless figure at their feet. 'Help me to throw him back into the sea before he asphyxiates in the fresh air.' Ahren gritted his teeth and the rush of blood subsided as her words got through to him. He helped her to heave the muscular man with his unnaturally broad chest and lidless, fishlike eyes over the bulwark, from where he dropped down into the ocean. Culhen stormed past him, yelping wildly, causing the Lost Ones to stop in their tracks. The wolf was their secret weapon, for even that time before he had become his companion animal, Culhen's howling had sent the cursed creatures into a panic. They had agreed that the wolf should appear when the attack was at its most dangerous, and in that way destroy the morale of the attackers, and this he was doing with his impressive appearance. His enormous body simply shoved several fleeing attackers overboard, and within five heartbeats, calm had returned to the deck and the battle was over. A cheer went up, and Culhen radiated such a conceited air of self-satisfaction that Ahren couldn't help smiling. But the moment passed, and his sorrow returned like an impenetrable wall of blackness, barring him from any feeling of warmth or happiness. Culhen came up to him and pushed his nose into his friend's chest, showering him mentally at the same time with all his love and affection. Ahren held onto him like a drowning man. The wolf's presence was like a torch, leading this traveller to safety and hope through the darkness of the night. 'Ah, big lad,' mumbled Ahren sadly. 'What would I do without you?' The fact that the wolf didn't retort with a biting or vain comment showed Ahren all too clearly that the Culhen understood how deeply Khara's self-sacrifice was affecting the young man. They retired to the foredeck and stared silently out over the sea, grimly determined not to miss the smallest signal that told them that Khara's plan had succeeded and that the young woman wasn't lost to them forever. 'Ahren, you simply must eat something,' said Falk in a concerned, almost pleading voice as he stood beside the young man. The stars were shining brightly in the dark-blue night sky, and everything around him seemed to possess at that moment, an extreme sharpness and clarity. During the first two days and nights he had been dog-tired, as he had spent all day and all night watching out for any sign of Khara, but this feeling had melted away the longer he had stayed awake. He found it hard to think, it was true, but his eyes were functioning, and that was the only thing that mattered. 'And you have to sleep too, you know,' pleaded the old Forest Guardian. 'People are watching around the clock, and Selsena is swimming ceaselessly around the hull and keeping an eye out for Khara,' said Falk. 'Torturing yourself is not going to help you one little bit – on the contrary – as soon as we get a signal from the girl, you need to be rested and ready for action.' Ahren continued to stare out onto the waves. The words made sense, but he didn't want to respond – and certainly not turn his head. He wasn't going to abandon Khara, he wasn't going to betray her. He heard Falk urging Culhen beside him. 'Can you not knock some sense into him?' he was asking in a concerned voice. Culhen's words then echoed in Ahren's mind, but during the two sleepless nights he had completely disregarded the wolf, so Falk's efforts were in vain. Ahren smiled. Nothing would prevent him from standing by his beloved, even if only to stand guard in silence. Falk was speaking to Culhen again. 'I'm really sorry, but this is going to hurt me more than it hurts him.' Ahren blinked as Falk yanked him around by the shoulder. 'What the…?' he asked, flabbergasted, but Falk's fist was already connecting with his chin, sending his martyred spirit to the enforced peace of unconsciousness. His chin was aching hellishly when he woke up in his hammock. A cool facecloth lay on his forehead and Ahren smelled the spicy aroma of soporific herbs suffusing the stagnant air of the cabin. 'He is awake.' Ahren heard the gravelly of voice of Trogadon beside him. He wanted to turn his head towards the dwarf, but the warrior was already beside him, pressing his heavy hand down on the Forest Guardian's chest, making Ahren feel like a fly pinned to a wall. 'You stay lying there like a good little boy,' said the dwarf firmly. 'Jelninolan has prescribed three days bedrest for you. You pushed yourself to the very limit – and completely unnecessarily.' 'Khara?' asked Ahren, his mouth dry. Trogadon shook his head sadly and Ahren's heart sank. 'How long has it been?' he whispered. 'We've been watching you for six days now,' said the dwarf, clearing his throat apprehensively. Ahren closed his eyes and suppressed the fearfulness that was rising within him and threatening to fray his nerves to the point of despair. He knew that if he gave in to the inferno threatening him from within, he would lose his mind or jump overboard. Or both. 'What do Uldini and Jelninolan say?' His voice still betrayed the pain he was feeling. 'That Khara is hale and hearty,' blurted Trogadon. 'Well, as hearty as she can be, given the circumstances.' The warrior's face wrinkled beneath his beard as he tried hard to smile good-naturedly. 'Your girl is a tough nut – tougher than you are. She would have made a fantastic dwarf. She will get through this.' Ahren pondered hard. He had to trust that Khara would use her strength of will and her toughness to good effect. The despair within him began to ebb away a little. 'Is it alright if I sit up?' he asked. 'I'm feeling too much like a little child here.' Trogadon laughed in his rumbling bass voice and took his hand away, which had still been pressing down hard on Ahren's chest. 'As long as you don't jump out of your hammock,' he warned. 'Or we will bind you fast and place a hot pot of stew on one side of you, and a chamber pot on the other.' Ahren scowled and the dwarf laughed again. 'You've done well over the last few weeks,' growled Trogadon, his voice sounding almost embarrassed. 'I keep forgetting how young you still are.' The Forest Guardian shrugged his shoulders. 'At the moment I feel ancient.' Trogadon laughed yet again, and even louder this time. 'That's what experience and difficult decisions do to you. A moon of drinking and laughter, and that feeling will disappear again, believe you me.' 'That sounds tempting,' said Ahren. 'Once we have Khara back, we'll do that. Is that a deal?' Trogadon nodded solemnly. 'A deal. When she is with us again, that's exactly what we'll do.' Ahren knew all too well how hollow their agreement sounded. He closed his eyes in an effort to satisfy his spirit's need for sleep and to escape from the harsh reality of the situation he was in. The next time he awoke, the aromas of spices were gone, as was the surreal feeling at the back of his mind. And about bloody time, complained Culhen irritably. Your measly human understanding really locked me out over the last few days. Ahren grinned. I really don't understand why, when I hear you talking like that. You'd better get up on deck, said Culhen, offended. Everyone has gathered – something about the Lost Tribe. Any news about Khara? asked Ahren excitedly. Do you not think I would have torn you out of your hammock if there were? snapped the wolf, making it abundantly clear to Ahren that the young Paladin was not the only one terribly concerned about the fate of the young swordswoman. He stood up and noticed that he was alone in the cabin. His head was clear, his senses were sharp, and he felt refreshed and rested. He was certain that Jelninolan had played a part in his recovery and wondered how long it had been since Khara had disappeared. Eight days and eight nights, came the answer from the wolf as Ahren climbed the stairs to the deck. The sailors he encountered greeted him formally and seemed to be treating him with kid gloves. He gritted his teeth and decided to ignore their change in behaviour. They had seen the Thirteenth Paladin in a particularly emotional state, and it would probably be a while before the impression he had made would be forgotten. He was hit with a blast of fresh sea-air as he arrived on deck, and with it came the memory of Khara's dive into the sea. He suppressed his fears, which served nobody, and sensed Culhen's delight at the effort he was making. 'We can only stay anchored here for another two or three days,' said Captain Orben just as Ahren came within earshot. 'You can see for yourselves that more and more of those harpooners are gathering around us. Our continued presence is going to provoke a full-scale attack soon, sea-snake or no sea-snake.' The punctilious officer was surrounded by Ahren's companions on the quarterdeck, and it was clear that a lively discussion was just taking place. 'I agree with his assessment of the situation,' said Aluna. 'If they attack us there will be a full-scale massacre – on both sides. Something that we must avoid at all costs.' Uldini frowned. 'Let's try and hold out for as long as possible. Khara's signal will emerge at the point where she was pulled underwater. The instructions that I planted in her subconscious were crystal clear on that point. I don't want us to miss her message, in whatever form it appears.' 'Squire Ahren, good to see you!' interrupted Yantilla, who was the first to spot him. 'You look well rested.' The curious eyes of everyone on deck were almost unbearable. Ahren tried his best to put on a serious yet neutral face, accompanied by a determined, steady look. 'Paladins are renowned for their tendency to hibernate,' he said, trying to make a joke. 'And that in the middle of summer,' grinned Falk, while the others laughed cautiously. A look of relief came over the onlookers as they realised that he was back to his old self and they gladly made room for him so that he could join in the discussion. 'How much did you hear?' asked Falk. 'Enough,' answered Ahren. 'Can Fjolmungar not frighten the harpooners a little?' he suggested. 'Not really attack them,' he added quickly. 'Just a few lunges that might demoralise them.' 'Fjolmungar is good at frightening,' said Aluna, the snake bellowing loudly in response. 'Many a merchant has willingly handed over all their wares after such a roar.' Ahren refrained from adding that the snake had still destroyed the merchant vessels after that. He was willing to forgive Aluna, but he was sure that he would never overcome his aversion to the enormous reptile. Aluna seemed to have issued the animal with some orders, for Fjolmungar dived down towards the east, causing the Queen of the Waves to rock violently, and all on board to look in the direction that the snake was going. Ahren could see over two hundred figures that were repeatedly emerging above the waves, looking at the ship and her occupants. Long, crude harpoons were in their hands, and Ahren knew that strands of algae were affixed to their ends, with which the Lost Ones could pull their victims into the sea once they had been harpooned. Fighting against a force like that would be utterly impossible without injuring many of them or even killing them. Then Fjolmungar was underneath the Lost Ones, churning the water up by slapping his long, thick, contorting body hard on the waves before bellowing, diving, and repeating the process. The marines and sailors on deck looked at each other fearfully, and it became clear to Ahren, not for the first time, that they would never have stood a chance against this ferocious creature on the high seas. At last the Lost Ones scattered in all directions, and Fjolmungar swam back to the ship, his eyes half-closed, giving his frozen features a self-satisfied look. 'That should buy us a little time,' said Uldini, relieved. 'Let's hope that Khara's message appears soon.' Ahren heard the undertone of doubt in the Arch Wizard's face and turned his face away, hoping that nobody would see his frustration. 'I'll keep watch on the foredeck until sunset,' he said. 'It would be nice if somebody replaced me then.' Nobody objected, and Ahren was glad that they realised he was in no mood for conversation. The Forest Guardian felt that he was trapped in no-man's land, and that his life would only continue once Khara was with him again. Ahren, Ahren, wake up! Culhen's voice pushed its way into his drowsy mind and immediately he was wide-awake. The wolf had tilted his head and was listening intently to something. The night was overcast, there was practically no wind, and the only things that Ahren could hear were the creaking of the ship as she rose and fell with the gentle swell, and the rhythmical metal clanging of the anchor chain as it chafed the hull. I'm sure I heard something, said Culhen. A splashing! Just where Khara disappeared. Ahren was immediately up on his feet and ran to the railing. At first he had feared an attack by the Lost Ones, for five more days had passed since Fjolmungar had scattered the warriors of the Lost Tribe, but Culhen's excited words gave him hope that it might be some kind of sign connected to Khara. The dark, starless night transformed the broad expanse of ocean into a black burial shroud. In the light of the hurricane lamp, Ahren sensed more than he could properly see – two large white eyes seemed to be staring at him from above the surface of the water, their form strangely familiar to him. His heart skipped a beat. 'Khara?' he asked timidly, and the figure in the water moved a little. 'Is it you, Khara?' he asked again. Falk stormed up on deck and immediately the shadow disappeared beneath the surface. 'Selsena is telling me that Khara is here!' he called out joyfully. When he saw Ahren, he ran over to him. 'She was there a second ago, in the water,' responded Ahren, nonplussed. But she didn't say anything – just disappeared again.' Falk slapped him on the back and squeezed him close for a heartbeat. 'The main thing is, she's back,' he said decisively. 'Come on, let's have a look and see what she has left for us. Selsena says there is something floating in the water.' Ahren shivered and nodded. 'Let me climb down a rope. I'll collect it and bring it back on board.' 'Going down into the water in the dark with the Lost Tribe all around us? I think not!' intoned Uldini from the hatch leading below deck. The Arch Wizard floated up the stairs, his robe hanging askance and inside out around his childlike figure. 'I'll do it,' he said forcefully and quickly floated out over the bulwark and down. Two heartbeats later and a cry could be heard from the depths beside the ship. It took Ahren a heartbeat to register that it had been a cry of joy. 'Got it in one!' called Uldini, rising and swaying somewhat as he floated upwards towards them. Meanwhile, all their companions were streaming up on deck, not to mention most of the other occupants of the ship. 'Look and see what she's put together for us.' Uldini was holding a longish wedge-shaped article under the hurricane lamp. It seemed to be a piece of coral and had some kind of illustration scratched into it in the shape of an upright stone. Jelninolan laughed delightedly, taking the find from Uldini's hands. 'That's perfect,' she said, her voice brimming with enthusiasm. 'She's even carved the runes, at least on one side of it.' 'Who's going to explain all this to us so that we can join in the celebrations?' asked Trogadon drily, anticipating what Ahren had been about to say. Uldini pointed at the coral in Jelninolan's hands. 'That is the drawing of a Bonding Stone. Very rare, very powerful and exactly the type of focus required for a curse in the manner of the one used for the Lost Tribe.' 'And now we can track it down,' said Jelninolan jubilantly. 'We know what we are looking for, and thanks to Khara, we know some of the magic runes that are found on it. Creating a suitable charm net will be child's play!' Cheers rang out on deck and countless hands slapped Ahren on the back or shook his hand, but his eyes were fixed on the two Ancients. 'How long?' he shouted above the racket. 'Not long,' said Uldini. 'Give us one day and then we will know where we are sailing.' Ahren grasped the hilt of Sun. One day. The two words burned like fire into Ahren's brain. Only one more sunset, and then they would set off, to free Khara and every member of the Lost Tribe from their enslavement by the dark god. He drew Sun from its scabbard, the blade catching the light from the Storm Lantern. Then he raised the sword above his head and roared his joy and relief out into the night – and there was not a soul on board that did not do the same.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 23

Uldini's prediction was overtaken by reality. That very same night, the two magicians instructed Captain Orben to take a north-easterly course, which would bring them closer to the Bonding Stone that Khara had etched for them. Ahren tried in vain to sleep. Even Culhen, normally so relaxed, wandered the deck restlessly, getting into the way of more than a few sailors. Trogadon stood at the railing, singing a litany of Dwarfish ballads, his gravelly, rhythmical songs firing up the crew as they hurriedly carried out their captain's orders by the light of the hurricane lamps. Fisker and Falk stood beside Ahren on the foredeck of the ship, keeping him company. The mood was tense but optimistic. 'We're not going to get to the Bonding Stone without a fight,' said Fisker, looking pensively over at Aluna, who was riding on Fjolmungar beside the Queen of the Waves. The sun was now a fiery chink on the horizon, its first rays lending the armoured woman on the enormous snake a heroic appearance. 'I hope she will accept that.' 'We should act the same way as we did during the skirmish when Khara fell under the curse,' said Ahren decisively, much to the surprise of his companions. 'We will try to keep the enemy at bay without injuring them. If we start a massacre, we risk alienating Aluna. I am certain that Fjolmungar is just waiting for his chance to bring her back under his control.' Falk looked at him sceptically, but Fisker nodded, and even Cassobo moved his head up and down furiously. 'We agree with your decision,' said the blond man, whose appearance had gone through a dramatic transformation. Ahren thought back to the dissolute drunkard and self-proclaimed admiral that he had first met only a few months previously. Fisker's blond locks fell tidily down over his shoulders, his light Paladin armour sparkled in the early morning sunshine, and his fencing cape made from Deep Silk shimmered brightly every time he moved. His sparkling eyes and straight back pleased Ahren just as much as the calm manner he was currently exhibiting as he absentmindedly stroked the chattering little monkey with affection. This Paladin, who had once lost his way so badly, was blossoming now that they were embarking on a task worthy of the champions of the gods, and it was impossible not to see that he was struggling to rein in his enthusiasm. Falk, on the other hand, looked as stoical as ever, although Ahren did notice the tiny tell-tale signs of nervousness recognisable only to those who knew him particularly well. 'Then I shall inform the good Yantilla that her people must only fight with kid gloves on,' said the old man, striding away. 'I don't know anybody who can express quiet disapproval as effectively as our big brother,' laughed Fisker. Ahren chuckled. 'What is your nickname among the Paladins?' he asked. Fisker frowned. 'Monkey-valet,' he said reluctantly. Cassobo grinned, clapping his tiny hands in front of his friend's blushing face. Ahren giggled and saluted the little monkey facetiously, who saluted back and then started chattering to Fisker. The Paladin shrugged his shoulders dutifully. 'Now that we are on the subject – I'd better go and serve him some wine.' 'Not too much, though,' warned Ahren. 'We could still do with his clever mind today.' While Fisker was bringing the chattering little monkey below deck, Ahren looked out towards the horizon, where the first outlines of a large island were beginning to appear ahead of them. That had to be where their destination. Stay strong, Khara, he thought wildly, digging into Culhen's fur. We're coming! In the late afternoon they moored off the stony, barren island, which was peppered with ruined houses. Ahren wondered how anybody could have survived on this mass of rock, but when he saw Aluna's shocked face, he realised that it had not always been like this. 'This island was once renowned for its gardens. Only the wealthiest of our tribe lived here,' she said sadly. 'We have to go that way,' announced Uldini, pointing inland. 'The Bonding Stone is in the heart of the island. Let's see if we can find a slope somewhere.' Yantilla, who had come with her soldiers to cover their back, looked around doubtfully. 'The stone is the source of an underwater curse. What makes you think you can approach it by land?' 'According to the few documents that were found here describing the fate of the Lost Tribe, the dark god's treachery was planned over a long time, with visits and gifts, where he disguised himself in a pleasing human form. He must have created the Bonding Stone during this period and included it among the presents for the Lost Tribe. This type of magic cannot be carried out from a distance using charms, not even HE, WHO FORCES can do that. No, there must be a path leading downward here – or, at least, there must have been one in the past. We should try searching for the stone here before risking an underwater probe in the surrounding waters, don't you think?' Yantilla and her people nodded dutifully, and the large group proceeded to walk between the silent stone witnesses to a lost civilisation. Ahren could see the ruins of circular houses everywhere, with the remains of shell-covered domed roofs bravely trying to defy the ravages of time. He remembered the ghost town they had gone through in the Borderlands. So many civilisations that had fallen at the hands of the Adversary – and they were on the point of resurrecting one of them. 'Everything is still quiet,' said Trogadon, eyeing the bay behind him. The Queen of the Waves was anchored not far off the stony beach, and Orben's sailors, together with Fjolmungar, were guarding her against possible attack. 'But if the Lost Tribe hear that we are after their priceless stone, the situation will change very quickly.' 'Here it is,' said Uldini, and the disappointment in his voice spoke volumes, even before Ahren turned towards him. The Arch Wizard was standing by a small pond, and once he lit up his crystal ball, they could see rough stone steps submerged in water and leading down into the depths. 'The way is flooded,' he said with a sigh. 'What now?' asked Falk, looking at the baffled faces of his companions. 'I can create a little breathing space for us,' said Uldini doubtfully. 'But the charm will only last for a short time.' Ahren was losing courage with every heartbeat. If they had to dive now, they would be in the Lost Tribe's element, and it was clear to him what the outcome of any battle under water would be. 'I can help,' announced Jelninolan, raising her Storm Fiddle to her shoulder. 'An age-old friend gave me a gift many moons ago, and now I finally understand what it was that he was trying to teach me.' Before anyone had a chance to question her further, she was already playing. Sweet, sustained notes floated through the air and over the rocks, seeming to carry with them the sound of the breakers and the mighty forces of the ebbing and flowing tides. The water in the pond trembled as if experiencing an earthquake but did nothing else – until Jelninolan began to sing. Ahren didn't recognise the words, but her voice was both commanding and enticing at once, the melody of her song a harmonious counterpoint to the sounds from her fiddle. The water seemed to shrink back from the elf. When she placed her slim foot on the top step, the water withdrew, leaving her dry. The soldiers gasped in surprise as the priestess descended the steps, playing and singing all the while, and the water pushed its way back down like a flock of sheep before their shepherdess. Her blue-green robe seemed alive and contorting, and the power of her True Form was almost tangible. 'That woman never ceases to amaze me,' said Trogadon admiringly. 'Right then, down we go!' commanded Uldini as he floated after Jelninolan. The first of the companions began to descend, but when it was Ahren's turn, he was stopped in his tracks. 'Look over there, Squire!' cried out Yantilla, pointing back towards the beach. Over forty Lost Ones were storming up the shore in their direction. They were all holding waterskins, with which they were wetting their gills to stop themselves from asphyxiating. The spears on their backs betrayed their murderous intent. Ahren quickly considered the situation, figuring out quickly what had to be done. 'You must let them approach us from behind. Your people have shields – fight off the attackers. They won't be able to engage in combat for long, then they will have to withdraw so that they can breathe.' The gaunt woman nodded and issued her orders. Soon there was a shield wall around the exposed stairway. 'You do what you have to do, we will resist them for as long as we can,' said the soldier, a look of steely determination in her eyes. 'Good luck, Yantilla,' said Ahren in farewell. 'You too, Squire. May the gods be with you!' Ahren had gone down a step when he noticed that Culhen was hesitating. I can be much more effective up here, said the wolf. I can run and jump and howl and push. There's hardly any room down there for me. Ahren looked into the wolf's golden-yellow eyes for a heartbeat. 'Alright,' he said aloud. 'But be careful.' Then he walked down the steps with the sound of cheering from the soldiers above ringing in his ears as they realised the enormous wolf would be staying to help them. The young man hurried to catch up with the others, all the while allowing Culhen's sense impressions to have their effect on him so that he could keep track of what was going on above the surface. The stairs descended for about fifty steps. It seemed to Ahren to be the entrance to another world. Damp, glittering algae hung from the smooth walls and carpeted the steps, making progress treacherous. The gurgling of the retreating water mingled with Jelninolan's mysterious singing and the sounds of Mirilan, creating such confusion in Ahren's senses that he could barely distinguish what was real from what was magical. Uldini's crystal ball emitted a fiery brightness, which further underlining the otherworldliness of their surroundings. Ahren took shallow breaths of the moist air and instinctively tried to make himself as small as possible, although he didn't really know why he was doing so. Then they came to the bottom of the stairs, the music from Jelninolan's Storm Fiddle swelling in sound, the priestess's voice growing stronger and louder. Ahren could see a bubbling, retreating wall of water, pushed back ever further by Jelninolan's charm until it revealed a large, subterranean cave with a massive object on the opposite wall, five paces tall and decorated with pale-green runes. The Bonding Stone! Ahren's heart raced as he looked at the object of their search. Only two dozen paces separated them from the joyful end of their enterprise, and with it the end of the curse that was controlling his beloved. But then he noticed hundreds of shadows splashing about in the water that Jelninolan was pushing backwards. Three of the cave walls were free, but the entrance to the sea on the right-hand side of the cave lay behind a wall of water, stretching twenty paces upwards. Already the first of the Lost Ones were leaping out of it, rushing forward into the room with spears, harpoons and the accursed necklaces in their hands, so that now they were between the companions and the Bonding Stone. The creatures were running towards them, their oversized eyes squinting angrily and a surreal, elongated howl coming out of their mouths. Jelninolan was still indicating towards the stone with her chin as she sang. Ahren understood. Her magic had pushed the mass of water as far back as she could manage, but it was impossible for her to create more space for them. The companions spread out within the cave, at whose other end stood the Bonding Stone like a grotesque trophy, and they defended themselves against their attackers, who were pushing them back and keeping them away from the towering megalith. 'Don't kill them if you can avoid it at all,' pleaded Aluna as the chaos of battle erupted. Ahren left his weapons on his back, for none of them were designed to spare their victims. He was going to have to rely completely on his skills in unarmed combat, which Khara had painstakingly taught him. Trogadon, too, was depending on his gnarled fists, generously handing out haymakers while Falk simply used his Deep Steel shield to either push the enemy back or hit them with short, quick blows. Fisker danced around the Lost Ones with his rapier, expertly inflicting incapacitating, but non-lethal cuts to their arms and legs, forcing them to retreat into the water wall. Aluna whirled her trident about, using its blunt end to whack her attackers, causing them to tumble backwards, occasionally breaking a bone in the process. Ahren used any trick he could think of to disarm the Lost Ones of their primitive weapons made from coral, bones and rusty iron, as they rained down on top of him. But for every opponent they defeated and chased back to the safety of the water, another two Lost Ones would appear to take their place. Through Culhen's eyes Ahren could also see that Yantilla's soldiers were faced with the same problem, with more and more Lost Ones emerging from the sea. 'Hold them off!' screamed Uldini, weaving a charm. 'I will try and smash the Bonding Stone!' 'Easier said than done,' snorted Trogadon, a spear tangled in his chainmail, having just grasped two Lost Ones, one in each hand, and hurled them back towards another group of advancing attackers. 'I've been in more than a few punch-ups in my time, but this one is beginning to get on my nerves.' Ahren evaded a harpoon thrust that a very young-looking Lost One had aimed at his face. He paused for a heartbeat, not sure if he should attack the girl, hardly more than a child, but she was already attempting another thrust, which scraped across his leather armour as he only just managed to escape the deadly point with considerable effort. Ahren gritted his teeth and swept her off her feet by means of a well-aimed kick, snatching her weapon from her hands and using the blunt end to push her back into an advancing Lost One, knocking him to the ground. The girl in front of him staggered to her feet and fled back into the water wall to get some respite, Ahren already being confronted by three more Lost Ones. Behind him, he heard Uldini cursing loudly before the Arch Wizard's crystal ball flew through the cave, whizzing from one Lost One to the next, smashing into their arms and legs, leaving its victims with nasty bruises. The onslaught of pale bodies gradually abated, the Paladins and Trogadon finally managing to form a secure semi-circle around Uldini, who had abandoned his charm against the Bonding Stone in order to help them with his crystal ball. Jelninolan was keeping well away from the fighting and was singing with all her might. But Ahren could see that the water wall was beginning to tremble and sway ever so slightly, the first waves escaping from it and crashing forcefully onto the floor of the damp cave. 'We are running out of time,' gasped Ahren. 'Jelninolan is weakening.' 'I have to start from the very beginning again,' grumbled Uldini. 'This magic is complicated, and if I don't weave it correctly, everybody under the curse's influence will die.' The companions were all in the middle of the cave now, surrounded by an influx of more than fifty lost souls, who were trying to prevent them from getting to the rune-peppered stone – and their number was growing. 'Alright, then,' grumbled Uldini. 'We have to use every means of getting to the stone – much as it hurts me to say it.' His hands performed a complicated dance over the surface of his crystal ball, which was floating between them. 'As soon as I have finished my charm, I must touch the stone with my crystal ball. That will bring about its destruction. You have to create a corridor for me to get there.' 'Come on, then!' said Trogadon, ready to take a step forward, but Uldini shook his head. 'Only when the charm net is stable. I cannot move before that.' The dwarf grunted sullenly and pointed at six Lost Ones, who were stepping out of the water with an enormous, rusty cauldron which they proceeded to push through the ranks of their brothers-and sisters-in-arms. One would duck his or her head into the cauldron, then it was the turn of the next Lost Soul, and so it went on until Ahren realised what was happening. 'This is why they are not attacking,' he gasped. 'They are building up a line of defence! They have salt water in that cauldron. This way, they don't have to keep running back to the water wall to breathe,' 'We can't do anything about that now,' growled Falk. 'We'll wait until Uldini is ready.' There were now sixty armed defenders standing in front of them, and the spear-throwing was beginning. Trogadon caught one missile in mid-air, snapping it in two with a growl, while Falk waved his shield skilfully here and there, protecting most of the group. Aluna spun her trident dexterously, slapping aside any spears that Falk had missed. After a while, the Lost Ones abandoned their spear-throwing tactic and it seemed to Ahren as if the two sides had reached some strange kind of deadlock. 'The tide is turning against us more and more, Uldini,' said Falk anxiously, drawing his broadsword and earning a glare from Aluna. 'Their number is increasing all the time, and the ocean is beginning to squash Jelninolan's charm.' And indeed the right-hand third of the cave had already filled with water, and the risk was growing that as soon as the Lost Ones felt they had enough souls positioned in front of the Bonding Stone, they would launch an assault from the flank. 'Fjolmungar can help,' said Aluna decisively. 'He may not be able to get in here, but he can guard the entrance to the cave and prevent reinforcements for a while.' 'Then the Queen of the Waves will be exposed,' warned Fisker. 'Do it!' gasped Uldini, whose crystal ball was glowing brighter all the time. 'We must get to this stone.' Aluna nodded. Ahren used the breather to concentrate on Culhen. Yantilla and her soldiers were giving their all, and the wolf was using his enormous body to knock over water cauldrons that the Lost Ones had pulled ashore. But Ahren could sense more than a dozen wounds on his friend, all of them superficial it was true, but he would pay for them later. The soldiers behind their broad shields had not escaped unscathed either. Ahren was certain that the men and women overground did not have much time left before they would need to retreat. 'The situation above us is stable but dangerous,' said Ahren anxiously. 'How much longer, Uldini?' 'Avert your eyes, everyone!' commanded the Arch Wizard and a blinding white light filled the cave, radiating from the crystal ball, now caught in a complicated pattern of shimmering lines as it swayed between his hands and shone like a star that had been netted. 'I can see nothing,' he called out loudly. 'You must lead me to this stone now. One touch from my crystal ball and it will be destroyed.' No sooner had the companions begun to move than the Lost Ones pressed forward with even greater wildness. An almost grotesque battle began between the two groups, now flooded in light. While the Paladins and Trogadon avoided using deadly force, the Lost Ones were prevented from doing so by the blinding, magic light, as they were forced to turn their heads away or cover their eyes. Ahren boxed and kicked willy-nilly, burrowing his way through what seemed like a mountain of attackers as he tried to get to the other side of the cave. A dagger cut his cheek here, a spear scratched his upper arm there, and more than one roughly hewn club managed to connect with his torso, too fast for him to evade. It literally felt like death by a thousand cuts. Uldini's extraordinarily bright magic enabled Ahren to see deep into the water that was being forced back. He spotted the outline of Fjolmungar, performing complicated manoeuvres, preventing most of the attackers from getting through to Ahren and his companions. Nevertheless, there were still enough coming out of the water wall to replace the wounded retreating into it. 'We're being overrun!' shouted Ahren. 'If it goes on like this for much longer, we are going to have to draw our weapons and then we'll have a massacre on our hands.' 'We have another card up our sleeve,' said Falk, smiling grimly as he slammed a shield down on a Lost One, knocking him out while slamming the butt of his broadsword into the face of another, causing him to tumble backwards. 'Look over there!' Ahren risked a sideways glance between two attacks and recognised a slim shadow, four paces in length with a spiral horn, swimming here and there close to the water wall, fighting off any Lost Souls who had managed to get past Fjolmungar. 'Selsena!' shouted Ahren excitedly. His companions quickly used the reduction in reinforcements to push themselves further forward. The Bonding Stone was now only eight paces away and Ahren began to feel hopeful that they would reach it soon. Trogadon, who was gasping beside him, was slowly being driven back by a crowd of Lost Ones, who were raining down blows on him with their weapons. 'I'm doing great,' called out the dwarf, punching one of his attackers in the stomach, causing him to crumple like a puppet whose strings had been cut. 'Go on yourselves!' Ahren pressed onwards, but his arms and legs were growing heavy, and he knew that he had lost copious amounts of blood, which was slowing down his progress. Full of regret, he drew Wind Blade and began distributing painful, but – in so far as it was possible – harmless cuts. His companions too were becoming less fussy regarding their methods of defending themselves, and even Aluna stabbed with the front of her trident on more than one occasion. Tears were running down her cheeks, her right one being heavily bruised. 'Stick together!' roared Falk. 'They're trying to drive us apart!' Yet, despite the Paladin's warning, the group was fanning out more and more. The Lost Ones had almost given up on striking them with their weapons, trying to hang onto the companions' arms and legs instead, wearing them down through sheer force of numbers. Fisker was fighting with three of them at the same time in a desperate attempt to stay with the group, and Falk had his hands full trying to keep Jelninolan protected. Aluna's trident was a whirlwind of blows and thrusts and Ahren was only too happy that the blond woman was now on their side. He suddenly found himself at the head of their disintegrating formation again and he repeatedly called Uldini's name, using his voice to lead the Arch Wizard through the chaos whenever he and Aluna had cleared another space for the childlike figure, whose eyes were firmly closed. Ahren was only three paces from the Bonding Stone when Falk let out a scream of pain and the young man looked around in dismay. There was a thick cloud of blood in the water and he could just make out Selsena's white body retreating towards Fjolmungar, three harpoons sticking out of her body. She seemed to be gravely wounded and was fleeing while she still could. New Lost Ones immediately started leaping out of the bubbling water that was bearing down on them now as Jelninolan's powers continued to weaken. Ahren snapped the wrist of one Lost One's weapon arm, while simultaneously kicking another Lost One in the side, causing him to buckle over. 'Uldini, come on, the path is…' he began, when suddenly his blood ran cold, and his heart pounded in his ears. Khara had leaped in front of him, two long bone-swords in her hands, the light from Uldini's crystal ball showing all too clearly the damage the curse had done to her. Her eyes seemed too big for her head and her eyelids too small to be able to close properly. Her ribcage under her torn, algae-covered Elven material had widened and her skin was of a white, normally associated with the bellies of fish. But worst were the gills that had grown on her neck. He could only glance at her for a heartbeat and already her bone-blades were flying towards him with murderous intent. 'Ye gods!' gasped Ahren, horrified beyond belief but managing a hasty parry. 'Uldini, stay where you are! Khara is blocking our way!' 'You must get past her!' shouted Aluna, who had positioned herself behind Uldini's back to ward off attacks from the rear. Everywhere in the cave his friends were frenziedly defending Ahren and Uldini as the water wall reconquered its territory. Jelninolan was swaying like a tree in a hurricane, her eyes were sunken, and her face was the picture of exhaustion. Culhen was reporting to him that the first of the Lost Ones were pouring down the steps, Yantilla's soldiers having had to pull back, and Ahren could sense that his friend was limping and in pain. All this information was transmitted to him in a blink of an eye while he was struggling to arm himself so that he could fight against the love of his life. Khara's weapons were speeding towards him again, and it took all his might to fend them off. Ahren gritted his teeth, feinted in the hope of encouraging the swordswoman to step after him and create a space through which Uldini could pass, but she stayed where she was and thrust her sword at the blind Arch Wizard. Ahren threw himself between them, Wind Blade parrying her blow a hand's breadth away from Uldini's baffled face. 'What are you doing there?' growled Uldini in shock, his eyes still closed. 'I don't know!' screamed Ahren in despair. 'I can't just attack her!' 'You must!' roared Falk, hardly able to protect Jelninolan from the unrelenting attacks of the Loved Ones. 'Or we will all be lost.' Ahren's head was spinning with contradictory thoughts and emotions. Behind him he could hear the slapping sound of wet feet announcing the imminent arrival of enemy reinforcements as the bubbling water wall to their right neared them inexorably. With a scream of despair, he threw himself forwards, attacking the woman he loved more than life itself with every sword skill he had ever learned from her. Splinters of bone were flying everywhere as Khara's blades gradually gave up the ghost, disintegrating under the Deep Steel sword's relentless attacks. Still the young woman moved with deadly elegance and grace, Ahren paying for his wild attacks through several gashes as Khara thrust the stumps of her weapons through the gaps between his ribbon armour. He felt stabs of pain in his chest and stomach, the shards of bone digging into them. He knew now that he could win this fight. All he needed to do was to thrust his blade into Khara's unprotected body, but that would destroy him too, as surely as if he had stabbed himself. He roared so loudly it seemed the conflict within him was tearing his very body asunder, then he reached a decision in the blink of an eye. 'Now, Uldini!' he roared, throwing himself forwards, directly into the broken weapons still sticking in his body, pushing Khara backwards and nailing her to the Bonding Stone with the weight of his own body. With a cold, sinister look on her face devoid of any emotion, Khara pushed her weapons deeper into his flesh. Ahren looked in vain for even a scintilla of mercy or recognition in the eyes of the woman to whom his heart was captive. 'Khara, please,' he groaned, feeling one of her blades piercing into his stomach, but if she had heard him at all, she showed no reaction to his pleading. His legs buckled and his sight dimmed as Khara began turning the shattered weapon in his body, trying to achieve maximum damage. Then Uldini let out a cry of triumph and an enormous bang shook the entire cave. Khara gasped and collapsed in an unconscious heap beside Ahren. Every other Lost One in the cave did the same, their necklaces falling away from them, transformed into harmless strings of algae. Ahren doubled over on the ground, blood pumping from his wounds as he struggled with all his remaining strength to watch a crack beginning to form on the Bonding Stone, slowly making its way up to the top of the rock before causing it to break into two unequal halves. 'Success!' snorted Uldini. At that very moment Jelninolan's voice became silent and her spell died. Gurgling, and with the wildness of ravenous predators, the magically contained water mass flooded the cave, smashing everyone inside against the cavern walls. Within a couple of heartbeats all souls were swallowed up by the water, whose darkness was only lit up by Uldini's still shimmering crystal ball. Ahren knew that they had to swim to the surface, but he was hardly able to stay conscious. Fjolmungar was gesticulating wildly from outside the cave, but its entrance was too small for the enormous snake, who could see that the heavily armoured Aluna was on the point of drowning with all the rest. Ahren had hardly any breath left in his lungs and his heart was breaking at the sight of Trogadon and Falk as they struggled to move, weighed down by their armour which made swimming an impossibility. They won't manage it, thought Ahren, that much is clear. None of us will manage it! He had failed. Four Paladins would die today, sealing the fate of Jorath forever. But then, woozy and with burning lungs he could see by the magic light how himself and his friends were being carried by the Lost Souls out through the mouth of the cave and into the ocean. No, Ahren corrected himself before he finally lost consciousness, those were not Lost Ones anymore. They were free men and women. The rough stones on the beach dug into his back, but they were nothing when compared to the agony coming from his stomach and chest, both provisionally bandaged, as he came back to consciousness, coughing out water. Two one-time Lost Ones were standing above him, their too small mouths on their strange-looking faces breaking into crooked smiles of gratitude. One of them let out a long shrill sound before they both turned and plunged back into the waves. 'Their voices sound better under water,' said Khara beside him, in a curiously monotone voice. Ahren, lying flat on his back, turned his head to look at her, a cry of joy on the tip of his tongue, which died in an instant. His beloved's face seemed wax-like, resembling a death mask, and her eyes looked dully and lifelessly out at the world. 'She is trapped in the Void,' groaned Uldini from behind. Ahren turned painfully to look at him. His friends were lying scattered on the beach around him, all rescued from the water by those who once were the Lost Ones. Uldini was in the process of healing a deep wound to Aluna's neck when suddenly Fjolmungar rose from the water, creating an enormous fountain, his bellowing head darkening the skies above them. 'She is being healed,' spluttered Ahren as loudly as he could. 'We are not your enemies!' The enormous water-snake hissed furiously, sniffing first at Aluna before his broad head swayed over, his mouth opening wide, to Fisker, who was lying unconscious. 'Fjolmungar,' whispered Aluna, who had awakened and could see what he was planning. 'I gave them my word. Leave him in peace.' The snake bellowed his protest. Ahren had no idea how anyone of them in their present conditions would be able to prevent him from satisfying his lust for revenge. 'If you really love me, you will spare him. Kill him and you kill the world. And both of us, too.' A shiver ran through Fjolmungar's body. Finally, and terribly slowly, the enormous snake turned and lowered himself, swimming away from them until he was no longer to be seen. 'Well, that's that settled at last,' said Uldini angrily. 'Of course, I would like to do more than patch you all up, but you are going to have to wait for a complete recovery or the after-effects of my magic will turn me into a blubbering idiot.' Ahren checked to see if all his friends were still alive, and his heart leaped for joy when he spotted Culhen limping into view, followed by Yantilla and her gang of soldiers, all battered and bruised. How are you feeling, big lad? he asked quickly. You won't get rid of me that easily. And the same applies to Selsena, by the way, responded Culhen, who had arrived beside him and was now snuffling at the young man. You're in a far worse state than I am. Ahren nodded weakly and looked up at the sky. Now that he was sure they were all alive, the pains returned with a vengeance and he decided to concentrate on his breathing. 'Good thing I wasn't able to pull out the splinters,' said Khara in a toneless voice. 'Otherwise you would have died of blood loss long ago.' Her matter-of-fact description of his lucky escape slipped easily from her lips. Ahren looked at her with concern and she stared blankly back at him. 'Khara, please, you can return from the Void now,' said Ahren. 'It is over.' He quickly looked at her neck. It was free from gills, and her eyes looked smaller than they had during the fight. The physical effects of the curse seemed to be disappearing quickly. Ahren gave a sigh of relief, which immediately turned into an agonised fit of coughing. Then Uldini was looking down at him critically. 'You look like a meat skewer over a campfire,' he grumbled as he started muttering some magic charms, pulling out one splinter after another from the young man's flesh. Ahren groaned in pain. He stretched out a hand to Khara, but she only glanced back at him quizzically before turning her head to look at the sea. 'What's wrong with her?' asked Ahren in a low voice as Uldini leaned over him to treat his chest wound. 'She is in the grip of the Void,' whispered the Arch Wizard. 'Khara spent the whole of her enslavement in this state and she is finding it impossible to get out of. She is still very much her old self, but her emotions are locked away and impossible to access for the moment. We are going to have to help her out, but there is no time for that now.' Ahren understood and nodded weakly. He had been warned before never to overstrain the Void, but that was exactly what Khara had done over the previous weeks. She was able to think completely clearly and logically, but she was feeling absolutely nothing. 'Be thankful that we have her with us again,' said Uldini reassuringly. 'Everything else will be a matter of time. The good news is that as soon as we have successfully lured her out of the Void, she will feel fine again. Her enslavement will only have been a bad dream for her, and her memories of it will eventually fade.' Ahren found the words incredibly reassuring and his hand grasped onto the Arch Wizard, who was just about to float to his next patient. 'Thank you,' whispered Ahren. Uldini nodded, then departed, leaving the injured young man lying on the beach to consider all that had happened. They lit a large fire on the strand that evening, for half of the wounded were still not capable of being transported anywhere. They were sitting or lying, snuggled up in blankets, with goblets of hot wine or rum in their hands, the drinks having been warmed over the fire. Aluna was looking out onto the ocean with a melancholy look on her face as she sipped at her drink. 'Somehow, I had expected this moment to be much more glorious,' she said quietly to nobody in particular. 'That they would all emerge from the water and resume their old existences.' Uldini sighed heavily. 'A nice vision but completely unrealistic. Your tribe has been living under water for many, many generations now, and their progeny were born the way they look today. The curse only transformed the fishing folk who had begun their lives as humans, and only they will metamorphose back into their original form. All the others have simply been released from their bondage to the Adversary and are free from those necklaces, but they will always remain residents of the seas.' 'A great victory, nonetheless,' said Falk forcefully. 'These people have their lives again and can establish their own culture beneath the waves, free to do what they have always wanted to do. Which was exactly what we had wanted to achieve.' 'Yes,' said Aluna ruminatively. 'That was our goal. The rest was just wishful thinking on the part of a weary warrior.' Fisker looked over at her, a haunted look on his face. 'We cannot reverse the sands of time, Aluna. That was something that neither of us understood.' The two exchanged a prolonged look which, Ahren mused, was not a look of love, but one of mutual understanding. And the realisation that now, at last, they had made peace with each other.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 24

Sven tossed the crumpled letter, sealed with the insignia of the King of the Knight Marshes, into the burning brazier just as Baron Aconus entered the command tent. The Baron, his eyebrows raised, looked in surprise, first at his adjutant, then at the burning message, then back at his subordinate again. 'What does this mean, Sven?' he asked in an irritated voice, twirling his moustache as he always did when he was vexed. 'Commands from the General Staff,' responded Sven truthfully as he saluted. 'Please forgive my impetuosity, but they've really got my blood up.' Aconus waved his hand impatiently, indicating that he should continue, and so Sven began to weave his web of lies. 'King Blueground has decided to withdraw confidence from our militia. We are to patrol the hinterlands of the Knight Marshes, leaving Baron Gundersberg and his knights to carry out what had been our plan originally. It seems that someone else is to reap the rewards for our idea. You have crossed swords with that baron before. A real war hero.' A flicker of anger appeared in the nobleman's eyes, and Sven silently congratulated himself on his flash of inspiration. Gundersberg was everything that Aconus would like to be – tall, handsome, victorious every time that he had encountered Dark Ones from the Borderlands adjoining his barony. Naming that name was both a bait and a distraction at once. In fact, Blueground had simply congratulated the militia on their proposed gambit of surrounding the Pall Pillar and wished them all the best. The one part of the letter that hadn't suited Sven was the command that they return to Hjalgar until the autumn. They were to secure the border because there was a gap in the army's defensive ring along the eastern lands. But Sven needed this gap for the smooth implementation of his plan – which was why the letter had landed in the fire, where the document was now burning in the flames – just as the lust for glory was now burning within the heart of the furious baron. The fool had swallowed Sven's lie – hook, line, and sinker. 'We are commencing a forced march!' he thundered. 'We shall break camp immediately! I demand that we proceed to the Pall Pillar tomorrow at dawn – the whole militia. I will not have my moment of glory stolen from under my nose – especially not by that arrogant Gundersberg!' Sven bowed his head – not least to hide the sparkle in his eye. 'As you wish, sir!' 'Oh, and ask the Keepers how much progress they have made with the protective amulets, will you? I am not crazy enough to send my people to the home of the Adversary without the blessing of the gods.' 'But of course, my Baron,' murmured Sven, bowing and scraping and retreating out of the tent. He shouted out several commands to his soldiers, ordering them to dismantle the camp they had set up in the middle of the Borderlands and to prepare themselves for a forced march to the Pall Pillar. Loud voices barked his commands out into the night air as his orders were passed on, and an organised chaos gripped the men and women of the camp where the militia of the THREE were gathered. Sven had gone to great trouble to ensure that any of the many hordes of Dark Ones that wandered through the Borderlands avoided the militia or fled as soon as they were spotted, thus giving the more than five thousand men and women a false sense of security and a mistaken belief in their own invincibility despite being in the heart of enemy territory, surrounded by more murderous creatures than they could possibly imagine. The knowledge that a single command from Sven would be sufficient to eliminate not only the camp but every man and woman who occupied it – and that by the following dawn to boot – was truly intoxicating. But Sven held back. Patience was the name of the game. The chess pieces were now in position and the contest was almost won. He simply had to make his final move. Urging the men and women of the militia around him to redouble their efforts, Sven strode towards the tent with its decorated religious embroidery where the Keepers of the militia were currently gathered, blessing the talismans which were to protect every soul who carried them on their journey to the Pall Pillar. 'Why are you standing around here dawdling?' thundered Sven, admonishing the two sentries on guard before the tent. 'Don't you see that it's all hands on deck here? We need to be ready for the oncoming ride!' The pair looked at him sheepishly, and Sven waved them away impatiently. 'Off with you now! I'll look after this place.' The sentries hurried away, and Sven stepped into the tent with a smile, drawing his dagger from his belt as he did so.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 25

Ahren looked wearily up at the stars. He was still lying on the pebble beach under his heavy woollen blanket. The fire had died down, but the glowing wood was radiating enough warmth to keep away the worst of the cold. His wounds were burning and throbbing, and he could hardly move, but Uldini had assured him that the pain would ease off the following day. Culhen was grumbling in his sleep, an arm's length away, his injured leg having been temporarily put in a splint. The Arch Wizard had made a similarly hopeful prognosis concerning the wolf. Following supper, Khara had curled up a good ten paces away from him without saying a word and was now nothing more than a shadow in the dim light. Ahren knew that he ought to have been feeling delighted at having rescued her, but the price this time had seemed unfairly high. They had now found six of the thirteen Paladins, but whenever he looked over at Khara, he wondered if it had been worth it. He heard a splashing sound coming from the water and Ahren lifted his head with a groan. A girl from what was once the Lost Tribe was standing there looking at him with her large eyes. Ahren recognised her as one of the attackers whose life he had spared. She smiled at him and waved. He feebly returned the gesture. Then she leaped feistily back into the waves and disappeared. Ahren groaned and laid down his head. Of course it had all been worth it. But why was doing the right thing always so damn difficult?

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 26

Sven watched the priests of the human god, who were sitting silently in a trance-like state around a large magic circle, within which was a large pile of tiny talismans, each one bearing the sign of the THREE. The magic radiating from the circle was tangible, causing Sven to shrink back instinctively. His mind filled with images of an elf, veiled in cloud, breaking his legs and feet. He drew strength from these images because they nourished his hatred. Soon he would begin his revenge, finish his charade and hunt down those whom he had wished dead for so long now. The Thing in his head stretched, and quickly Sven suppressed his craving for revenge, wrapping his steely determination around the parasite within his skull. He had a mission to complete, he reminded himself. He approached the magic circle, listening to the voice of his master, who was telling him what to do. Without hesitation he cut deep into his arm, allowing his blood to drop onto one of the candles standing within the magic circle. Black, oily smoke rose from the flame as Sven's blood vaporised. The blood of a High Fang was pouring within the holy ritual of the THREE. The Keepers in their trance began to twitch like fish on dry land but didn't open their eyes. Sven went to the next candle, repeating the sacrilege. Soon every candle was stained with blood and now the Keepers were lying on the floor, all curled up – lifeless shells, their souls feeding a completely different type of magic charm. Sven tasted the sweet nectar of betrayal on his tongue. Then he started to fill the three boxes that were there, packing them with the talismans and humming as he worked. He pulled the boxes out of the tent and patiently stood guard. 'The Keepers are still resting,' he would say whenever somebody came to take down the tent. And every time, the soldiers took a fistful of amulets so that they could protect themselves and their comrades from the influence of the Adversary. By the time it was morning the three boxes were empty, and Sven was one of the few people left in the camp, now almost completely dismantled. He promised them that he would follow with the Keepers and watched with a crooked smile as the horses and riders move off, singing a song of the THREE as they rode away towards the Pall Pillar.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 27

Ahren had slept terribly badly. The pebbles below him, his wounds, Khara's condition – they had all conspired against him and given him no peace, and when he finally had fallen asleep, he had been haunted by nightmares where the Pall Pillar was in the centre, as well as a tall silhouette that seemed vaguely familiar to him. He shook off the cobwebs of his dreams and sat up, cursing the weakness in his limbs and the heaviness of his head. 'Here is your breakfast,' said Khara in a neutral tone, holding a bowl of stew in front of him. 'Jelninolan says that you must regain your strength.' Ahren looked at her features in the hope of finding some signs of an improvement in her condition but could only see an indifferent expression on her face, her eyes intelligent but uninvolved. He might just as easily have been a total stranger to whom Khara was handing a bowl only because she had been instructed to. 'Thank you, Your Highness,' said Ahren with a sincere smile, hoping for a reaction. But Khara merely nodded impassively, then turned away to bring the next wounded person their breakfast. 'Have patience,' said Falk, who was sitting a few paces away. 'Her situation will not change overnight. I got stuck in the Void once too, you know. It is difficult to find your way out of it again.' 'You?' asked Ahren in disbelief. 'Really?' Falk nodded. 'I'm surprised that Jelninolan is awake,' said Ahren, gesturing to the elf, who was ladling out another portion of stew. 'She's forcing herself into action,' said Falk. 'Just like Uldini. As soon as they have repaired us, they will sleep for ages. By the way, the Lost Ones have transmitted their gratitude to us. Amazingly, Selsena has learned to understand their language, because it is so close to the one the whales use to communicate with each other.' 'Whales speak to one another?' asked Ahren in wonderment. Falk nodded absently and then continued. 'The one-time Lost Ones have promised to take care of any of their own who have turned back into humans with the ending of the curse and who are stranded on the surrounding islands, at least until we have sent ships to collect them.' 'Did many drown?' asked Ahren in a concerned voice. 'Some of them must have been deep in the ocean during the dissolution of the curse.' Falk shook his head. 'Their bodies took some time to turn back into humans. That gave them enough time to find the safety of the shore, or at least to come to the surface. Those who were born beneath the waves helped the ones still at sea to get ashore.' Ahren gave a sigh of relief and looked across the beach. He saw Aluna and Fisker deep in conversation and a look of alarm came over his face, but Falk chuckled. 'Relax,' said Falk. 'They have laid aside their differences for once and for all.' 'Where is Trogadon?' asked Ahren, who scanned the beach but could see no sign of him. 'He's gathering together our belongings,' said Falk. 'Can you imagine that the old blockhead came away from yesterday's brawl with barely a scratch?' Ahren nodded and smiled. That was the indestructible squat warrior all over. 'But you seem to have come out of it rather well, yourself,' said Ahren. Falk shrugged. 'My heavy Paladin armour must be good for something. A minor cut on the leg, and that was about it.' he tapped on his bandaged thigh. 'But you look like a wedge of Kelkor cheese. You're covered in holes.' Ahren grinned, but before he could respond Uldini was beside them. 'Well, then,' said the exhausted-looking Arch Wizard, raising his hands in preparation for a healing charm. 'Let me patch the two of you up at the same time. After all, you know the old proverb – Find one Paladin and you find them all.'

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 28

The sun was already rising on the horizon, and the militia were less than a mile from the Pall Pillar when Baron Aconus gave the signal that he wished to give a speech before the individual troops would divide up and surround the prison of the dark god. The temperature had dropped surprisingly, and the wind was whistling down the remote hill, carrying the little man's words to every one of his subordinates. 'Today is a magnificent day,' he announced. On hearing these words, Sven positioned his horse beside the baron, who nonetheless took no notice of him. 'Today is the day that we are going to cut the adversary off from his only means of creating hordes of new servants.' A cheer rose from the ranks of men and women standing below him, clutching their protective amulets and calling out words of praise to the gods. 'Today is the day that we, the militia of the THREE, will write our names in the pages of history!' thundered Aconus triumphantly. How right you are, thought Sven. He brought his horse closer to the baron, who glanced at him irritably, but before he had the chance to ask his adjutant what he wanted, the High Fang drew a dagger from under his cloak, slashing it across the little man's throat. The baron looked at him in surprise, a gurgling sound coming from his mouth, before he slipped from his horse and collapsed in a crumpled heap on the ground to the sound of his death rattle as he twitched in the Borderlands mud. The men and women of the militia gasped in unison as they watched the man whom they had considered their hero smiting down their leader. Sven grinned, raised his bloody dagger towards the Pall Pillar and called out, 'Lord, it has come to pass!' A loud, rumbling noise was next – monumental and alien at once – as if a mountain were awakening from its sleep of aeons, taking its first deep breath following countless years of calm. The Pall Pillar exploded in a vortex of smoke, followed by several heartbeats of eery quiet as the blanket of smog settled on the entire militia. In the blackness surrounding him, Sven heard first one low scream, then a higher one, then another and another until all around him the men and women were wailing their suffering, the terrified whinnying of horses joining in with their chorus of agony. A laugh of delirium exploded from Sven's mouth when he heard the first bones snapping and the soft flesh tearing against its own will. I am contented! echoed the voice in his head, and Sven laughed and he laughed, even as his own body began bending to the will of his master, taking on a form never seen before in the history of the world.

(13th Paladin 5) The Isles of the Cutlass Sea

Torsten Weitze

Chapter 29

Everyone in the cabin struggled back to their feet and looked at each other in puzzlement. A huge wave had just slammed against their ship, and even as Ahren was straightening up, Uldini was speaking frantically, looking down at his crystal ball, now emitting a message charm. 'Ancients, Monarchs, Paladins – everyone serving our cause, hear ye! Something unforeseen has happened to the Pall Pillar and a conclave on King's Island is of paramount importance! The Adversary has made his first move.' In the following silence, the companions looked at the little Arch Wizard without saying a word, while the Queen of the Waves changed course and began sailing northwards. Uldini looked earnestly at Ahren. 'We have achieved much over the past few years. Now we must hope we can withstand the first onslaught.'

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

Chapter 1

In the writing and researching of this book, I was able to access an extensive amount of primary source material due to the survival of a great deal of the original documentation in archives and libraries in Britain and Australia. For this I am extremely grateful. A wealth of official letters, records and government files exist in the Public Records Office in Kew, England, and many of these documents were published in the Historical Records of New South Wales in the late nineteenth century and in the Historical Records of Australia from the early twentieth. There are also a number of original documents and copies in various Australian libraries, including the National Library of Australia in Canberra and the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. In addition to having access to the official records and dispatches, we are fortunate that many of those who sailed on the First Fleet kept journals and diaries. (The unfortunate aspect is that most were written by naval officers and marines, and we have little by way of first-hand accounts from women, convicts and the Aboriginal people.) The first journals were sent back to England on returning ships in late 1788 and published the following year in London, even though many of the authors would not themselves return for some years. The last of the personal accounts was written around thirty years later by an American seaman, Jacob Nagle, when he returned to his homeland. Also, a number of very valuable personal letters survive, and originals and copies of the originals are available in a number of libraries, including the Mitchell Library in Sydney. I would like to thank all the staff of these institutions who helped me in my research. Increasingly, all of this documentation is becoming electronically accessible, including via the Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS), run by the Sydney University Library, and the electronic resources of the Mitchell Library. I found both of these resources very helpful. Finally, I would also like to register my thanks to everyone at Random House for their guidance and support, and particularly to Kevin O'Brien for his professional and sensitive editing.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

NOTE ON EXTRACTS FROM PRIMARY SOURCES

In quoting material from the primary sources consulted for this book, I have remained faithful to the authors' non-standard grammar, spelling and punctuation as much as possible. However, there are some cases where a verbatim transcription would have hampered the meaning or otherwise presented a stumbling block to the reader. The only text that I have corrected, as such, is the misspelling of people's names. I have, though, made a number of formatting decisions in my transcriptions, such as to italicise the names of all ships, to spell out abbreviations, such as 'wt', meaning 'with', to spell out numbers and to eliminate the confusing use of capital letters in the middle of sentences. I hope the reader will forgive me for taking these small liberties. There was also the problem of conflicting dates being given by different journal writers concerning the same event. In these cases I have compared a variety of accounts, where possible, and quoted from one of the concurring ones.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

ENGLAND

More prisoners were destroyed by disease in gaols than were put to death by all the public executions in the Kingdom. At four o'clock in the morning on Sunday 13 May 1787 the signal was given by the flagship Sirius for the ships of the First Fleet to set sail and begin their eight-month voyage from Portsmouth to establish a British convict colony in a remote and little-known spot on the far side of the world. There was no ceremony or fanfare, as it was still nearly two hours till daybreak when the ships were assembled outside Portsmouth Harbour at Spithead, which separates the mainland from the Isle of Wight. So began the program of mass exile that over the next seventy years would see more than a hundred and sixty thousand convicts dispatched from Britain to New South Wales and to other Australian colonies. The First Fleet was the biggest single overseas migration the world had ever seen at the time. Each of the eleven tiny ships – the largest was less than forty metres long – was heavily loaded with human cargo (they carried nearly fifteen hundred people between them), two years' supply of food and the equipment needed to build a new settlement once they reached their destination. This was the Georgian era, and Britain was enjoying the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of the mighty British Empire and the rising affluence that went with it. Great canals, sturdy roads and giant bridges were being constructed, and, from the 1760s, labour-saving machinery was being introduced for the manufacture of cotton, iron, steel and pottery. The steam engines developed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton were being put to various uses, and there was a quickening pace of advancement in all fields of human endeavour. The Empire was expanding at a time when the earlier European powers of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were in decline. In 1773 the British Parliament passed the legislation that began the government takeover of the administration and control of India from the British East India Company, which was to precipitate nearly a hundred years of British rule of the subcontinent. In 1768 Captain James Cook had begun a series of remarkable voyages through the southern oceans and the Pacific in which he discovered new lands and claimed new territories for the Empire. It was also the age of the Enlightenment. As the century progressed, new approaches and fresh currents of thought provided the setting for the revolutionary changes ahead. It was during the Enlightenment that the ecclesiastical establishment was dislodged from its central role in cultural and intellectual life, and science was emancipated from the restraints of theological tradition. Predominant figures included Newton, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Hume, Locke, the Irishman Edmund Burke and the Americans Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man (which supported the French Revolution), Benjamin Franklin, scientist, statesman and writer, and the younger Thomas Jefferson. These latter two were involved in the drafting of the American Declaration of Independence. In 1776 Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published and the first of the six volumes of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was released. The late eighteenth century was a period during which music, theatre, the arts and science flourished. Writers included Jane Austen and the social commentators Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, while William Hogarth was satirising British society in his highly stylised paintings and cartoons. Prominent poets included Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake and Byron, and the painters Gainsborough and Reynolds were making names for themselves. The Georgian era had its own architectural style – made famous by architects such as Robert Adam, James Wyatt and John Nash – and its own style of furniture, which was characterised by strong, clean lines typically highlighted with vertical reeds and flutes. Britain's king at the time was George III. He was to sit on the throne for fifty years from 1760 – at the time the longest reign of any monarch – and his rule covered tumultuous change and dramatic events. He had come to the throne as a 22-year-old on the death of his grandfather, King George II, and was the third German to become the British monarch but the first of those to be born in England and to speak English as his native language. The German kings had taken over the throne of England when Queen Anne had died in 1714 without any heirs. The English realm was offered to her nearest Protestant relative, George of Hanover, who became George I of England. Throughout the long reigns of George I, his son George II and George III, the very nature of English society and the political face of the realm changed. The first two Georges took little interest in the politics of rule and were quite content to let ministers govern on their behalf, but George III became far more involved in the running of his governments. After a rocky start, largely due to the instability caused by the Seven Years War with France, George III was to become a popular monarch, although the remainder of his reign was far from easy. He was first believed to have gone mad in 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived in Australia, and at one point Parliament debated whether he should continue as king. He appeared to have recovered, but in 1811 the recurrence of the illness forced him to abdicate in favour of his son, the Prince Regent, who would later become King George IV when his father died in 1820. King George III typified much of the enlightenment of the era. He founded and paid the initial costs of the Royal Academy of the Arts, started a new royal collection of books and later gave all sixty-five thousand copies to the British Museum (now the British Library). He was keenly interested in agriculture and earned himself the nickname 'Farmer George' for his enthusiastic work on the royal estates at Windsor and Richmond. He also studied science and made his own astronomical observations. Many of his scientific instruments survive and are now in the British Science Museum. George III had become king when George II died suddenly in October 1760, and immediately a search began to find the new young monarch a suitable wife, so as to ensure succession. The year before George was said to have been smitten by Lady Sarah Lennox, the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. He was forced to abandon the idea of marriage with her, however, as she was not a royal and was therefore deemed to be an unacceptable match. The following year he married Duchess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz at St James' Palace in London. George met his wife for the first time on the day of the wedding, but they appear to have enjoyed a happy marriage and had fifteen children together. In contrast to his predecessors and his sons George III does not appear to have taken a mistress and enjoyed spending time with his family and farming on the royal estates. The remarkable advances of the age and the rising level of affluence did not benefit everyone, of course. While the rich got richer, an overwhelming majority of people continued to live and die poor. The industrial changes brought a huge movement of people from the country to the increasingly overcrowded towns and cities. This overcrowding was compounded by the 'enclosures' of the commons, whereby landowners fenced off land that had previously been used by everyone. Hand in hand with the growing numbers of King George's displaced and unemployed subjects came an increase in crime, as many resorted to stealing to survive. At the same time King George and his governments were distracted by a succession of foreign wars, first with France and later with Britain's American colonies. The American War of Independence would have a direct bearing on the British decision to dispatch the First Fleet and to create a convict colony in Australia. For most of the eighteenth century the British had been transporting surplus convicts to America. In 1717 the Parliament had passed the Act for the Further Preventing of Robbery, Burglary and Other Felonies and the More Effective Transportation of Felons etc., which marked the beginning of the large-scale removal of criminals to foreign shores. Over the next sixty or so years about forty thousand convicts were sent to America, until the practice was halted when the American colonies rose up in revolt against Britain. Unlike the later transportation to Australia the system of transporting convicts to America was entirely privately run. Convicts committed to transportation were sold by their gaolers to the shipping contractors, who took them across the Atlantic and sold the prisoners to plantation owners for the duration of their sentences. The American revolt that began in the 1760s and turned into war in the 1770s was triggered by Britain's policy of taxing its colonial citizens even though they were allowed no say in the British Parliament – and at the same time that Britain was allowing the British East India Company tax breaks on tea being sold directly to America. On 16 December 1773 a number of Boston radicals dumped a large quantity of British-owned tea into Boston Harbor in what was to become known as the Boston Tea Party. Tough retaliatory measures by the British, including the closure of Boston Harbor, escalated the situation and, rather than isolating the Boston radicals, united many of the colonies in protest. The following year representatives of the colonies met in Philadelphia and resolved to boycott British trade and withhold taxes. In 1775 the first shots of the war were fired in Massachusetts, and while the British managed to regain control of the area around Boston after what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, their win came at the cost of many of their troops. The Americans now moved to establish the new Continental Army under General George Washington to bring many of the local militias into a coordinated fighting force. Over the next few years the fighting spread across all the colonies. In 1776 the British sent their biggest ever force across the Atlantic, and the colonies approved the Declaration of Independence. There was no way of going back. The year 1777 was the last year of British ascendancy in the war. The following year the French, who had already been providing the colonists with support, joined the hostilities on the American side following the signing of an alliance between the French and Americans in Paris. For the next three years the armies fought a number of battles, until the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia in May 1781, when the British general Cornwallis surrendered and more than six thousand British troops were taken prisoner. When news of Yorktown reached London, the Parliament moved to end the war, despite the opposition of King George III, who wanted a continued British military commitment until the insurrection was crushed. His prime minister, Lord North, duly continued the war but when faced with declining parliamentary support was forced to resign in 1783. (North would be replaced as prime minister by the 24-year-old William Pitt ('the Younger'), who would be the head of the government when the decision was made to establish a convict colony in Australia.) The loss of the American colonies was a crushing blow to the prestige of the British Empire, and the peace treaty of Paris in 1783 only added to the British humiliation, with the first article of the agreement stating that 'His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States'. The loss of the United States also meant that Britain no longer had a convenient dumping ground for her surplus convicts. As the country had been unable to send convicts to America from the early days of the conflict, Parliament had passed the Hulk Act in 1777, which allowed for the confinement of the growing number of convicts on decommissioned British navy vessels on the Thames and other English rivers and ports. The Hulk Act was envisaged only as an interim measure until the American insurrection was quashed, but with the loss of the colonies the hulks would continue to be used as prisons in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century. By the late eighteenth century it was estimated that a hundred and fifteen thousand, or one in eight, people in London were living off crime in the city. Horace Walpole complained that robbery in broad daylight had become so commonplace that 'one is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going into battle'. At the beginning of the 1700s criminal offences that attracted the death penalty had been limited to the most serious acts, such as murder and treason. By the end of the century more than one hundred additional crimes – almost all of them involving offences against property – had been made capital offences. Thirty-three had been added during the reign of King George II and a further sixty-three during the first decades of the rule of King George III. The new crimes that warranted execution included smuggling, selling a forged stamp, burglary, extortion, blackmail, larceny by servants, blackmailers who failed to surrender themselves, arson, wilful destruction of property, petty theft and the stealing of horses. Most of the new capital statutes were passed with very little discussion and 'were created … by a placid and uninterested Parliament. In nine cases out of ten there was no debate and no opposition.' So great was the increase in the number of capital offences that by 1800 Sir Samuel Riley was to observe that 'there is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with loss of life than in England'. However, despite the dramatic rise in the number of convicts sentenced to death, fewer were actually being executed. The judges in the courts of England were increasingly reluctant to send offenders to the gallows, and more and more death sentences were being commuted to transportation to America – even after such shipment had been suspended. It has been suggested that the judges deliberately 'went to invent technicalities in order to avoid infliction of the capital penalty', even though their actions were 'clearly outside the contemplations of the legislation'. As a consequence of this judicial leniency the proportion of those executed fell dramatically over the second half of the eighteenth century. In the 1750s about seventy per cent of those convicted were actually hanged, but by the time the First Fleet set sail barely a quarter of the condemned reached the gallows. By the end of the century the figure had dropped to less then twenty per cent. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the gaols and prison hulks of England were overflowing, with their population increasing by more than a thousand a year. This was causing increasing public concern. Periodic riots by convicts spread alarm, and there was the ever-present fear that rampant diseases in the gaols would break out in the wider community. There was also concern amongst some quarters for the prisoners themselves. Prison reformers were campaigning against the appalling conditions in the prisons and the hulks. Foremost among them was John Howard. Born in 1726 in Hackney in East London, Howard inherited considerable wealth in his 20s on the death of his successful merchant father. In 1773, when he was 47 years old, Howard was appointed high sheriff of Bedford and became shocked by the conditions he witnessed in the gaols. In 1777, after studying prisons in England and other countries, he wrote a book titled The State of Prisons in England and Wales: With Preliminary Observations, and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, which painted a devastating picture of the reality of prisons and brought into the open much of what had been out of sight and out of mind to genteel society. He also gave evidence to the House of Commons about convicts and the question of convict transportation. Howard wrote that healthy men who entered the prison system were often soon reduced to illness and death. He said that disease was so rife that 'more prisoners were destroyed by it in gaols than were put to death by all the public executions in the Kingdom'. In some prisons, he said, there was no food allowance for the prisoners, and in others no fresh water. There was a shortage of fresh air and ventilation in most gaols, which were 'made poisonous to the more intense degree by the effusia of the sick'. Many of the prisons had no sewers, and in those that did, 'if not properly attended, they are, even to a visitant, offensive beyond expression'. Many had no bedding or straw and the prisoners were forced to sleep 'upon rags, others on bare floors'. He said that chaining prisoners in irons made walking and 'even lying down to sleep difficult and painful'. Howard was especially critical of the half of England's prisons that were privately run: 'In these the keepers protected by the proprietors and not so subject as other gaolers to the control of the magistrates are more apt to abuse the prisoners.' Howard called for the building of new, properly planned prisons that would have water pumps, baths, cooking facilities, an infirmary for the sick, clean air and ventilation, and workshops so the prisoners could be effectively employed. He also called for more effective regulation of the gaolers, including a ban on the sale of grog to the prisoners, and placed emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness: 'Every prisoner who comes to the gaol dirty, should be washed in the cold or warm bath and his clothes should be put in the oven … Every prisoner should be obliged to wash his hands and face before he comes for his daily allowance.' Largely as a result of the agitation of Howard and other prison reformers, legislation was passed in Parliament for the building of two new prisons, but funding was never made available and construction never began. Parliament also passed legislation in 1777 for the reintroduction of the overseas transportation of convicts, but the Bill did not prescribe to which countries the prisoners should be sent. With America closed it would be almost another decade before Botany Bay was selected, and in the meantime more and more convicts had to be crammed into the existing prisons and hulks in England. The concept of transportation was not unique to the eighteenth century. Legislation had been introduced in Elizabethan England to banish certain criminals to lands 'beyond the seas', but the practice had never taken on the dimension it had with regards to America or would later with the first and subsequent fleets to Australia. Not everyone in Georgian society supported the idea of transportation. Many believed it was going too easy on the convicted criminals. Lord Ellenborough, who was later to become a member of parliament and chief justice, and who argued that capital punishment should be extended even further to include pickpockets, said he believed transportation was no more than 'a summer excursion, in an easy migration to a happy and better climate'. However, to the convicts in England, transportation to Botany Bay was a frightening prospect, and Australia in the late eighteenth century might as well have been another planet. At the time of the First Fleet Europeans knew little about the geography of the globe. The outline of the continents of the Americas and Africa was roughly known, but there was little knowledge of the hinterland or west of America or anything beyond a few of the coastal ports of Africa. Even less was known of Asia, and less again of the southern-hemisphere continents of Australasia and Antarctica. The only concrete information the British had when they decided to establish a penal colony on the east coast of Australia was Captain James Cook's account of his voyage there eighteen years earlier, when the Endeavour spent barely a week in Botany Bay. While Cook was the first to chart much of the east coast of what was then called New Holland, he was far from the first to discover Australia, as more than fifty European ships had seen or landed on the continent over the preceding two hundred years. The earliest European visitors to the region had been the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish. The Pacific Ocean had been named 'El Mar Pacifico' by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan in the early sixteenth century, during his remarkable voyage from Portugal to Guam. The first undisputed European sighting of Australia was in 1606, although there may have been some earlier discoveries. Around 1300 Marco Polo had made mention of the existence of a great southern continent but offered no first-hand knowledge of the place. Some archaeological evidence suggests that from 1500 a number of Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish ships may have touched on Australia's west and southern coasts, and it has been more recently claimed, by the author Gavin Menzies, that the Chinese explorer Zheng He charted much of the west coast in 1421. There is also evidence of Asian ships regularly visiting the north of Australia from around 1600, including Indonesian traders who harvested the bêche-de-mer, or sea slugs, which were regarded as a delicacy and an aphrodisiac by many Chinese people. In 1606 Dutch captain Willem Janszoon landed briefly on the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Duyfken, wrongly assuming the land was part of Papua New Guinea. From 1616 a number of Dutch and other European ships reached the west coast of Australia. In 1642 Abel Tasman sailed below Tasmania, giving it the name Van Diemen's Land after the Dutch East Indies governor of Batavia, Anthony van Diemen. By 1644 – still more than a hundred years before Cook's first expedition – the Dutch were able to draw most of the coastline from Cape York peninsula in the north of Australia around to the eastern end of the Great Australian Bight in the south, as well as the southern tip of Van Diemen's Land and parts of the coast of New Zealand. The first English ship to reach Australia was the Cygnet, a small trading vessel captained by William Dampier, who landed on the west coast in 1688, almost eighty years before Cook. Dampier was the first Englishman to provide what were to become many negative descriptions of the Australian Aboriginal people, whom he said were the 'miserablest people in the world', 'nasty people' and who 'differ little from brutes'. Even these incomplete reports and maps would not have been known by the uneducated convicts, of course. They would have had little knowledge of geography, and the worldly experience of most would have been confined to the area within walking distance of where they were born. Far from seeing it as Lord Ellenborough's 'summer excursion', most of the convicts regarded transportation as the most severe punishment available next to death, one that was intended 'to purge, deter and to reform'. They would be exchanging familiarity for hardship, hostility and the unknown. They would be saying goodbye to loved ones and friends and would have been aware there was little prospect of ever coming home.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

THE BOTANY BAY DECISION

There was a great plenty of fish … The grass was long and luxuriant, and the eatable vegetables, particularly a sort of wild spinage; the country was well supplied with water; there was an abundance of timber and fuel sufficient for any number of buildings, which might be found necessary. The selection of the site on which to establish a convict colony took many years, and Botany Bay was only chosen as a last resort when all the other options had been eliminated. In 1779 the House of Commons established a committee to find a workable solution to the escalating prisons problem. The committee heard from a number of witnesses who argued for the establishment of a convict colony in various locations, including Gibraltar and sites along the west African coast. It also heard from Duncan Campbell, a contractor who had transported convicts to North America but had recently 'declined contracting them upon the revolt of the colonies of Virginia and Maryland'. The committee concluded that the current prison arrangements in Britain were a failure: In short, your committee must observe, that the whole arrangement of the prisons, so far as they are informed, is, at present, ill-suited, either in the economy of the state, or the morality of the people, and seems chiefly calculated for the safe custody of the persons confined, without due attention to their health, employment or reformation. The committee also recognised that it 'was not in the power of the executive Government at present to dispose of convicted felons in North America' and recommended that some other spot be found in 'any part of the globe that may be found expedient'. The most significant witness to appear before the committee was the famous botanist Joseph Banks, who was to be a major influence on the ultimate decision to send the First Fleet to Botany Bay. Banks' reputation had been cemented eight years beforehand when he had travelled as a 25-year-old to New Holland with Captain James Cook in the Endeavour and returned with hundreds of new species of plants. When asked by the parliamentary committee where he thought was the best location for the establishment of a penal colony, Banks praised Botany Bay's fertile soil and plentiful water and food: Joseph Banks Esq. being requested, in case it should be thought expedient to establish a Colony of convicted felons in any distant part of the Globe, from whence escape might be difficult, and where, from the fertility of the soil, they might be able to maintain themselves, after the fifth year, with little or no aid from the mother country, to give his opinion what place would be the most eligible for such settlement, informed your committee, that the place which appeared to him best adapted for such a purpose, was Botany Bay, on the coast of New Holland, in the Indian Ocean, which was about seven months voyage from England, that he apprehended there would be little possibility of opposition from the natives, as during his stay there in the year 1770, he saw very few and did not think there were above fifty in the neighbourhood, and had reason to believe the country was very thinly populated, those he saw were naked, treacherous, and armed with lances, but extremely cowardly, and constantly retired from our people when they made the least appearance and resistance. He was in the bay in the end of April and the beginning of May 1770, when the weather was mild and moderate, that the climate, he apprehended, was similar to Toulouse in the South of France having found the southern hemisphere colder than the northern, in such proportion that any given climate in the southern answered to the northern about ten degrees nearer the pole, the proportion of rich soil was small in comparison to the barren but sufficient to support a very large number of people; there were no tame animals, and he saw no wild ones during his stay of ten days, but he saw the dung of what were called kangaroos, which were about the size of middling sheep and difficult to catch; some of these animals he saw in another part of the bay, upon the same continent; there were no beasts of prey, and he did not doubt oxen and sheep, if carried there, would thrive and increase, there was a great plenty of fish, he took a large quantity by hauling the seine and struck several stingrays, a kind of skate, all very large, one weighed 336 lb. The grass was long and luxuriant, and the eatable vegetables, particularly a sort of wild spinage; the country was well supplied with water; there was an abundance of timber and fuel sufficient for any number of buildings, which might be found necessary. Being asked, how a Colony of that nature could be subsisted in the beginning of their establishment, he answered, they must certainly be furnished, at landing with a full years allowance of victuals, rainment and drink, with all kinds of tools for labouring the earth and building houses; with black cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry; with seeds of all kinds of European corn and pulse; with garden seeds; with arms and ammunition for defense, and they should likewise have small boats, nets and fishing tackle; all of which, except arms and ammunition, might be purchased at the Cape of Good Hope; and that afterwards, with a moderate portion of industry, they might undoubtedly, maintain themselves without any assistance from England. Banks was not the first person to argue for the establishment of a penal colony in the Pacific. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier the French writer and statesman Charles de Brosses had suggested that France settle a penal colony on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea, where felons could be purged from society. In an analogy with the prevailing medical practice of bloodletting, or leeching, he said, 'The political body, like the human body, has vicious humours which should be often evacuated.' The Englishman John Callander went on to say the same thing with regards to Britain in 1776. In his three-volume Voyages to the Terra Australis he said that Britain should found a colony on New Britain and explore the possibility of annexing New Holland, New Zealand and Tasmania. When Banks was giving his evidence to the House of Commons committee, it was not yet known in London that Captain Cook had been killed. In February 1779 Cook had been searching for a passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans when he was murdered in Hawaii. Cook had provided his own assessment of Botany Bay when landing there with Banks back in 1770, and it was completely different from Banks' submission to the committee. Cook had said that the land was uncultivated and produced virtually nothing fit to eat. At the time of their visit the aristocratic Banks had been at the height of his power and influence. Back in London he had the ear of the government, the Admiralty and the king. He was regularly consulted on a wide range of matters, including botany, earthquakes, sheep breeding and exploration, and was in the habit of corresponding with all the commanders of British exploration ships, whose captains regularly returned with more botanical samples for his analysis. Banks was the only son of a wealthy landowner and was to maintain a lifelong interest in the family estates at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. Both his father and his grandfather had been members of parliament. He had first travelled as a botanist to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1766 and was soon after elected as a member of the Royal Society. When he had boarded Cook's Endeavour as a 'gentleman of fortune', he had taken aboard his own suite of eight staff, which included the noted naturalist Solander and two servants. Of Banks' party, only Banks, Solander and two tenants from his family estates survived the journey. Banks became president of the Royal Society at the relatively young age of 35 and was heavily involved in the development of Kew Gardens. He became a trustee of the British Museum, a member of the Society of Antiquities and a member of many London clubs, including the Society of Dilettanti. In his later years he became a well-known spectacle in London, where he lived in New Burlington Street, overweight and crippled with gout, presiding over the Royal Society in a wheeled chair in full court dress, wearing the Order of the Bath. Banks' glowing report to the committee is not only at odds with Cook's assessment but also strangely at odds with his own far less enthusiastic journal entries of the time. The Endeavour arrived in Botany Bay on 29 April 1770 and left on 6 May. Banks went ashore on five of those days with his colleague Solander and wrote a brief account in his daily journal. On the second day he was ashore, Banks wrote that the 'soil wherever we saw it consisted of either swamps or light sandy soil on which grew very few species of trees'. Four days later, on 4 May, he ventured a little further inland, where we went a good way into the country which in this place is very sandy and resembles something our Moors in England, as no trees grow upon it but every thing is covered with a thin brush of plants about as high as the knees. It is perhaps worth noting that Banks stood to gain from any settlement on the east coast of Australia. He had collected many botanical species when he had visited Botany Bay on the Endeavour and would benefit from any ships returning with more specimens. His influence would later result in British ships being modified to have sheds installed on their decks for the storage of botanical samples. Despite the committee's deliberations and Banks' recommendations, the decision on where to send the surplus convicts was deferred for many years. It seems that some of the British ruling elite were still hopeful that the American insurrection could be put down and the transport of convicts to the American colonies resumed. As late as 1783, before the formal surrender of the colonies, King George III was adamant that he would make no concessions to the Americans and remained of the view that 'unworthy' convicts would still be sent there: 'The Americans cannot expect nor ever will receive any favour from me, but permitting them to obtain men unworthy to remain in this island I shall certainly consent to.' That year the Botany Bay option was given further support by an American named James Matra, who had sailed with Banks and Cook on the voyage of 1768–71 and had consequently been to New South Wales. (New South Wales was given its name by Captain Cook. He never explained why he used the name in the journal he wrote on his way home in 1770, but it is believed that the land simply reminded him of South Wales.) On the voyage Matra had been a lowly seaman, and the only reference to him in Cook's log is a poor one, following Matra's involvement in a violent and drunken brawl. Matra was an Italian American who had returned to England in 1781 from New York and wanted Britain to help those Americans who had remained loyal to the empire during the American War of Independence. In 1783 Matra submitted to the British Government 'A Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in NSW to Atone for the Loss of the American Colonies' and was able to meet and discuss the idea with a number of influential people, including Joseph Banks. Matra wrote of New South Wales: This country may afford an asylum to those unfortunate American loyalists to whom Great Britain is bound by every tie of honour and gratitude to protect and support, where they may repair their broken fortunes, and again enjoy their former domestic felicity. Even though the proposal to assist American loyalists was never actually embraced, many of the details of Matra's proposal were incorporated in the later British convict-settlement plan. Matra had suggested, for instance, that the settlement fleet stop at Cape Town to take on board plants and animals for the new colony – a stopover that the First Fleet did indeed make. A striking feature of the Matra proposal that was also included in the official British plan for the convict colony was the suggestion that, to address the shortage of women, the settlers could send a ship across to nearby Pacific islands and simply take the women: When the landing is effected … the … ship may, if thought proper be dispatched to New Caledonia, Otahite, and other neighbouring islands to procure a few families there and as many women as may serve for the men left behind. Matra had managed to successfully lobby the support of Banks – whose own suggestions would also make it into the final plans – and included in his proposal the endorsement that 'Sir Joseph Banks highly approves of the settlement and is very ready to give his opinion of it; either to his Majesty's Ministry or others, whenever they may please require it'. After circulating his plan, Matra was able to gain an audience with the home secretary, Lord Sydney, who was to become a significant figure in the First Fleet story. Lord Sydney told Matra that the government was looking for a solution to the convict problem, so Matra amended his plan for an American colony to include convicts: When I conversed with Lord Sydney on this subject it was observed that New South Wales would be a very proper region for the reception of criminals condemned to transportation. I believe that it will be found that in this idea good policy and humanity are united. It is not clear whether Matra himself ever intended to be part of the new colony, but he was never to return to New South Wales. In 1786, while the First Fleet was being prepared, he managed to secure a minor British diplomatic posting to Morocco, where he would spend the rest of his life. He died in Tangier in 1806, aged 60. Meanwhile the issue dragged on, with no decision from the government and the convict population still growing. In 1784 the House of Commons debated and passed a Bill titled An Act for the Effectual Transportation of Felons and Other Offenders, which stipulated the reintroduction of transportation but again did not mention any sites. On 5 March 1785 a petition from the high sheriff and grand jury of the county of Wiltshire to the government typified the widespread concern about the overcrowded prisons and hulks: To his Majesties Secretaries of State. The country is overburdened with such a number of transports hulks which have been increasing for the last two assizes and is continuing to increase by the addition of many more sentenced to the same punishment we apprehend from the physicians employed for the purpose of inspecting the state of the gaols by the justices of the said county that there is a great danger of an epidemical distemper being the consequence of the close confinement of so many prisoners. We therefore humbly entreat that the prisoners may be removed from the said gaol with the utmost expedition. In April 1785 an increasingly frustrated House of Commons set up yet another committee to look at how its transportation Bill of the previous year might be given effect. The committee heard how the hulks were failing to help address the convict problem and how being imprisoned on a hulk was more, rather than less, likely than standard imprisonment to corrupt newcomers and commit them to a life of crime. The usual destinations for transportation were again presented, including Africa, but these were rejected, largely because of evidence that the environments were too hostile. Earlier in 1785 Attorney-General R. P. Auden had sent to his colleague Lord Sydney a detailed proposal for the transportation of convicts to Botany Bay. He had received the proposal from Sir George Young, an admiral in the navy, and added his own highly qualified recommendation: I profess myself totally ignorant of the probability of the success of such a scheme, but it appears to me, upon a cursory view of the subject, to be the most likely method of effectively disposing of convicts, the number of which requires the immediate interference of the government. It seemed that Auden wanted the problem solved in whichever manner was the quickest. Young's plan emphasised the potential benefits of increased trade between countries in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and Britain, which at that time was consciously seeking to expand its empire in the face of its recent losses: Botany Bay, or its vicinity … with a fair open navigation … there is no doubt but that a lucrative trade would soon be opened … I think … that a territory so happily situated must be superior to all others for establishing a very extensive commerce, and of consequence greatly increase our shipping and number of seamen. The plan also took up the Matra idea of helping the displaced American loyalists to find a new place to live and argued it would be at less cost than any other option: The American Loyalists would here find a fertile, healthy soil, far preferable to their own, and well worthy of their industry, where with a very small part of the expense the crown must necessarily be at for their support, they may be established now comfortably and with a greater prospect of success than in any other place hitherto pointed out for them. It was Sir George Young who first excited the British with the prospect of opening a new colony for the purpose of growing New Zealand flax, which was of critical strategic importance for making canvas and rope for the British navy. Captain Cook had noted the value of the flax during his explorations to the south seas some fifteen years earlier, and Joseph Banks had brought back some samples to England from the voyage. Sir George Young believed it would be superior to what the British were using: The New Zealand flax-plant may be cultivated in every part, and in any quantity, as our demands may require. Its uses are more extensive than any vegetable hitherto known, for in its gross state it far exceeds anything of the kind for cordage and canvas, and may be obtained at a much cheaper rate than those material we at present get from Russia. In these early years of the Industrial Revolution Young also offered the tantalising prospect that the new colony might provide the British Empire with rich deposits of valuable minerals. His plan, too, suggested that transportation to Botany Bay would cost less than maintaining prison hulks in England and that Britain would be permanently rid of the convicts because the distance and expense made their return 'the most distant probability': The very heavy expense the Government is annually put to for transporting and otherwise punishing the felons, together with the facility of their return, are evils long and much lamented. Here is an asylum open that will considerably reduce the first, and forever prevent the latter. By the year of Young's proposal, 1785, there was a public clamouring for a decision on what to do with the rising number of convicts, and there were fifty-six separate requests and petitions from sheriffs, mayors, judges, town clerks and gaolers calling for their removal. In March 1786 the country was shaken when prisoners on a hulk in Plymouth rioted and forty-four were shot, eight of them fatally. At the same time the Lord Mayor of London, Fraser, appealed to the government for something to be done about the overcrowded hulks. For months the government procrastinated while 'parliament, press, pamphlet and pulpit' were all calling for something to be done about the overcrowded prisons. Rumours began circulating that Botany Bay would emerge as the chosen solution. In June the Cabinet considered a number of specific sites for the resumption of transportation in Canada, the West Indies and Africa, but again no decision was made. Finally, two months later, in August 1786, Lord Sydney advised the lords of the Treasury of the government's decision. Lord Sydney, whose real name was Thomas Townshend, was the home secretary but also the colonial secretary in the government of William Pitt the Younger for six years from 1783 to 1789. He was ultimately responsible for the decision to establish a convict colony in Australia and for the appointment of Arthur Phillip to lead the expedition. Sydney was of aristocratic birth, the Townshend family estate being Frognal House in Sidcup, Kent. He began his political career in the House of Commons and later moved to the House of Lords, before becoming a viscount. There is considerable argument about Sydney, who has been variously described as an enlightened and progressive politician and a person who 'scarcely rose above mediocrity'. In his letter to the Treasury outlining the decision, the main reasons he gave were the overcrowded prisons and the fear of society being doubly threatened by escaped convicts and the outbreak of disease. There was no mention of creating a new colony that would benefit from British trade or provide a refuge for American loyalists: The several gaols and places for the confinement of felons in this kingdom being in so crowded a state that the greatest danger is to be apprehended, not only from their escape, but for infectious distempers, which may hourly be expected to break out among them, his Majesty, desirous of preventing by every possible means the ill consequences which might happen from either of these causes, has been pleased to signify to me his royal commands that measures should immediately be pursued for sending out of this kingdom such of the convicts as are under sentence or order of transportation … His Majesty has thought it advisable to fix upon Botany Bay. In the end Botany Bay was a last resort, chosen because, after years of deliberation and inquiry, the government could come up with no better option. Sydney's letter went on to instruct the Treasury 'to take such measures' to provide the necessary shipping to transport seven hundred and fifty convicts, 'together with such provisions to last two years'. The transport fleet would take a route that would include stopping at the Cape Verde Islands and the Cape of Good Hope, where it would be authorised to pick up cattle and other livestock for the convict settlement in New Holland. The expedition was to have all the necessary officers and assistants and would be accompanied by three companies of marines, who would stay in Botany Bay 'so long as it is found necessary'. The decision was officially announced to the House of Commons in the king's Speech from the Throne in January 1787: A plan has been formed, by my direction, for the transporting a number of convicts, in order to remove any inconvenience which arose from the crowded state of the gaols in the different parts of the kingdom and you will I doubt not, take such further measures as may be necessary for this purpose. If Lord Sydney was responsible for policy, it was his deputy, Evan Nepean, who was to be responsible for the detailed implementation of the plan. Nepean was a 33-year-old undersecretary when the decision was made. He headed a branch of the Home Office that administered the British overseas colonies, and working on the details of the First Fleet was his first major appointment. Nepean came from Saltash in Cornwall. He began his naval career working as a purser on a number of British ships along the American coast during the American War of Independence. In 1782 he became secretary to Lord Shuldham, a post-admiral in Plymouth, before being promoted a year later to work in London as Lord Sydney's undersecretary. He was regarded as an excellent administrator and later became chief secretary for Ireland, a lord of the Admiralty and a member of parliament. He was made a baronet in 1802 and admitted to the Privy Council in 1804, was governor of Bombay from 1812 to 1819, and died in Dorset in 1822 after a short retirement. Arthur Phillip was later to name Nepean River, about fifty kilometres west of Sydney, in his honour. At the time of the Botany Bay decision there was little rivalry between the European trading interests in the south Pacific, as the region had small populations and few exploitable natural resources. The British East India Company, which by now was emerging as the dominant trading influence in the Indian Ocean and north of Australia, expressed no interest in the venture, and commercial shippers, who may have been interested in the business of transportation, were more heavily involved in the much bigger slave trade. Nor was there much reaction from the other European powers to the British decision, which was first reported in the British newspapers from September 1786. There was no hint that the other colonising powers of France, Spain, Holland and Portugal wanted to mount any counter initiative. Britian's most obvious rival, France, showed little interest in the region until Napoleon sent Nicolas-Thomas Baudin in 1800 to explore New Holland and Tasmania – to which the British responded by establishing outposts at Fremantle and Perth on the west coast of Australia. It has been argued that Britain had a strategic interest in controlling Australian waters, if not the land, but even this was subordinate to the imperative of doing something about the convict problem. The Times came out in favour of the decision, arguing – erroneously as it turned out – that transportation was to cost less than the other schemes to deal with the growing number of convicts: There is one circumstance to be alleged in favour of the Botany Bay scheme in which it surpasses every other mode for the punishment of felons which has hitherto been carried into execution. In every former scheme, whether of confinement and hard labour, ballast heaving on the Thames etc., etc., there was a constant and growing expense on the public, which could not be reduced so long as the punishment continued. In the present instant the consequence is quite reversed for after the second year it is to be presumed that the convicts will be in the habit of providing for themselves and the expense to the public will be extremely trifling. It had taken years of equivocation and procrastination, but now that the decision was made the British Civil Service and the Royal Navy began the intensive organisation required to carry it out. The biggest migration fleet up to that time left Portsmouth less than a year later.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

ARTHUR PHILLIP

I cannot say the little knowledge I have of Captain Phillip would have led me to select him for a service of this complicated nature. The man chosen to lead the expedition to Botany Bay and become Britain's first governor to New South Wales was Captain Arthur Phillip. When he was plucked from semi-retirement at his Hampshire farm at nearly 50 years of age, there was nothing particularly outstanding in his career to recommend him, but he would prove to be a good choice. Arthur Phillip, like James Cook before him and Philip Gidley King afterwards, was an example of how men from modest backgrounds could still progress through the ranks in the British navy in a way that was far less likely at the time in the army, where class and connections were totally dominant. Phillip was born on 11 October 1738 in Bread Street in the parish of All Hallows, London. His father, Jakob, had come to England from Frankfurt to work as a language teacher, and Phillip was said to have spoken a number of languages, including German, passable Spanish, Portuguese and English, which he is said to have pronounced with a guttural German accent. His mother was Elizabeth Breach, who had been widowed before Phillip was born, having been married to Captain Herbert of the Royal Navy before she married Jakob. When Jakob died, Phillip was admitted to the boys' naval school at Greenwich on 24 June 1751, at 12¾ years of age. The school had been established in the early eighteenth century for the sons of navy men who had died or been killed at sea, but it seems that Phillip's family connections helped to secure his placement. Not only had Captain Herbert been a Royal Navy man, but he had also been related to Lord Pembroke, who shared the family name of Herbert. Lord Pembroke was a prominent member of society and was to become a member of parliament and privy councillor, a major-general in the army and a Knight of the Garter. It is unlikely that Phillip would have been enrolled at Greenwich but for this patronage. After two and a half years, and having turned 15, young Phillip left the school to take the standard seven-year indenture, to Captain William Redhead on the merchant ship Fortune, which regularly sailed to Greenland and Europe. In 1755, however, after only two years, he was released from his apprenticeship (which, according to Phillip's biographer George Mackaness, was quite common) and entered the navy shortly before the start of the Seven Years War to work as captain's servant on the Buckingham. Senior officers were permitted to take a number of servants with them on their ships, and being a captain's servant was the acceptable way for a young man like Phillip 'to learn the rudiments of his profession'. Later that same year he became an able seaman and a few months later, in early 1756, a yeoman-corporal before sailing from the West Indies to the Mediterranean, where he was involved in a battle with French ships off the island of Majorca on 20 May. Three of his colleagues were killed and another eight wounded in this battle. The commander of the British fleet, Vice-Admiral the Honourable John Byng, was accused of mismanaging the British effort, court-martialled, found guilty and shot. Over the next few years young Phillip served on a number of different British warships, including the Princess Louisa and the Ramillies, before being transferred to the Neptune, where he was promoted to midshipman and was on his way to a career on the quarterdeck. In 1759 he saw more action, this time on the Aurora in the battle of Quiberon Bay off the French coast near St Nazaire in the Bay of Biscay. More than twenty ships from each side were engaged, and the British won a famous naval victory. In 1760 Phillip was promoted to master's mate and at 22 years old was steadily climbing the naval ladder and becoming involved in more battles. Later the same year he was on the Stirling Castle off Barbados during the bombardment of Port Royal, in which hundreds of people in the French port were killed or wounded. In August 1762 the Stirling Castle was part of a British fleet of more than two hundred ships that successfully took Havana and 'completely destroyed the communication between Spain and her western Empire' in what was to be a significant event in Spain's decline as a dominant European power. Before sailing back to England, Phillip transferred to one of the twelve captured Spanish ships in Havana harbour, the Infante, which was renamed Infanta and converted to a British navy vessel. Phillip must have impressed his superiors during the taking of Havana because he was promoted to the ship's fourth-lieutenant. On his return to London he was also given a handsome share of the prize money of more than £234 that had been taken from the Spanish. By then the Seven Years War was drawing to a close, and Phillip's career was to enter more than a decade of comparative silence between April 1763 and January 1775. A short time after being pensioned out of the navy on half-pay at 25, Phillip became a farmer near Lyndhurst in the New Forest, Hampshire, and married the widow of John Denison, who had been a successful merchant from King Street, Cheapside, in London. Margaret Charlotte Tybott had come from County Montgomery in North Wales, where her family had been fairly well-established farmers. She had also been well cared for in her late husband's will. Not much is known about the marriage, but thirty years later the London Observer had the following to say: While on half pay Phillip married a widow lady, young and handsome, with a portion of £16,000. He became possessed of all of her fortune … then some circumstances occurred which induced Mr. Phillip to wish for a separation; he left his wife, restoring to her however, such part of her fortune as remained in his hands. The circumstances of Phillip's separation are not known, but over the next forty years there was an almost total absence of any reference in his reports and correspondence to his marriage or his wife. After he left the marriage, the only reference to Phillip in the navy records during this silent period states that he served on a fairly routine patrol on the Egmont for eight months between November 1770 and July 1771. Otherwise there is no known official reference to him until 1774, when he joined the Portuguese navy. In 1773 hostilities had again broken out between Portugal and Spain, in what was to become known as the Third Colonia War (1773–77). Colonial rivalry between the two countries had been, according to the author McIntyre, 'simmering over three centuries, at times subsiding in treaties or royal marriages, at times whipping into flames of war'. In the east the contest between the two countries centred on the Spice Islands, in what is current-day Indonesia, and in the west on the border between Spanish-controlled Argentina and Portuguese-controlled Brazil. By 1774 the Portuguese were moving to strengthen their tiny navy and looked to their long-time ally Britain for some experienced naval officers. Phillip sought and obtained permission from the British Admiralty to offer his services to the Portuguese, who immediately agreed to sign him up. Phillip had as his referee Rear-Admiral Augustus John Healey, who said of Phillip, 'though only a lieutenant in the British service, he is thoroughly worthy of command'. The deal was attractive to Phillip as the Portuguese agreed to appoint him captain and provide twice the rate of pay that they paid to local commanders. The Portuguese minister to London, Senhor Luiz de Souza, advised Phillip of his appointment in January 1775, when he went to Portugal and boarded the Nossa Senhora de Belem as second captain. Shortly after he was transferred to the Nossa Senhora de Pillar and at last became commander of his own ship – twenty years after he had first put to sea and fourteen years after becoming a fourth-lieutenant. Over the next three and a half years Phillip would establish his reputation fighting with the Portuguese around the contested territories that separated Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America. While he was with the Portuguese navy, a story emerged about Phillip that helps explain his later deft handling of large numbers of convicts aboard the First Fleet. While transporting four hundred criminals from Lisbon to South America, an epidemic on board disabled so many of the crew that the ship could not be sailed. Phillip appealed to those convicts with sailing experience, saying that he would make representations on their behalf if they helped complete the journey. After safely reaching his destination, Phillip kept his side of the bargain, and the prisoners were subsequently given their freedom as well as land grants. Phillip was to serve as commander in the Portuguese navy for three and a half years before leaving in 1778 with high praise. He was particularly remembered for protecting the Portuguese port of Colonia on the River Plate, with only his ship, the Pillar, restraining a Spanish assault. For this the Portuguese viceroy, Marquis de Lavradio, commended him: 'This officer is most honourable and meritorious. When at Colonia, he, with only his own Frigate, made the Spaniards respect that fortress as they ought to.' Back in England in 1778 he managed to secure his first independent command of a British navy ship when he commanded the Basilisk, which was part of the English Channel fleet. However, his time on the Basilisk was brief, and within a year he was again paid off and again unemployed. Back on his farm and largely idle Phillip wrote to Lord Sandwich appealing for work, saying he was prepared to serve 'in any part of the world whatsoever'. The approach was successful, and in 1780 he was appointed relief captain of a number of ships, including the St Albans and Magnanime, before being promoted to post-captain and transferred to the twenty-four-gun warship Ariadne, where he spent much of his time on routine patrols in the Baltic Sea. It was on the Ariadne where Phillip met Philip Gidley King, who would become a loyal member of his court and a key player in the expedition to New South Wales. King was born in Launceston, Cornwall, where his father was a draper, although his grandfather had been a local attorney at law. At 13 years of age he had joined the navy as a captain's servant and served for five years on the East India run. For the next three years he served in American waters as a midshipman on the Liverpool, where he was eventually commissioned as lieutenant. In 1780, now 22 years old, he served under Phillip on the Ariadne before going across to the sixty-four-gun Europe when Phillip was given command of the larger ship in 1782. Under Phillip's command the Europe sailed to India via the Cape of Good Hope and to South America. The Europe would be the last posting for Phillip, and he again retired on half-pay in 1784 before being appointed to head the expedition to New South Wales in 1786. Lieutenant Edward Spain, who also sailed on the Europe, said that Phillip allowed four women to be brought aboard at Port Praya in the Cape Verde Islands, but only because 'one of them he had a sneaky kindness for and had he given permission to her alone the reason would have been obvious to the officers and the ships company'. Phillip arrived back at Spithead on 22 April 1784 and was yet again laid off from further service. After this date we know little about what he did until he was appointed governor of New South Wales two years later, except that he took leave for about a year to visit the south of France. The circumstances of his appointment to head the convict expedition to New South Wales are somewhat mysterious. While he certainly was not appointed from a position of obscurity, there was nothing in his career that suggested he stood out as the most suitable candidate for the post. The announcement did not please the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Howe. He made it clear in a letter to Lord Sydney that even though Phillip was a navy man, he was not the choice of the Admiralty: I cannot say the little knowledge I have of Captain Phillip would have led me to select him for a service of this complicated nature. But as you are satisfied of his ability … I conclude he will be taken under your direction. Lord Sydney responded by saying 'presumably he was appointed on his merits as he appears to have no private influence with his superiors'. But could this really have been the case? There is some indication that Sir George Rose, the undersecretary of the Treasury, was the minister responsible for making the decision. Rose's estates were at Cuffnels near Lyndhurst, so he was a near neighbour of Phillip, who was then a gentleman farmer in the same district. Later, in New South Wales, Phillip would name the rich farming land he found twenty-five kilometres west of Sydney 'Rose Hill' in honour of Sir George. Evan Nepean, Lord Sydney's deputy, may also have had some say in the appointment. Nepean knew Phillip well from his earlier career, when Phillip had been attached to the Portuguese navy and Nepean responsible for spies and intelligence. Perhaps Phillip did have a certain amount of influence with the right people after all. We are fortunate that Phillip's personal vision for the colony of New South Wales survives. A short time after his appointment, while he was working in London in a little office in the Admiralty on the preparation of the fleet before its departure from Portsmouth, Phillip outlined his thoughts for the voyage and the settlement. They were recorded in his own handwriting on small sheets of paper and, although undated, are thought to have been written in January or February 1787. Many of the things he wrote about were later included in the detailed instructions he received from the government on 2 April 1787, which suggests that Phillip helped shape the design of his role of governor. Phillip wrote that he wanted to arrive in New South Wales some months ahead of the convicts to prepare the settlement: By arriving at the settlement two or three months before the transports many and very great advantages would be gained. Huts would be ready to receive the convicts who are sick … Huts would be ready for the women; the stores would be properly lodg'd and defended from the convicts … The cattle and stock would be likewise properly secured … Phillip planned to pick up the last of his supplies at the Cape of Good Hope but did not want any food or grog loaded onto the ships carrying convicts, where it might be stolen. He also said that, during the voyage, he wanted to regularly inspect the convict transport ships, 'to see they are kept clean and receive the allowance ordered by the government'. Phillip was well aware that the confinement of large numbers of convicts below decks and in overcrowded conditions would create a health hazard and required special care. He also saw the need for the protection of female convicts: The women in general I should suppose possess neither virtue nor honesty … But there may be some … who still retain some degree of virtue, and these should be permitted to keep together, and strict orders to the Master of the transport should be given that they are not abused and insulted by the ship's company, which is said to have been the case too often when they were sent to America. Phillip planned to create good relations with the local Aboriginal people and to civilise them, but he also wanted to prevent any involvement of the convicts with them: 'The convicts must have none, for if they have, the arms of the natives will be very formidable in their hands, the women abused, and the natives disgusted'. In compliance with the British Government's plan for the new settlement Phillip proposed to send ships to the Pacific islands to bring women to New South Wales to address the gender imbalance. Curiously, Phillip did not believe the convicts should be allowed to be part of the new colony, even at the end of their sentences: As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire, I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison, and other settlers that may come from Europe, and not be allowed to mix with them even after the seven or fourteen years for which they may be transported may be expired. However, what he did not know then – and would only be told after being in the new colony for more than two years – was that the British Government very much saw the convicts' passage as one way and was counting on them remaining in the new colony for good. Phillip was also awake to the risks of the convicts escaping from the colony and wrote about how security was to be maintained by limiting boats coming ashore: Ships may arrive at Botany Bay in future. On account of the convicts, the order of the port for no boats landing but in particular places, coming on shore and returning to the ships at stated hours, must be strictly enforced. With regard to punishing the convicts Phillip's vision was surprisingly tolerant, or naive, when he suggested that he thought it possible to avoid imposing the death penalty: 'Death, I should think, will never be necessary – in fact I doubt if the fear of death ever prevented a man of no principle from committing a bad action'. Phillip felt there were only two crimes that warranted the death penalty – murder and sodomy – even though he must have been aware of the widespread homosexuality among seamen, who were often away at sea for years at a time with few or no encounters with women. For either of these crimes I would wish to confine the criminal till an opportunity offered of delivering him as a prisoner to the natives of New Zealand, and let them eat him. The dread of this will operate much stronger than the threat of death. Phillip may not have had the high profile that would have made him an attractive choice for governor of the new colony, but he was an experienced farmer, and very few others who made up the First Fleet settlers had any background in working on the land. Wisely Phillip set as a high priority the building up of farm-animal numbers in Botany Bay. He knew he would only be able to carry a limited number of animals on the little ships to the new settlement and it would therefore be important to maximise the breeding not only of the government-owned stock but also of the privately owned animals brought with officers: As the getting a large quantity of stock together will be my first great object, till that is obtained the garrison should, as in Gibraltar, not be allowed to kill any animal without first reporting his stock, and receiving permission. When the First Fleet eventually reached Australia, much of what Phillip had envisioned was to be achieved, but he was to encounter problems he had not foreseen. He had no real way of knowing the full extent of the struggle they would experience while trying to build the new colony. Nor did he have any inkling of the crisis they would face in the first years of settlement, caused by the shortage of food.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

PREPARATION FOR THE VOYAGE

We beg leave to propose that the wives of the two hundred and forty-seven marines going to Botany Bay, not exceeding ten to each company, which will not in the whole amount to more than forty women, may be allowed to embark with them. The fleet was to take more than fourteen hundred people – including seven hundred and fifty convicts, several hundred soldiers and officers, some wives and children and the ships' crews – to the new colony on the other side of the world. The organisation for the venture, which would take nine months, included the commissioning of eleven ships, the appointment of the officials to lead the expedition and the loading of supplies sufficient for the long voyage and for two years' subsistence after arriving. The first move came from Lord Sydney, who wrote to the lords of the Treasury on 18 August 1786 asking that the necessary arrangements be made for the transport of the convicts: My Lords, I am … commanded to signify to your Lordships his Majesty's pleasure that you do forthwith take such measures as may be necessary for providing a proper number of vessels for the conveyance of seven hundred and fifty convicts to Botany Bay, together with such provisions, necessaries and implements for agriculture as may be necessary for their use after their arrival. At the same time Lord Sydney communicated the king's decree that marines be recruited 'not only to enforce due subordination and obedience but for the defense of the settlement against incursion by the natives'. He continued: His majesty has been pleased to direct that one hundred and sixty private marines, with a suitable number of officers and non commissioned officers, shall proceed in the ship of war and the tender to the new settlement, where it is intended they shall be disembarked for the purposes before mentioned. Two weeks later Lord Sydney wrote to the Admiralty with a specific request for the organising of the ships necessary for the transportation fleet: My Lords, The King having been pleased to signify his Royal Commands that seven hundred and fifty of the convicts now in this kingdom under sentence of transportation should be sent to Botany Bay, on the coast of New South Wales, in the latitude of thirty-three degrees south, at which place it is intended that the said convicts should form a settlement, and that the Lords of the Treasury should forthwith provide a sufficient number of vessels for their conveyance thither together with provisions and other supplies for their subsistence, as well as tools to enable them to erect habitations, and also implements for agriculture … During the voyage out the marines were to be spread out on the different ships to maintain order among convicts. Once they reached New South Wales, they were to serve for a term of three years, after which they could either return to England or settle as farmers in the new colony. The full requirements for this venture were contained in a 'Heads of a Plan', which was drawn up in Lord Sydney's office, probably by his deputy Evan Nepean, and sent from Whitehall to both the Treasury and the Admiralty. By this stage there was no pretence that the venture had any higher ambition than disposing of the convicts and no mention of the settlement otherwise contributing to the good of the British Empire. The plan outlined the route the fleet would take to New South Wales and the seeds and plants and animals that should be collected on the way for the settlement. The navy commander of the fleet would be authorised to spend whatever was necessary at the Cape of Good Hope 'to obtain cattle and hogs, as well as seed grain, all of which must be procured for the new settlers, with a view to their future subsistence'. It was hoped that by the time the First Fleet had consumed all of the food it had itself imported, the new colony would be producing much of its own requirements. Also in the Heads of a Plan were minute details of the tools that would be needed for the clearing of vegetation and the creation of the new settlement. This included three hundred chisels, a hundred and seventy-five hand saws and hammers ('one for every four men'), a hundred and forty drawing knives and augers (large drills), a hundred wood planes, broad axes and adzes (an arched axe with the blade at right angles to the handle), fifty pickaxes, forty cross-cut saws, frame saws and wheelbarrows, thirty grindstones, twelve ploughs and ten forges. Among the other supplies to be taken on the ships were two thousand spikes, a thousand squares of glass, two hundred pairs of hinges, one hundred locks, ten barrels of nails and a large number of fish hooks. It was envisaged that the settlers would build their own homes when they arrived in New South Wales. For the initial period financial provision was made for five hundred tents for the convicts and a hundred and sixty for the marines. A special two-storey tent was to be provided to Arthur Phillip as his temporary residence. The plan calculated the necessary clothing for each male convict to be two jackets, four pairs of woollen drawers, one hat, three shirts, four pairs of worsted stockings, three frocks, three trousers and three pairs of shoes. The budgeted cost for outfitting each convict was two pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence. The plan did not elaborate on the items of clothing for the women, other than to say 'the expence of clothing female convicts may be computed to amount to like sum'. However, when the fleet eventually sailed from Portsmouth nine months later, it left without enough clothing for the women. The plan also suggested – as the Matra proposal had a few years earlier – a simple solution to the anticipated shortage of women in the new colony: a ship should be sent to the nearby Pacific islands to collect some. This proposed large-scale removal of women to another country was wholly a pragmatic measure, as it was felt that otherwise 'it would be impossible to preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders'. In a later instruction it was made clear that the women could not be abducted: Whenever the ship shall touch on any of the islands in those seas … you are … to instruct your commanders to take on board any of the women who may be disposed to accompany them to the said settlement. You will, however, take especial care that the officers who may happen to be employed upon the service do not, upon any account, exercise any compulsive measures, or make use of fallacious pretences, for bringing away any of the said women from the places of their present residence. As well as cultivating flax in the new colony, as had been proposed by Sir George Young of the Admiralty, the settlers were to consider going to New Zealand for timber that could be used for the masts of ships. Phillip's initial written instructions, issued by King George in London and presented to him when he was formally commissioned as governor at the Court of St James on 12 October 1786, were very brief: George the Third Etc., to our trusted and well loved Captain Arthur Phillip, greeting: We, reposing especial trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage and experience in military affairs, do, by these presents, constitute and appoint you to be Governor of our territory called New South Wales … You are therefore carefully and diligently to discharge the duty of Governor in and over our said territory by doing and performing all and all manner of things thereunto belonging … and you are to observe and follow such orders and directions from time to time as you shall receive from us … He was not to receive his detailed instructions until he was about to leave Portsmouth with the fleet the following year, only weeks before his departure. At the time he was given his formal commission, Phillip was also ordered to colonise a vast territory roughly the size of Europe, stretching some three thousand kilometres from north to south from the very top of Cape York on the east coast of Australia to the south of Tasmania. From east to west the claimed territory was also some three thousand kilometres, from 135 E, which is roughly a vertical line down the middle of Australia, to the east coast and beyond, taking in 'all islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean'. Britain's claim to such a large part of the world was based on a convention that had emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whereby European powers accepted that the nation to first discover and navigate an area had first claim to own and occupy it – and Cook had been the first to navigate the east coast of Australia and claim it for Britain. The Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish had for hundreds of years effectively colonised lands they had discovered and developed these outposts into strategically located trading ports in the new world and the south seas. The Dutch had been the first to regularly sail to the west coast of New Holland but had made no attempt to establish a settlement or claim the land. A major challenge in the implementation of the plan was the organising of sufficient shipping to transport almost fifteen hundred people. The Admiralty responded quickly to the request and within six weeks of the official order, in October 1786, was able to confirm that the first two ships would be available within another two weeks. One was a small warship, the Sirius, which was to become the flagship of the First Fleet, and the second was an even smaller support vessel, the Supply: We immediately ordered the Sirius, one of his Majesty's ships of the sixth rate, with a proper vessel for a tender, to be fitted for this new service; and that the ship will be ready to receive men by the end of the month. The Sirius and the tender Supply were the only Royal Navy vessels of the prospective eleven. The other nine were contracted from private owners. Six were designated for the transport of the convicts and three were for carrying supplies. The British Government paid ten shillings per ton per month for each of the privately contracted ships. The charges would apply until the ships returned to Deptford, except for the three that would be released from government service when they unloaded in New South Wales before going on to China to pick up a cargo of tea for the British East India Company. By today's standards the ships were tiny. The largest was only a hundred and thirty-two feet, or less than forty metres, long and a little over thirty feet (nine metres) wide. The smallest was only seventy feet (twenty-one metres) long and barely twenty feet (six metres) wide. To look at, all of them were fairly similar. They were all blunt nosed and round bodied with three masts, except for the supply ship the Friendship and the navy ship the Supply, both of which had only two masts. The flagship of the fleet, the Sirius, had been built in 1780 as the Berwick for the East India trade but, as Lieutenant Philip Gidley King recorded, it was badly burnt in a fire before being bought, rebuilt and renamed by the navy in 1786: She was built on the river Thames for an east country East India Company and in loading her she took fire and was burnt to the wales. The Government wanted a roomy vessel to carry stores abroad, in 1781 purchased her bottom and she was rebuilt with such stuff as, during the war, could be found. She went two voyages to the West Indies, as the Berwick, store ship; and without any repairs she was reported, when the present expedition was thought of, as fit for the voyage to New Holland. She was then renamed the Sirius, so called from a bright star in ye southern constellation of the Great Dog. The Sirius was in no way a glamour flagship. Although the largest of the fleet, it sailed badly and slowly, and it leaked. It was later dismissed by Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who sailed on it, as the 'refuse of the yard'. The Sirius was to carry a hundred and sixty passengers, with Arthur Phillip as its captain. Before leaving England it was fitted with extra guns, as it was intended that they could be taken ashore in the new settlement if fortifications were needed. Prior to the journey John Hunter, who would become a significant figure in the new colony and later serve as governor of New South Wales, had been working for Phillip helping to prepare the flagship and was on the lookout for an appointment. He explained in his journal how it came about: I had some reason, during the equipment of these ships, to think that I might be employed upon this service in some way or other, and as Captain Phillip was appointed Governor of the new settlement, and of course had much business to transact in London, I frequently visited the Sirius and frequently received his directions in anything that related to filling her … On the 9th of December 1786 the ship being ready to fall down the river, we slipped the moorings and sailed down to Long Reach where we took in the guns and the ordnance stores. On the 15th, I was informed by a letter from Mr Stevens, Secretary to the Admiralty, that there was a commission signed for me in that office, and desiring I would come to town and pick it up. Hunter had initially been impressed with the Sirius, which he described as 'exceedingly well calculated for the service'. He was commissioned as 'Second captain of His Majesty's ship Sirius with the rank of Post Captain, and with the power to command her in the absence of her Principal Captain', which meant that while Phillip had overall command of the fleet, Hunter was effectively in command of the flagship. Hunter would consequently be paid the full captain's pay and permitted to take with him four servants on the ship. Born in Edinburgh, the son of a shipmaster, Hunter joined the navy as a captain's servant before becoming a seaman and then midshipman. He passed his exams to become lieutenant in 1760 but, as a man without a fortune, his rise was long and slow and he was not given his first commission for another twenty years. Hunter was 50 years old when he sailed on the Sirius. Other officers who sailed on the Sirius and who would play significant roles in the First Fleet story included Lieutenants William Bradley and William Dawes, and the ship's surgeon, George Worgan, who took his piano aboard with him. The second navy vessel, the Supply, was the fastest ship in the fleet. Weighing only a hundred and seventy tons – about a third of the weight of the Sirius – it was to carry fifty people and a limited amount of supplies and was skippered by Lieutenant Henry Ball. With the advantage of speed came the disadvantage of capacity. As Lieutenant Philip Gidley King was to complain, 'Her size is much too small for a long voyage which added to her not being able to carry any quantity of her provisions and her sailing very ill renders her a very improper vessel for this service.' The government set in train a process to hire the rest of the fleet from private contractors. While each of the nine chartered ships was to have its own captain, or master, they were to come under the charge of Lieutenant John Shortland, the navy agent, who in turn reported to Arthur Phillip. On 14 September 1786 The Times ran the story that the 'Government is now about settling a colony in New Holland in the Indian seas and the commissioners for the navy are now advertising for 1500 tons of transport'. Advertisements for the hire of ships were placed on public notice boards and in the newspapers. Within a month the government confirmed it had an acceptable bid for the supply of shipping from William Richards, a London shipping broker. Richards was born in 1735, the son of a tailor, and by the mid-1780s had become a wealthy shipbroker, having made most of his money organising shipping to the American colonies. He advised the government that he was able to provide the ships for the transportation of the convicts at a cheap rate, because he had done a deal with the British East India Company for some of them to sail on to China after dropping off the convicts and their supplies in New South Wales. All were contract merchantmen, in that they had been built and operated as commercial cargo ships and would require conversion for the carriage of the convicts. The Admiralty had a great deal of experience in contracting ships for the movement of troops overseas and was meticulous with the details of the contract. It was stipulated that the ships should be adequately ventilated and regularly cleaned out and fumigated. The prisoners were to be supplied with clothing, bedding and adequate rations, and were to be given the opportunity of exercise on deck when the ships were safely at sea. After all the arrangements were made, the responsibility for ensuring the contract was complied with during the voyage rested with the navy agent, which was extremely difficult because the agent could only be on one of the ships at a time and was unable to supervise the daily management of all the others while on the open sea. The First Fleet's agent, John Shortland, was also responsible for supervising the conversion of the contract ships to carry convicts, which involved securing the prisoners' accommodation behind a bulkhead below decks and building a security wall across the middle of the ship above the deck. Separate accommodation was required on those ships that carried both male and female convicts so there could be 'no communication whatsoever with each other', in the words of Sir Charles Middleton, comptroller of the Admiralty. Following the conversions Shortland was to assemble the prisoners from the hulks and gaols and load them onto the transport ships in London, Portsmouth and Plymouth. Shortland was 48 years old when he became the navy agent for the convict transports. He had joined the navy as a 15-year-old midshipman and served in Newfoundland, the West Indies and Gibraltar. He had then spent a fairly undistinguished twenty-five years with the navy transport service supervising the conveyance of troops – largely to and from the American colonies. Shortland's appointment was criticised by the Admiralty, who felt that a better choice could have been made had they been consulted, but Arthur Phillip was to be impressed by Shortland and argue that his hard work contributed to the success of the First Fleet voyage. The Shortland family would become prominent in the early history of Australia. Two of Shortland's sons also travelled with the First Fleet: 18-year-old John sailed as master's mate on the flagship Sirius and 16-year-old Thomas George sailed as the second mate on the Alexander. Son John would stay on in the colony for several years after his father returned to England, before going back himself with Captain John Hunter in 1791. He returned in 1795 with the now governor Hunter and would later explore and give the latter's name to the Hunter River, which is about a hundred and fifty kilometres north of Sydney. John Shortland senior was to command some of the transports of the First Fleet on their ill-fated return to England after unloading the settlers and their provisions in New South Wales. When he finally reached England, he was promoted to captain but never promoted again and retired as a naval officer at 57 years old at Whitby in Yorkshire. Having a navy agent on the First Fleet with overall responsibility for the transport of convicts was a new arrangement. Until the American War of Independence the transportation of convicts had been the total responsibility of the private shipping contractors. Shortly before the Admiralty had been ordered to arrange the ships of the First Fleet, two contractors, Turnbull and Macaulay, had put a proposal to the British Government that they manage the entire venture, but their offer was not accepted. The government felt that the establishment of a new colony at the other end of the earth should not be left in the hands of those whose only interest lay in getting their cargo to its destination and unloading it on arrival. Initially there were to be five ships for transporting the convicts: the Alexander, the Charlotte, the Scarborough, the Friendship and the Lady Penrhyn. Later it was realised that another ship was needed, and the Prince of Wales was added. The three ships commissioned to carry the required two years' worth of supplies were the Golden Grove, the Fishburn and the Borrowdale. The largest of the transport ships in the fleet, the four-hundred-and-fifty-ton Alexander, measured a hundred and fourteen feet (thirty-five metres) long and thirty-one feet (nine and three-quarter metres) wide. According to the official navy report it was to leave Portsmouth carrying almost two hundred male convicts, thirty-seven marines and one wife of a marine, plus the ship's crew. For a ship of this size, the crew would have numbered nearly a hundred, compared with that of the smallest ship, the Supply, which would have numbered only around thirty. The transport Scarborough was the next largest, at a hundred and eleven feet (thirty-four metres) long and thirty feet (nine metres) wide and weighing four hundred and eighteen tons. It was to carry two hundred and ten male convicts, thirty-four marines and the ship's crew. The transport Charlotte was a hundred and five feet (thirty-two metres) long and a little over twenty-eight feet (eight and a half metres) wide. It was to carry eighty-eight male and twenty female convicts with two of their children, forty-four marines, six wives and a child, plus the ship's crew. The transports Lady Penrhyn and the Prince of Wales were almost identical in size, at a hundred and three feet (thirty-one metres) long and a little over twenty-nine feet (nine metres) wide. Both ships carried women convicts. The Lady Penrhyn was to carry a hundred and two women convicts with five children, six marines and the ship's crew. The Prince of Wales carried almost all of the families of the marines. In addition to the ship's crew, it boarded thirty-one marines, sixteen wives and six children, a hundred women convicts and one of their children. The Friendship was the smallest of the transports, weighing only two hundred and seventy-eight tons. At barely seventy-five feet (twenty-three metres) long, it would carry forty-four marines, three of their wives and five children, in addition to its crew. It would also take eighty-eight convict men, twenty-four convict women and three of their children. The private supply ships the Fishburn and the Golden Grove were both a hundred and three feet (thirty-one metres) long and twenty-nine feet (nine metres) wide. The Fishburn also carried twenty-eight passengers in addition to its crew and the Golden Grove twenty-two passengers, including the Reverend Richard Johnson, his wife and their servant. The Borrowdale was seventy-five feet (twenty-three metres) long and carried twenty-four passengers and its crew. Ever mindful of money the Treasury was keen to make sure that the contracted ships were used for the transport of the First Fleet for as short a period as possible, so as to keep the hire costs to the government at a minimum. George Rose, the undersecretary of the Treasury, wrote to Phillip Stephens, the undersecretary of the Admiralty, to say they wanted the ships released from Botany Bay as soon as possible to carry out their tea run to China: I am commanded by their Lordships to desire that you will move the Lords of the Admiralty to direct the captain of the Kings ship … to take care that no unnecessary delay happens on the passage to Botany Bay, or on their departure from thence, and that he uses his best endeavours to enable the ships under his command to reach China by the 1st January, 1788. The last months of 1786 saw the filling of a number of other key positions, some of which would be successful, others not. It was not difficult to attract competent officers to the project. Many saw these expeditions as an opportunity for career advancement and even fame. In the decades leading up to the colonisation of Australia, the navy had been involved in a number of non-military voyages of scientific discovery that had captured the public imagination and made their participants famous. Also the recruits for Botany Bay were well aware that a number of those who had been on the early expeditions had successfully published handsome illustrated journals of their travels, which had been snapped up by an enthusiastic public. Sure enough, a number of the officers with the First Fleet would hurry to publish their journals – some before they had themselves returned to England. Whether or not those on board the First Fleet ships expected fame, many became well-known figures and were to be instrumental, in one way or another, in the early days of the colony. Major Robert Ross was appointed as the commander of the marines. He was initially assigned to sail on the Sirius but later in the voyage transferred to the Scarborough for the rest of the journey. He would prove to be a constant problem for Phillip and for many of the others he dealt with in the new colony. Reverend Richard Johnson, sailing on the Golden Grove, would become the hardworking chaplain in the new settlement, having been given the role at the age of 34. Distressed by what he regarded as the depravity of the convicts, Johnson went to a lot of trouble to take with him plenty of material with which to help straighten their twisted souls. With the help of the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge he loaded aboard the First Fleet four thousand two hundred books, including a hundred Bibles, a hundred Books of Common Prayer, four hundred testaments, five hundred psalters and two hundred Church catechisms. In addition he took a large number of pamphlets on moral guidance, including a hundred and ten copies of Exhortations to Chastity, a hundred copies of Dissuasions from Stealing, two hundred copies of Exercises Against Lying and fifty copies of Caution to Swearers. No doubt Johnson wanted the convicts to benefit from all this, but only a tiny proportion of the new settlers – mainly the officers – could actually read. Johnson belonged, of course, to the Church of England. Despite the fact that around three hundred of the convicts on the First Fleet were Catholics, no priest was planned for them. Thomas Walshe, a Catholic priest, wrote to Lord Sydney saying that the Catholic convicts had an 'earnest desire some Catholic clergyman may go with them', but despite saying he 'would be so happy as to be permitted to go' without pay or any support from the government, the offer was not accepted. Phillip's two most valued officers, Captain John Hunter and Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, were to prove loyal supporters of their chief and would both eventually become governor of the colony. David Collins, sailing on the Sirius, had been appointed the colony's judge advocate. He would have the major responsibility of administering justice in the new colony and would become a valuable supporter of Phillip. Collins would also keep one of the most extensive journals of the settlers, covering the many years he spent in Britain's new colony. John White was 30 years old when he accepted the appointment as chief surgeon with the First Fleet, having been in the navy for ten years and served as a surgeon on ships in the West Indies and India. As the senior medical officer he would have a great deal to do with the remarkably good health record of the convicts on the voyage to New South Wales. In the new colony he worked in the most difficult circumstances, operating in a small tent hospital and treating outbreaks of scurvy, smallpox and the hundreds of diseased and dying convicts who arrived on the ill-fated Second and Third Fleets. He returned to England after five years, pleading ill health, and later resigned rather than go back to New South Wales. A number of other surgeons were appointed under John White. They were spread around the transports for the voyage out. The job of a surgeon in the convict service was far from attractive. It was demanding, the conditions appalling and the pay poor. With more appealing opportunities elsewhere the general standard of surgeons on convict ships was low. The work generally attracted novices fresh from the lecture room, the mediocre or the 'embittered failures'. William Redfern, who later ran the Colonial Medical Establishment, said that many of the surgeons were 'ill qualified to take charge of two hundred to three hundred men about to take a long voyage through various climates and under particularly distressing circumstances' and that many were all too 'devoted to inebriety'. Among the surgeons was William Balmain, who sailed on the Alexander and would later in Sydney fight a duel with his boss, John White. The surgeon appointed to the women's convict ship the Lady Penrhyn was John Turnpenny Altree, who took ill and was taken off the ship in Tenerife. He was replaced by Arthur Bowes Smyth, who would be another to keep a journal covering the voyage and his time in New South Wales. Along with the appointment of personnel, during these last months of preparation the exact amount of food to be consumed on the voyage was calculated. The marines were to have the same rations as the seamen: seven pounds of bread a week, four pounds of beef, two pounds of pork, two pints of peas, three pints of oatmeal, six ounces of butter, three-quarters of a pound of cheese, half a pint of vinegar and three and a half pints of rum. The convicts were to be given about two-thirds those quantities and were denied grog, except when it was prescribed by the surgeon for the sick. Phillip was involved with almost every detail of the fleet's planning. With only one month to pass before its departure, he wrote to Undersecretary Nepean asking about the number of caps for the convicts, supplies for the wives of marines, whether the judge advocate could bring along his servant and whether enough port wine could be loaded for the officers. The navy agreed that some of the marines sent out to maintain order and defend the colony could take their wives and children but stipulated that the number of wives be limited to forty, so as to minimise the need for provisions on the voyage out and in the new settlement: As it is usual when any regiments are sent upon service to his Majesty's colonies or plantations to allow them to take with them a certain number of women, we beg leave to propose that the wives of the marines going to Botany Bay, not exceeding ten to each company, which will not in the whole amount to more than forty women, may be allowed to embark with them. There would be two hundred and forty-seven marines and marine officers leaving Portsmouth, and many were to feel aggrieved at having to leave their families behind. Among the other key appointments to the venture was Baron Augustus Theodore Henry Alt, who would be the colony's surveyor-general. At 56 years of age Alt may have been the oldest official to sail with the First Fleet. He was born in London, the son of Heinrich Alt, a German, and his English wife, Jeanetta. He began service in the British army as a 23-year-old ensign in 1755 and served in France and Germany, fighting in the siege of Gibraltar in 1779. Alt would be one of a number of officers to marry a convict and have children with her. In Sydney he would marry Ann George, a 'shoe binder'. She had been convicted and sentenced to seven years' transportation as a 22-year-old in the Old Bailey in 1785 for stealing three shillings from a man whom her accomplice, Eleanor McCabe, had picked up in a pub. Henry Alt and Ann George would have two children together: Lucy was born in 1790 and a son, Henry George, was born in 1799. Ann died in 1814 in Parramatta, west of Sydney, and her husband died the following February. The planning of the First Fleet was, for its time, a colossal undertaking that involved the most impressive devotion to detail down to the required number of fish hooks, nails and door hinges that would be loaded on the ships and taken to help build the New South Wales settlement. Little attention, however, appears to have been given to the suitability of the convicts selected for the voyage. Many were too old or too ill, and a number of them would die while they were locked on the transports at Portsmouth waiting for the fleet to sail. It seemed that the welfare of convicts was a matter of the lowest priority.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

THE CONVICTS

COURT TO PRISONER: How old are you? PRISONER: Going on nine. COURT: What business were you bred up in? PRISONER: None, sometimes chimney sweeps. COURT: Have you any father and mother? PRISONER: Dead. COURT: How long ago? PRISONER: I don't know. The convicts loaded onto the transports of the First Fleet were not chosen with any regard for their fitness for the long voyage or for their ability to contribute to the building of a new colony once they reached Botany Bay. Remarkably, it also appears that no consideration was given to how much of their sentences the convicts had left to serve when they were put on the fleet. More than forty per cent had been convicted either in 1784 or before, and since most were committed to seven years' transportation, several hundred would have served more than half of their sentences when they arrived in New South Wales in 1788. This was to prove a major headache for Governor Arthur Phillip, who sailed with no convict records and had no way of confirming whether prisoners who claimed they had completed their sentences were telling the truth. Many had been condemned to be hanged for stealing food or items of clothing, but their death sentences were commuted to transportation. Only those too frail to walk were excluded from consideration, and fourteen pregnant women convicts were boarded who would give birth during the voyage. Many were old or ill when delivered from the hulks and prisons to the transports, and a number were to die before the fleet left Portsmouth. Almost sixty per cent of the First Fleet's convicts had been sentenced for stealing food or other goods of relatively low value. Thirteen per cent were guilty of burglary or breaking and entering, and a further fifteen per cent had been convicted of highway robbery, robbery with violence or grand larceny. The remainder were found guilty of living off fencing, swindling, forgery or some other offence. A large number of the convicts had been destined for transportation to America or Africa and had served some years of their sentence in English prisons or on prison hulks before being sent to Botany Bay. For example, 43-year-old Thomas Eccles had been sentenced in Guildford in Surrey in March 1782 to be hanged for stealing bacon and bread but 'reprieved for service in Africa for life'. Eccles was in prison for five years before being transported to Botany Bay on the Scarborough. Twenty-one-year-old Mary Braund (who would later become better known as Mary Bryant when she escaped from New South Wales) had been found guilty of assaulting and robbing Agnes Lakeman of a silk bonnet and other goods. In 1786 in the Exeter court in Devon she was condemned 'To be hanged. Reprieved. Transported seven years.' She sailed on the Charlotte to Botany Bay. Twenty-two-year-old Edward Pugh was convicted in 1784 in the Gloucester court for stealing a great-coat and 'Ordered to be transported to America for seven years.' He sailed to Botany Bay on the Friendship. A captain of the marines on the First Fleet, Watkin Tench, who was also responsible for censoring the convicts' letters to their families while the fleet was waiting to sail from Portsmouth, said that fear among the convicts was a constant theme: The number and content of the letters varied according to the disposition of the writers but whose constant language was an apprehension of the impracticality of returning home, the dread of the sickly passage and the fearful prospect of a distant and barbarous country. A number of the convicts, such as Thomas Limpus, had already been sent in chains to Africa and America before being sent aboard the First Fleet. On 8 October 1782, almost five years before the First Fleet sailed, 15-year-old Limpus had been sentenced in Westminster Court to seven years' transportation 'to some of his Majesty's plantations in Africa' for stealing a 'cambrick handkerchief valued at 10 shillings'. Limpus had been 'chained two and two together' with about forty other prisoners below the decks of the slave trader Den Keyser and sent to St Louis, in current-day Senegal, on the west African coast. With him were two other prisoners who would also find themselves on the First Fleet, John Ruglass and Samuel Woodham. Ruglass and Woodham had been originally convicted together at the Old Bailey in 1781 for highway robbery, having held up, with three others, William Wilson and stolen from him a silver shirt buckle, a handkerchief and some money, with a total value of one pound and four shillings. All three – Limpus, Ruglass and Woodham – would manage to get back to England. Limpus was later to tell the Old Bailey that, on arrival in Africa, he and other convicts were left to survive as best they could on an island off the coast. Limpus said that they were given no provisions and that, after getting work with the local governor, he had managed to find his way onto a ship working his passage back to England: On the 3rd of last December, I was landed on the island of Goree, with nineteen more, the soldiers were drawn up in a circle on the parade, the Lieutenant of the island ordered us all into the middle of it, and told us we were all free men, and that we were to do the best we could, for he had no victuals, there was a ship lay in the bay, I went on shore several times and did work for the governor, I remained there till the time I came home, which was last Saturday was three weeks. Ruglass was to give a similar explanation to the court in London. The British governor Lacey, he claimed, had 'sent them off and would not give them any victuals'. So, within a year of being sentenced to seven years' transportation, Limpus and the others had managed to find their separate ways home. Within three weeks Limpus was recognised as a convicted criminal, re-apprehended and brought before the Old Bailey, charged with 'returning from transportation' before the end of his term. Limpus was this time condemned to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted to transportation to America – even though by that time there were virtually no convict ships still going there. In April 1784 Thomas Limpus was one of a hundred and seventy-nine convicts, including twenty women, who sailed from England on the Mercury, which would be one of the last convict ships to make an attempt to sell prison labour to the Americans. However, the convicts on the Mercury mutinied when the ship was sailing along the English Channel off the coast of Devon. Most if not all the prisoners were recaptured, either while still at sea attempting to reach the shore or having already reached land, and many were to sail on the First Fleet. The average age of the First Fleet's convicts was around 27. Nearly fifty per cent were under 25 and only five per cent were older than 45. The oldest male was believed to be Joseph Owen, who was in his early 60s; the youngest was John Hudson, who was nine years old when he was convicted and sentenced to transportation. The youngest female was 13-year-old Elizabeth Hayward, a clog-maker who had stolen a linen dress and a silk bonnet. The oldest woman was Dorothy Handland, who was believed to be 82 years old when she sailed with the First Fleet. Dorothy had been convicted at the Old Bailey in February 1786 for perjuring herself in an earlier trial and sentenced to seven years' transportation. She hanged herself from a gum tree in Sydney Cove in 1789. John Hudson's case is as good an illustration as any that the British judicial system took no account of the age of offenders. He was brought before Justice Hall at the Old Bailey two weeks before Christmas in 1783 and sentenced to seven years' transportation. He had been found guilty of 'feloniously breaking into' the house of William Holsworth at one o'clock in the morning the previous October and stealing a linen shirt, five silk stockings, a pistol and two aprons, which had a combined value of one pound and two shillings. He was not convicted on the charge of burglary. In evidence the court was told that the boy had entered the house by breaking a windowpane, leaving 'marks of toes, as if someone had slided down the window in the inside of the shutters'. When asked by the court if they were large or small toes, the witness Holsworth replied, 'They were small toes … I took the impressions of the foot and of the toes that were on the table upon a piece of paper as minutely as I could.' Hudson had also been seen by a woman, Sarah Baynes, as he was trying to wash himself clean of soot in a boarding-house washtub in East Smithfield. Nearby she saw the stolen silk stockings and aprons. Also in evidence John Smith told the court that he recognised Hudson as the boy who came and tried to sell him some of the stolen goods the week after the robbery: I am a pawnbroker. On the 17th of October, the boy at the bar brought this shirt to pledge about seven in the morning. He said it belonged to his father. I asked who had sent him. He said his mother. I stopped him. Only John Hudson didn't have a father, or a mother, as the proceedings of the Old Bailey record. COURT TO PRISONER: How old are you? PRISONER: Going on nine. COURT: What business were you bred up in? PRISONER: None, sometimes chimney sweeps. COURT: Have you any father and mother? PRISONER: Dead. COURT: How long ago? PRISONER: I don't know. Hudson was one of thousands of abandoned or orphaned children left poor and destitute trying to survive in the recesses of urban England. Many died young of malnutrition, cold, exhaustion, neglect, cruelty and a range of ugly infections and diseases. It is not known how Hudson survived before he was sent to prison, except the account he gives of working as a chimney sweep. Chimney sweeping required children who were small enough to crawl up the insides of chimney flutes as narrow as ten inches (twenty-four centimetres) to clean away thickened soot. The job was extremely unhealthy and dangerous, and there was a large death rate among the children due to falling down chimneys, asphyxiation, smoke inhalation or lung cancer. Hudson was initially sent to Newgate in London and survived several months of the prison's 'depravity, profanity, wretchedness and degradation', probably because the conditions in the gaol were little different than those he had been used to at large. For many of the convicts, young or old, life in prison in England was no worse, and in some respects better, than trying to survive on the outside. John Nicol, who was to sail as a steward on the all-women convict transport the Lady Juliana in the Second Fleet, said that many of the convicts were hardened and indifferent to prison life and enjoyed the guarantee of food and somewhere to sleep: I witnessed many moving scenes and many of the most hardened indifference. Numbers of them would not take their liberty as a boon; they were thankful of their present situation. Many of these from country jails had been allowed to leave it to assist in getting the harvest, and voluntarily returned. When I enquired their reason, they answered, 'How much more preferable is our present situation to what it has been since we commenced our vicious habits? We have good victuals and a warm bed. We are not ill treated, or at the mercy of every drunken ruffian, as we were before. When we rose in the morning, we knew not where we would lay our heads in the evening, or if we would break our fast in the course of the day. Hudson's inclusion in the First Fleet was the second attempt to transport him. Three years before being put on board the Friendship in Portsmouth with ninety other convicts bound for Botany Bay, he too had been sent from London on the Mercury in April 1784 bound for America when the convicts mutinied and took the ship. Hudson and another boy, 13-year-old James Grace, were in one of the Mercury's two small boats off Torquay when they were recaptured. The two boys and a number of convict mutineers were able to escape the death penalty because they were technically still at sea when they were apprehended – nothing to do with Hudson and Grace being juveniles. Young James Grace would also join John Hudson on the First Fleet to Botany Bay. He had been found guilty of theft at the Old Bailey only a month after Hudson, in January 1784, when he was charged with stealing ten yards of silk and some silk stockings and sentenced to seven years' transportation. During his trial a 15-year-old servant boy, George Windsor, told the court that he saw the defendant in Oxford Street, London, with his hand through a broken glass window taking out the silk goods. In his defence Grace said that, while he took the stockings, the window was already broken, which resulted in his being found guilty of burglary but not of breaking and entering. After their recapture both Grace and the now ten-year-old Hudson were tried for 'returning from transportation' before their term had expired, convicted, sentenced again to transportation and sent to Exeter prison in Devon and then to the Dunkirk, a de-masted former warship that had been converted to a prison hulk in Plymouth harbour. There they waited to see where fate would deposit them next.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

PORTSMOUTH

A corpse sew'd up in a hammock floated alongside our ship. The cabin, lately occupied by the third mate Jenkinson, who died of a putrid fever the night before I came on board, and was buried at Ryde, was fresh painted and fumigated for me to sleep in. The preparation for the First Fleet's departure from Portsmouth was characterised by chaos, disease, promiscuity and death. It would take nine months to prepare and load the two navy ships, six convict transports and three supply ships with fifteen hundred people and two years' provisions and equipment. While the convicts dreaded the thought of being banished and transported, it was reported in the press at the time that the government received 'upward of a thousand applications' from others wanting to join the expedition. The applicants included various military officers who saw the venture as good for their career prospects and 'upwards of fifty women, wives of convicts', who had travelled to Portsmouth hoping to be allowed to go with their husbands, only to be referred back to their 'respective church parishes'. According to another press report a number of women applied directly to the Treasury in London to go with their convict men but, after being referred to Evan Nepean, 'the petitioners were dismissed'. In late 1786 The Times reported that there 'are now about three hundred felons under sentence of transportation in Newgate, most of whom are to be sent with the transports to Botany Bay'. The first convicts began to be loaded onto the transports in Portsmouth towards the end of 1786. From October the order was given 'for the men to work double tides' to speed up the loading of the ships. Many of the first prisoners to be loaded were to spend more than a year on their ships before being landed at Port Jackson in late January 1788. At the beginning of their ordeal it was winter in England, and they were locked up in the lower decks of the transport ships where it was cold, dark and damp. The arrival of hundreds of these convicts at Portsmouth, with many of their cronies and families turning up on shore, caused panic among the locals, many of whom closed and locked their businesses until the fleet left. The press was to report a wave of violent crime as 'gangs of thieves and robbers' descended on Portsmouth from London: The town and neighbourhood is infested with numerous gangs of thieves and robbers, and that scarce a night passes in which some persons are not robbed or some houses broken open. The villains are supposed to have belonged formerly to the hulks at Woolwich and to have come down to see their former friends and companions. In early 1787 hundreds more convicts were rowed down the Thames from the hulks and from Newgate prison and loaded at Woolwich on the convict transport ships the Alexander and the Lady Penrhyn. These were then sailed down to Portsmouth with the two navy ships the Sirius and the Supply to meet up with the rest of the fleet in a journey that was to take several weeks. Not all the prisoners were transported directly to Portsmouth by ship, however. More than two hundred were first brought from London overland to Plymouth, chained together on carts and escorted 'under proper guard'. There they were loaded aboard the Charlotte and the Friendship, which were in Plymouth harbour, along with two hundred and thirty-nine male and fifty-one female convicts who were already being held in Plymouth on the Dunkirk prison hulk, before being sailed around to Portsmouth to join the rest of the fleet. In the first days the cautious masters of the transports kept the prisoners, including the women on the Lady Penrhyn, in chains below decks, exchanging one type of metal shackle for another. Sixteen male convicts on the Alexander and a woman on the Lady Penrhyn were to die before the fleet departed Portsmouth. In fact more convicts were to die before the fleet left England and on the first leg of the journey to Botany Bay than during the many months of the rest of the voyage. The fleet would not sail until May, and there was already concern about the outbreak of disease among the convicts on the transports. Arthur Phillip successfully sought permission from Nepean for the transports to be moved several miles out to sea into Spithead. There the convicts could, for part of the day, be allowed out of their cramped quarters up onto the deck, where they could get some fresh air. You will, sir, permit me to observe that it will be very difficult to prevent the most fatal sickness amongst men so closely confined; that on board that ship which is to receive two hundred and ten convicts there is not a space left for them to move in sufficiently large for forty men to be in motion at the same time, nor is it safe to permit any number of men to be on deck while the ship remains so near the land. On this consideration, I hope you will order the Alexander and Lady Penrhyn to join his Majesty's ship Sirius immediately, and proceed to Spithead, where more liberty may be allowed the convicts than can be done with safety in the river. The chief surgeon of the fleet, John White, had first gone to Plymouth from London on 7 March 1787, two months before the fleet eventually departed. He carried with him various dispatches from the secretary of state and the Admiralty authorising the loading of convicts for transportation. He had travelled overland for two days in 'the most incessant rain I ever remember', to be greeted by gale-force winds at Plymouth that delayed the loading of the convicts from the Dunkirk hulk onto the Charlotte and Friendship. The ships were then to sail round to Portsmouth with the convicts 'placed in the different apartments allotted for them'. When White arrived at Portsmouth, he recommended to Phillip that the Alexander be temporarily evacuated so the ship could be fumigated. Phillip communicated White's advice to the government: 'The surgeon states the situation of the convicts to be such that I am under the necessity of requesting … ordering lighters from Portsmouth yard to the Alexander, to receive the convicts while the ship is cleaned and smoked.' Based on advice he received from White in Portsmouth, Arthur Phillip was also to complain that the convicts were being sent there in a state wholly unsuitable for being aboard ship and at sea: The situation in which the magistrates sent the women on board the Lady Penrhyn stamps them with infamy – tho' almost naked, and so very filthy, that nothing but clothing them could have prevented them from perishing, and which could not be done in time to prevent a fever, which is still on that ship. On White's prompting, Phillip was to propose a series of measures to improve the health of the convicts, including washing and dressing new arrivals in clean clothes before loading them onto the transports, allowing the sick a little wine and supplying all of them with some fresh meat while they were in Portsmouth Harbour. It was not only the convicts who were sick and dying. By early 1787 a number of the marines had arrived at Portsmouth to be assigned to the different transport ships to oversee the convicts. The marine commander Major Robert Ross had also arrived and complained that conditions on the Alexander and the other ships in Portsmouth Harbour were so bad that his men were falling ill and dying. Many had been assigned quarters in lower decks 'under where the seamen are berthed' and where they were 'excluded from all air'. He complained of this in a letter to Stephens, the secretary of the navy: I have to request you will please to inform their Lordships that the sickness that has, and still does prevail among the marine detachment embarked upon the Alexander, transport, gives me a great degree of concern. Since the time of their first embarkation no less than one sergeant, one drummer, and fourteen privates have been sent sick on shore from her, some of whom, I am informed, are since dead. Ross had also written to Nepean to complain about the food rations his marines were receiving: I likewise beg to observe to you that the contractors for the victualling the marines have not put any flour on board the transports for their use, and of course, as they are the only people deprived of that necessary article, which I believe was never intended to be the case, may I request that you will use your endeavours to get the mistake rectified, as you know that the preservation of their health is of the utmost consequence on the present occasion. Ross was a larger-than-life character who would become unpopular with other officers and a thorn in the side of Governor Arthur Phillip when the fleet reached New South Wales. He jealously guarded his command over the marines and was difficult to handle. At 47 Ross was one of the oldest officials on the First Fleet, along with Arthur Phillip and Captain John Hunter. It is widely believed that he was born in Scotland, although details of his family are not clear. He joined the marines as a 16-year-old second-lieutenant, which suggests that he came from an established family or was at least well connected. In his early career with the marines he served in the Seven Years War against the French in north America for nearly four years and was involved in the siege of French-held Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758 and the capture of Quebec the following year. He appears to have been well regarded and was promoted to first-lieutenant in 1759, captain in 1773 and brevet-major in 1783. He also fought in the American War of Independence and was involved in the pyrrhic victory at the battle of Bunker Hill in Massachusetts in 1775, when the British incurred more than two hundred dead and eight hundred wounded to achieve victory. On his way home to England on the Ardent he was captured by the French but subsequently returned as part of an exchange of prisoners. From 1781 he served in the Mediterranean and the West Indies until he was appointed lieutenant-governor to Arthur Phillip. Ross sailed to New South Wales and took with him his eight-year-old son, whom he signed up to the marines and later, in Sydney, attempted to have commissioned as an officer. Also arriving at Portsmouth were the twelve surgeons whom the 'Government had appointed at the public expense to go to Botany Bay'. Arthur Bowes Smyth, the 37-year-old assistant-surgeon who replaced the ill John Turnpenny Altree, described the appalling squalor that confronted him when he went aboard the women's convict ship the Lady Penrhyn in March to take up his cabin: A corpse sew'd up in a hammock floated alongside our ship. The cabin, lately occupied by the third mate Jenkinson, who died of a putrid fever the night before I came on board, and was buried at Ryde, was fresh painted and fumigated for me to sleep in. While waiting for the fleet to sail, Bowes Smyth was able to go for long walks on the mainland and the Isle of Wight, an escape not available to the convicts being held mostly below deck on the transports. Back on the ship Bowes Smyth recorded how many of the women convicts who had never been on a ship before 'were very sick with the motion of the ship' out in Spithead. Bowes Smyth was born in Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex, the seventh son of a surgeon, and as a youth would follow in his father's footsteps, working locally as a surgeon, before signing up with the First Fleet. The officers had many weeks to kill waiting for the fleet to sail, but marine captain Watkin Tench found good uses for the time: Unpleasant as a state of inactivity and delay for many weeks appeared to us, it was not without its advantages; for by means of it we were able to establish regulations among the convicts, and to adopt such a system of defence, as left us with little to apprehend our own security, in case a spirit of madness and desperation had hurried them on to attempt our destruction … An opportunity was taken, immediately on their being embarked, to convince them, in the most pointed terms, that any attempt on their side, either to contest the command, or to force their escape, should be punished with instant death; orders to this effect were given to the sentinels in their presence. The ships' officers and the marine officers were from a totally different world from the ordinary seamen and the marine privates and would enjoy a very different experience of the voyage to the rest. They were also given the added incentive of a year's pay in advance before leaving England. The officers were far better accommodated on the ships than anyone else, even if by today's standards their quarters were tiny. Usually they shared a cabin, which was typically five feet by seven feet (one and a half by two metres) and large enough only for two bunks and a little storage space. Some of the more senior officers had their own cabin and were also able to take servants with them, which produced the expected envy from those who were not. This sentiment was echoed by the surgeon John White, who had not yet left for Plymouth when he learned that the chaplain Richard Johnson had been given approval to take his servant. Sitting in the Hungerford Coffee House on The Strand, he wrote directly to Evan Nepean to plead his own case: Sir, Finding that the Revd. Mr. Johnson is to be allowed the privilege of taking with him to Botany Bay a servant, I hope it will not be deemed unreasonable or improper if I solicit a like indulgence. Being … without a servant, my situation must be truly uncomfortable … you … must know and admit the inconveniences I shall be subject to, not only on the passage, but after landing without one … I have apply'd to Captain Phillip, who has no objection. While at sea, the officers ate and drank better than anyone else. The captain could mess with other officers or eat alone and would sometimes keep his own table or invite other officers to join him to be served by his own servants. The other officers would be served their meals at a dining table in a wardroom and would drink port and other wines. Their diet would be more varied and regularly supplemented by the slaughter of a chicken, a pig or some other animal on board, and the officers were usually far less likely to contract scurvy than the ordinary sailors. The marines and seamen would be lucky to have a bench on which to sit while they ate and were fed a ration based on salted meat, dried peas, rice and 'hardtack' bread. The meat was either pork or beef that had been dried and salted and stored in barrels. The notorious hardtack bread, which was the basis of the seafarer's diet for several hundred years, was made from wheat or barley and was baked brick hard and devoid of moisture, like a biscuit. Normal bread would only be edible for about a week if stored in cool and dry conditions and even less if it was damp or hot. Hardtack bread could last practically indefinitely but was less palatable, very hard to chew and often infested with weevils. The men would also have some of the fruit or vegetables that had been loaded aboard at the last port of call, until they ran out, and were entitled to a daily grog ration that was invariably half a pint of foul-tasting rum. The officers' clothes also differentiated them from everyone else on the ships, their uniforms being colourful and absurdly impractical. The dress coat was full skirted with very deep cuffs and had much in common with the formal suits of the mid-eighteenth century, except that instead of silk or velvet it was made of hard-wearing wool that would have been extremely hot in the tropics. The outfit's one practicality was that it dramatically distanced those who gave the orders from those who carried them out. There were several hundred sailors on the First Fleet, although no exact number was ever recorded – they were all expected to return with their ships to England and were not part of the calculation of those who would form the colony in New South Wales. Most of the sailors were merchantmen who were contracted to work on the privately owned convict-transport ships. The rest were Royal Navy seamen who had volunteered, or had previously been pressed into service in wartime. Signing up enough sailors for the navy ships was not difficult because, as Lieutenant Philip Gidley King noted, 'a great number of seamen were at this time out of employ and the dockyard was constantly crowded with them'. Among those who signed up to sail on the flagship Sirius was the 25-year-old American Jacob Nagle. Nagle was born in 1762 in Pennsylvania into a German Presbyterian Reformist family that had migrated to America around 1750. In 1777, at 15 years old, he joined his father in the American War of Independence in fighting against the British. Nagle recalls seeing General George Washington, who 'came riding up to the Colonel Procter with his life guards with him and enquired how we came on' in September that year during the Battle of Brandywine. After three years with the armies of George Washington the young Jacob Nagle joined the American navy and later transferred to the privateers, which were the privately owned American ships that were encouraged to sink and pirate any ships in British colours. In November 1781 he was captured by the ships HMS Royal Oak and HMS La Nymphe and pressed into service in the Royal Navy with sixteen other American sailors. He was later to be rescued from the island of St Kitts by the French, who were American allies, but subsequently recaptured by the British. It was here in the Caribbean that his involvement on the American side of the war ended and a twenty-year career with the British Navy began. With the announcement of the end of the War of Independence in April 1783 plans were made for the English to return home. The Royal Navy ship Prudent arrived in Portsmouth with Nagle aboard several months later. After being paid off, Nagle tried to get home to America and, with a fellow crew member, took a stagecoach to London. Things there, however, did not go according to plan: By this time London was full of sailors. The men of war being all paid off, and the American ships were gone full of passengers from London and no possibility of getting work, or a ship, and what few did get work for a shilling a day. Our money getting short, we begin to look out for a ship of any kind. The ship Sippio, man of war, was then shipping men for different stations laying in the river abreast Woolwich. We went down and shipped on board … We sailed for Spithead. Nagle was to transfer to the HMS Ganges in Portsmouth, on which he would sail for the next three and a half years, largely transporting British soldiers to different ports before jumping at the opportunity of joining the First Fleet: I was now near four years on the Ganges and often applied to the captain for my discharge, but could not get it, when the Sirius, twenty-eight-gun freighter came round the Downs to Spithead commanded by Captain Hunter and Governor Phillip bound for Botany Bay with a fleet of eleven sail of transports, the Supply brig as a tender, full of men and women convicts and soldiers, with provisions and stores. The Governor having the privilege of taking any men that turned out from the men of war, there was a great number turned out, but the captain took his pick, all young men that were called seamen. A hundred and sixty in number, no boys and no women allowed. Seven of us volunteered out of the Ganges … I was put into the Governor's barge. He was lucky enough to be assigned to Phillip's boat crew and over the next few years would spend a lot of time close to Phillip and other officers. He said that he kept a journal at the time but it was lost, possibly with the sinking of the Sirius off Norfolk Island a few years later. Nagle returned to England in 1792 and eventually went back to America, where, years later, around 1822, he wrote his memoirs, The Nagle Journal. Despite being barely able to write 'behind the façade of misspelling, meaningless commas and semi colons, questionable capitalizations and never ending sentences', it is a fascinating eyewitness account of the settlement of Australia. Most of the sailors aboard the First Fleet had more normal lives. They and the customs and practices they followed were very typical of their times. Most eighteenth-century seamen would have first gone to sea as boys, commonly between the ages of ten and 12, beginning work both on deck and on the rigging, where nimbleness was required. By the age of about 16 most had matured and become able to work aloft, reef sails, knot and splice ropes and steer the ship. At the same time their bodies took on the characteristic broad-shouldered, barrel-chested physique – the result of heavy hauling and lifting and often being bent double over the yards – while the constant roll of the ship gave them a 'peculiar rolling gait'. At sea the sailors would normally be divided into watches, usually two, which shared the work, and into messes of eight to ten individuals for catering. Each mess was a self-assembled group of like-minded men, usually with the same skills and rank. They shared the domestic chores of preparing food, collecting cooked dishes and washing up. These small groups formed the core of shipboard life and were the basis of effective teamwork, working together in key areas, perhaps in the rigging or as a gun crew. They had no personal space on the ship and would sleep, usually in hammocks, in a common area below decks that had little space for private effects and no provision for washing or relieving themselves, which was always done up on deck. Most sailors worked at sea for a decade or two before settling down and working on shore or in coastal seafaring. Some remained at sea for as long as they were physically able, often moving into more skilled work as a master, responsible for the navigation of the ship. The clothes worn by the ordinary sailors aboard ship were completely practical. At work they wore long trousers that could be rolled up, short-waisted jackets that kept the body warm and, in colder weather, heavy knitted pullovers. These clothes were either supplied by the ship or made from raw materials that the men purchased on board. Most worked barefoot, for extra grip on the ropes while aloft. By the time of the First Fleet, at the end of the eighteenth century, many of the sailors would have been tattooed. The tattoo had become popular with European seamen after they were introduced to it by Polynesian societies in the south Pacific. It is widely believed that the practice was first taken up by the seamen of Cook's voyages from 1768 to 1770. A number of the crew thought a tattoo would be the perfect souvenir to bring back from their exotic experience. It is said that Joseph Banks had his discreetly applied to his buttocks, while the majority of sailors were more interested in having theirs on display. Discipline aboard ship in the eighteenth century was enforced with fairly brutal beatings. There was little point imprisoning men on the ships, so offenders were typically flogged then forced to return to work as soon as they were physically able. The whip was usually a cat-o'-nine-tails, which had nine leather strands, each with metal studs that would tear the flesh from the back of the person being punished. The rest of the crew were assembled on deck and forced to witness the punishment as 'the theatre of example', with marines drawn up with loaded muskets between sailors and officers. Sometimes the punishment would be suspended on the advice of the surgeon if the person being flogged became unconscious or was thought to be at risk of dying while tied to the flogging board. The two hundred and fifty marines who were to maintain order during the voyage of the First Fleet and provide security for the settlement once they reached Botany Bay were largely from a similar lower class background to the convicts and seamen and were similarly poor and uneducated. They were also disciplined severely – in fact they were flogged more frequently for breaches of rules than were the convicts, which was to become one of a number of sources of resentment when the marines reached New South Wales. The marines were a big influence on the shaping of early Australia. In the absence of free settlers in the first years of the new colony many of the marines – and particularly marine officers – would become its principal farmers and merchants. Within a few years they monopolised most of the economic activity in New South Wales. Most of the marines were single when they signed up with the First Fleet, but this did not mean, as we have seen, that all of those who were married were permitted to take their wives and children with them. Ralph Clark was just one of the marines who were devastated at having to leave their families behind: May the 13th, 1787. Five o'clock in the morning. The Sirius made the signal for the whole fleet to get under way. O gracious God send that we may put in at Plymouth or Torquay on our way down the channel that I may see our dear and affectionate Alicia and our sweet son before I leave them for this long absence. O Almighty God hear my prayer and grant me this request. Twenty-seven-year-old Clark was from a humble background in Edinburgh, where his father had been a gentleman's servant. Ralph had joined the marines as a 17-year-old and volunteered for the expedition to Botany Bay because he was ambitious for promotion. Three years before the departure of the fleet Clark had married Betsy Alicia Trevan from Devon, and their son, Ralph Stuart, was born the following year. Clark was to keep a highly personal and intimate diary in which he mourns the separation from his 'beloved Betsy' and 'my sweet boy'. When he reached New South Wales, he was promoted to acting lieutenant on the death of the marine captain O'Shea. After two years he was sent to the settlement on Norfolk Island with the marine commander Major Robert Ross and other marines. While he was in Sydney, he lived for a while with a convict woman, who bore him a son. Clark was to return home to England in June 1792 with most of the other marines who had sailed with the First Fleet. Tragically, within two years, Clark, his wife and his son would all die. Early in 1794 his wife died after giving birth to a stillborn daughter. In June Clark died of yellow fever on a naval ship in the West Indies, and his son, who was a young midshipman on the same ship, died of the same disease ten days later. While the loading of the fleet stretched on from January through to May, Phillip returned to London and did not join the fleet again until days before it set sail. While in London, he was regularly appraised of preparations in Portsmouth. In April he was to complain that a hundred and nine female convicts had been loaded onto the Lady Penrhyn when there should have been only a hundred and two. It was one of many occasions when Phillip was to show his frustration with the organisation of the venture. At one stage he protested that the amount of ammunition ordered for the marines' muskets was 'very insufficient', and earlier he had demanded to know why the advance wages to which the staff were entitled had not been paid, because they were 'much distressed' and needed the money to fit themselves out for the voyage. In March 1787 an exasperated Phillip wrote to Lord Sydney to warn him that many marines and convicts would die because of inadequate provisions being made for the journey: I fear, my Lord, that it may be said hereafter the officer who took charge of the expedition should have known that it was more than probable he lost half the garrison and convicts, crowded and victualised in such a manner for so long a voyage. Over the next weeks there was further correspondence between Phillip and the government before Lord Sydney replied directly to Phillip at the end of April, only a few weeks before the fleet departed. Sydney reassured Phillip 'that any supplies which it may be necessary to provide for the maintenance during the voyage will be obtained and paid for'. He added that should the fleet find itself short of supplies, it would have the authority to purchase what it needed at ports 'where the convoy may touch' during the voyage. By staying and working in London, Arthur Phillip was able to liaise directly with Evan Nepean, who, as the deputy to Lord Sydney in the Home Office, was the most important single figure in the organisation of the venture. Nepean was a key figure not only in organising the First Fleet but also in the administration of the new colony in New South Wales in its early years, and was a useful ally for Phillip. As the day of their departure drew nearer, many of the crew and the convicts said their goodbyes, wrote their wills and otherwise put their affairs in order. Major Robert Ross, who had been an active soldier for more than twenty-nine years, wrote to Evan Nepean pleading for his wife and children to be taken care of if he did not survive the venture: You know my daily pay to be the whole of the fortune I am possessed of … My only view in mentioning the situation in which cruel necessity compels Mrs Ross and my young family is, that in case of any accident should deprive them of their all, in depriving them of me, you will then permit me to hope that your friendly assistance and interest shall be employ'd in endeavouring to procure for the widow and fatherless some compensation from the public … Could I but be assured that Mrs Ross and the little ones would have your friendship to plead their cause in support of their claim, my oppress'd mind would then be reliev'd in some measure from a weighty load of the care and anxiety. When Phillip returned to Portsmouth a week before the fleet was to leave, all of his colleagues were already aboard, including the colony's judge, David Collins, who was to sail with Phillip on the Sirius. The 31-year-old Collins was born in Ireland and came from a fairly well-established family. His grandfather, Abel Roper, had written the first edition of Collins' Peerage in 1709 and his father was a marine officer who attained the rank of major-general. In 1770 young David joined his father's division as a 14-year-old ensign and became a second-lieutenant a year later. In 1775 he was fighting the Americans in the War of Independence and, like Major Robert Ross, was at the battle of Bunker Hill. The following year he was stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and, now 20 years old and a full lieutenant, married Maria Stuart, the daughter of a British officer. In 1781, back in England with the rank of captain, he joined the Courageux in the Channel squadron. In 1783 he was retired on half-pay. Like a number of his fellow officers Collins volunteered most probably because he was bored with being retired on the half-pay that had come with peacetime. It is also believed that his father encouraged him to seek the job as judge advocate even though he had no formal legal training. Unlike those officials who would take their wives with them, David Collins left his wife in England. He would not return for another ten years, and when he did he found his wife ill. However, Maria recovered sufficiently to help her husband publish his journal in England in 1802, and two years later Collins left his wife again to take up the position of lieutenant-governor in New South Wales, with the responsibility of establishing a new settlement in Port Phillip Bay, near present-day Melbourne. Collins found the new site deficient in water and timber and successfully applied to move his entire settlement to Hobart Town on the Derwent River in Tasmania. He was never to see Maria again. He had one child with her, a daughter who died in infancy, but fathered four other children in Sydney and in Hobart. Like many of his fellow officers Collins was to live with convict women. In Sydney he lived with Nancy Yates and had a son and daughter with her. She had sailed as a 19-year-old on the Lady Penrhyn in the First Fleet after being convicted in the York court in 1785 for stealing printed cotton worth five pounds. She had been sentenced to be hanged but reprieved and transported for seven years. Later, in Hobart, Collins lived with 16-year-old Margaret Eddington, the daughter of a convict couple, and had two children with her in 1808 and 1809. Collins died suddenly in Hobart in March 1810, three weeks after his 54th birthday. According to Maria her husband died insolvent, leaving her with only thirty-six pounds a year, the pension of a captain's widow. She repeatedly appealed to the Colonial Office, and she was eventually granted an allowance of one hundred and twenty pounds a year, retrospective to January 1812, in consideration of her husband's services in superintending the commencement of the settlement at Hobart Town. She died in Plymouth on 13 April 1830. Back in Portsmouth at the end of April 1787 the fleet was ready to sail, but first it had to confront a series of last-minute problems. With less than a week to go the marines discovered they would not be issued with a grog ration once they arrived at the new settlement. In a protest note to their officers they argued that the grog would be 'requisite for the preservation of life' in the new colony: We, the marines embarked on board the Scarborough, who have voluntarily entered on a dangerous expedition replete with numerous difficulties … now conceive ourselves sorely aggrieved by finding the intentions of the Government to make no allowance of spiritous liquor or wine after our arrival at the intended colony of New South Wales. Arthur Phillip had tried to warn the government the previous December that there would be 'much discontent' in the garrison if the marines were denied a grog ration. On 8 May, with the matter still unresolved, Phillip wrote again to Nepean, pleading the marines' case and repeating his warning that trouble would inevitably result if they were denied the grog: They all in general expected the usual allowance of wine or spirits … They have no market to go to, and I fear much discontent amongst the garrison. I wish such an allowance could be granted them; indeed I fear very disagreeable consequences if they have not the same allowance of spirits in the garrison as the marines and seamen are allowed on board the Sirius and they certainly were told they should be victualled in the same manner. Phillip sent his letter not knowing that the government had relented and that a letter of permission written by Lord Sydney three days beforehand was on its way. It was too late to procure the grog and load it in England before the fleet left, so Phillip was given approval to spend up to £200 buying the drink in either Tenerife or Rio de Janeiro. On Thursday 10 May Phillip's orders to set sail were defied by the sailors: The wind this morning coming round from the southeast, I made the signal and got under weigh, but the seamen on several of the transports refused to get their ships under sail … unless they were paid what wages were then due. Judge David Collins revealed the reason in his journal: On the Thursday following Phillip made the signal to prepare for sailing. But here a demur arose among the sailors on board the transports, who refused to proceed to sea unless they should be paid their wages up to the time of their departure alleging … they were in want of many articles necessary for so long a voyage. The officers of the fleet held different views about the strike. Phillip saw the seamen on the transports as the contractors' responsibility and was impatient to sail. Collins thought the demands of the men 'appeared reasonable', and Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, second in command on the Sirius, was also sympathetic: I think the seamen had a little reason on their side … They had been in the employ upwards of seven months, during which time they have received no pay except their river pay and one month's advance. John White was less charitable and recorded that he thought the men were drunk and that the trouble arose 'more from intoxication than from nautical causes'. The contractors would not pay the sailors, and the strike ended when Phillip ordered that those men not prepared to sail be put ashore and replaced with a number of naval seamen who were on the Hyaena. This Royal Navy ship had been ordered to escort the fleet for the first hundred leagues (about five hundred kilometres) of its voyage, out through the English Channel and into the Atlantic Ocean. The fleet was almost delayed again by the late delivery of bread by the contractors, but Phillip hastened its loading when he 'ordered it to be sent on board' on the night of Friday 11 May. Finally, on the night of Saturday 12 May, Phillip ordered that the fleet should prepare to leave early the next morning. At three o'clock on Sunday morning all the ships were ready. At four the signal was given from the Sirius, and by six the whole fleet was under sail. The total number of people in transit on these ships was now almost fifteen hundred, although accounts of the exact number are wide-ranging. Phillip's own return gives a total of seven hundred and seventy-eight convicts and thirteen children. There is no complete record of the number of ships' crew, which would likely have totalled over four hundred and would have included the navy officers who were to stay in New South Wales, as well as all of those who returned on the transports after the convicts and supplies were unloaded in the new colony. Phillip's biographer Mackaness says there were two hundred and ten naval seamen, two hundred and thirty-three merchant seamen and a total of two hundred and fifty-two officials – marines and marine officers – giving a grand total of one thousand four hundred and eighty-six. The First Fleet, heavily laden with passengers, supplies and equipment, was finally on its way.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

THE VOYAGE

I never met with a parcle of more discontent fellows in my life. They only want more provisions to give it to the damned whores the convict women of whom they are very fond since they broke through the bulk head and had connections with them. The First Fleet's initial progress was as faltering as its departure had been, as the sailors discovered that the ships were difficult to sail. The American seaman Jacob Nagle, aboard the Sirius, complained that the ship was 'so deep with stores, and having large buttocks, we could scarcely steer her until we got better acquainted with her'. As the fleet passed the Isle of Wight, Watkin Tench went below deck to register the mood of the convicts: By ten o'clock we had got clear of the Isle of White, at which time, having little pleasure in conversing with my own thoughts, I strolled down among the convicts, to observe their sentiments at this juncture. A very few excepted, their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land could not be wholly suppressed. By noon on the first day they passed the Needles, on the west of the Isle of Wight, heading to the port of Santa Cruz on Tenerife in the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands. This first leg of their journey would entail more than three weeks of sailing, covering almost two thousand kilometres to their southerly destination off the coast of north Africa. For the first three days of the run down the English Channel there was a rising swell and rain and 'great sea sickness', particularly among the convicts who had never been to sea before. On the second day they could see the Devon coast and on the third many boats off Falmouth harbour. They also saw many fishing boats out on the sea, and one, according to Arthur Bowes Smyth on the Lady Penrhyn, 'came alongside and all the hands in her were very drunk'. Later in the day they passed the lighthouse at Eddystone and the Lizard peninsula on the Cornish coast, which for many of the fleet would be the last they would ever see of England. This was the first time that all of the ships comprising the First Fleet had sailed together, so they had little idea of their comparable sailing ability. Shortly after starting the journey the officers 'had the mortification' to discover that two of the convict transport ships, the Lady Penrhyn and the Charlotte, sailed 'exceedingly bad', and the Charlotte fell so far behind that at the beginning it had to be towed by the navy escort, the Hyaena. These differences in speed and sailing ability were to create difficulties later on in the voyage and would cause Arthur Phillip to eventually split the fleet, taking the faster ships ahead and leaving the slower ones behind to follow as best they could. The first serious accident occurred after three days at sea. A marine corporal, Baker, lost his balance in the rough seas and accidentally fired off his musket. John White, who was on the Sirius at the time, witnessed the incident: Extraordinary as this incident may appear it is no less true … On laying the musquet down which he had just taken out of the arms chest Corporal Baker was wounded by it in the inner ankle of the right foot. The bones after being a good deal shattered, turned the ball, which taking another direction, had still force enough left to go through a harness-cask full of beef, at some distance, and after that to kill two geese that were on the other side of it. After a week, and when the ships were well out to sea, Phillip ordered 'to release from their irons' those convicts who were still fettered but sufficiently well behaved. Captain Tench recorded that the disposition of the convicts immediately improved, and Captain Hunter also noted that the additional freedom of the criminals would better their health as they could now 'wash and keep themselves clean'. The following day the navy agent John Shortland began to visit each of the transports to collect information about the convicts' 'trades and occupations' for Arthur Phillip, who was already planning the building of the settlement in New South Wales. Towards the end of the first week, as the convoy was still battling its way in heavy rain westward along the English Channel, the sailors on the contracted convict transport ship the Friendship went on strike, demanding an increase in their meat ration from one and a half pounds to two pounds a day. Lieutenant John Shortland came aboard from the Sirius and told the sailors there was not enough meat carried on the ships to increase the daily ration, but he did promise them an increase in their pay. It seems that the sailors wanted the extra food not for themselves but to pay the convict women for sex. While a prison wall had been built below decks in England to keep the convicts separated from the crew, the sailors had already broken through a hole in the barrier on the Friendship to reach the women. Ralph Clark kept a detailed diary of the voyage and was not impressed: I never met with a parcle of more discontent fellows in my life. They only want more provisions to give it to the damned whores the convict women of whom they are very fond since they broke through the bulk head and had connections with them. Having cleared the English Channel, the convoy turned southwards into the Atlantic Ocean, and the Hyaena, which had escorted the fleet for the first week, turned back towards Portsmouth. The Hyaena left the convoy some two hundred kilometres west of the Scilly Isles, as the seas were getting higher heading into the notoriously rough Bay of Biscay. The conditions made it difficult for Phillip to find out what was happening on the other ships before he wrote and sent his first report back with the returning Hyaena. He consequently sealed his letters unaware that on the Scarborough the captain was thwarting what he believed was a planned mutiny by the convicts. When Phillip learned of the planned uprising, he hastily penned a note, which he managed to get to the Hyaena before it was too far away: Since I sealed my letters I have received a report from the officers on board the Scarborough respecting the convicts, who it is said, have formed a scheme for taking possession of the ship. I have ordered the ringleaders on board the Sirius … I have no time to enter into particulars. The planned mutiny had apparently been plotted by two convicts on the Scarborough, Phillip Farrell and Thomas Griffiths. Before they could organise the support of other convicts, though, they were betrayed to the ship's officers. According to Captain Hunter's journal the men had planned to free other convicts, take control of the ship and quietly sail away from the rest of the fleet at night. Such a plan was feasible as both of the plotters were experienced sailors. Before being convicted and sentenced to seven years' transportation at the Old Bailey for stealing a one-shilling handkerchief, Phillip Farrell had been boatswain's mate on the navy ship HMS Goliath. Thomas Griffiths had been the master of a French privateer during the American War of Independence before being convicted of stealing cloth at a value of two pounds, also at the Old Bailey, and sentenced to seven years' transportation in 1784. Once the plot was uncovered, the two men were rowed over to the Sirius, flogged, put in irons and then sent to another of the transports, the Prince of Wales. The traitor who revealed their plan before it could be carried out was transferred to another of the convict ships for his own safety. Despite the high drama at the time Phillip was to say in a letter sent three weeks later from Tenerife that he did not think there was too serious a threat to the security of the Scarborough: In my letters by the Hyaena I mentioned the apprehensions the officers on board the Scarborough were under, and though I did not then think they had reason to be seriously alarmed. As some of the convicts had behaved very ill, two of the supposed ringleaders were ordered on board the Sirius, punished, then sent on board the Prince of Wales, where they still remain. About halfway to Tenerife the officers and men were to witness an incident that would give them a valuable insight into Arthur Phillip's thinking about the future of the New South Wales settlement. It occurred when the duty officer on the Sirius, Sergeant Maxwell, ordered the flogging of two seamen who were not on deck during their watch. Jacob Nagle described the incident in his journal: The Governor ordered every officer on board the ship to appear in the cabin, even the boatswain's mate and told them all if he knew any officer to strike a man on board, he would break him immediately he said, those men are all we have to depend upon, and if we abuse those men that we have to trust to the convicts will rise and massacre us all. Those men are our support and if they are ill treated they will all be dead before the voyage is half out and who is to bring us back again? When the fleet reached the Canary Islands – or the Madeira Isles, as they were then known to the English – on 2 June, a further eight convicts had died, in addition to those who had died before the fleet left Portsmouth. Five of the eight had died on the Alexander. One of the dead was Ishmael Colman, of whom John White recorded the following: 'worn out by lowness of spirits and debility, brought on by long and close confinement, Colman resigned his breath without a pang'. By now a total of twenty-one convicts had been lost on the Alexander, the unhealthiest ship in the fleet, to fever, pneumonia and dysentery, which included the sixteen convicts who had died on the ship while waiting to sail. However, the rate of fatalities on all ships began to fall after Tenerife, and John White was to observe that the convicts were generally in better health than before the fleet first set sail. At the time of the English fleet's arrival in Tenerife the Canary Islands had been under Spanish control for three hundred years, since becoming part of the Spanish Empire in the late fifteenth century. While Spain's influence as a world seafaring power had for a long time been on the wane, the port of Santa Cruz remained strategically important to Atlantic shipping. On arrival at the port the English fleet was met by the Spanish authorities, who inquired about its business. The next morning, as protocol dictated, Arthur Phillip sent his loyal deputy Lieutenant King to wait on the local Spanish governor, Marquis Branciforte, while everyone else stayed on the ships. When King attended the governor to announce the arrival of Phillip and the English fleet, he apologised for the Sirius's not saluting the fort in the customary way because there were too many stores packed on the deck of the flagship to allow it to fire its guns. As Hunter wrote in his journal, the next morning they received a very polite reply from the governor, signifying his sincere wishes that the island might be capable of supplying us with such articles as we were in want of, and his assurances that every refreshment the place afforded we should certainly have. The following day Governor Branciforte agreed to receive Phillip, who attended the palace with ten of his officer colleagues. It was Monday 4 June, when the English would normally have been celebrating the king's birthday, but the business of the fleet put paid to the normal celebrations, leading the marine commander Major Robert Ross to complain that insufficient respect was shown to the British monarch. The meeting with the Spanish governor went well, and John White, who attended the audience, gave the following account of him in his journal: He is rather above the middle size but cannot boast of much embonpoint; his countenance is animated; his deportment easy and graceful; and both his appearance and manners perfectly correspond with the idea universally entertained of the dignity of a grandee of Spain. This accomplished nobleman, as I have been informed, is not a Spaniard by birth, but a Sicilian; and descended from some of the princes of that island. Two days later Arthur Phillip and his party were treated to a lavish dinner at the governor's palace, where the extravagance amazed the English, who were accustomed to more restrained entertainment. King was to say, 'We were received and entertained with the liberality and elegance for which the Spaniards are so much distinguished.' The desserts made a particular impression on Watkin Tench, who was also at the dinner: The profusion of ices which appeared in the dessert I found surprising considering that we were enjoying them under a sun nearly vertical. But it seems the caverns of the Peak very far below the summit afford at all seasons ice in abundance. During the week the fleet was able to acquire some, but not all, of the supplies it needed. Tenerife's economy depended on being able to sell its fresh produce to the ships that called in on the next legs of their journeys. However, the English fleet was of an exceptional size and it is unlikely that the port had ever before been challenged to provide for so many people at once. The timing was also unfortunate, as the English arrived before much of the food they needed was ready for harvest. The vegetables that could be procured were, according to White, 'rather scanty, little besides onions being to be got; and still less of fruit, it being too early in the season'. Stocking up on fresh food, particularly fruit, was a vital protection against scurvy, and the fleet was able to take on board large quantities of figs and mulberries, which were then in season. This was accompanied by a temporary improvement to the standard of all rations. The marines were each given a daily ration of a pint of wine, instead of spirits, and a pound of fresh beef, rather than salted meat. They also received a pound of fresh bread and some fresh vegetables. The convicts were not given wine but received three-quarters of a pound of fresh meat and a pound of fresh bread or rice, as well as some fresh fruit and vegetables. The fleet also took aboard some wine but was to stock up further when reaching its next port of call, Rio de Janeiro. While the English had no choice but to purchase fresh meat from the Spanish colony, they baulked at the high price of local bread, so instead they drew on their own supply of dried hardtack biscuits. While in Tenerife, a number of officers took the opportunity to do some sightseeing. Captain Hunter of the Sirius describes how expatriate English merchants took him and a number of colleagues on a trip to the island's old capital, Laguna, some four miles' walk to the north side of Tenerife. On another day they went to the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi, where they witnessed a colourful procession followed by solemn worship. This prompted an indignant comment from the Anglican Richard Johnson that it was all 'superstition and idolatry'. When the officers went ashore to see the celebrations, all of the English sailors were kept on board their ships for fear that their usual drunken behaviour might disrupt the event and offend the locals. Jacob Nagle described in his journal an incident that occurred later during their stay. After rowing Governor Phillip ashore, he and other crew members went to a local inn and he had his pocket picked. It seems that Phillip had unexpectedly returned to his boat to be rowed back out to the Sirius and the other oarsmen made a run to get back on time, leaving Nagle to pay for the wine. Nagle said his purse suddenly disappeared as he was paying the bill and that the innkeeper then strip-searched an old woman beggar who was standing nearby and found his purse behind her neck. He was impressed by the 'dexterous hand in whipping it out of my pocket' and was relieved to have his money back. He was even more relieved that the 'Governor excused my not being at the boat' when he had wanted to be taken back to the ship. The fleet had intended staying in Tenerife only a few days but needed to stay a week because of how long it was taking to load fresh water onto the ships for the next leg of the journey. Captain Hunter noted that the water pipe to the port only allowed two small boats to fill their casks at the same time, which made supplying water to all eleven ships very protracted. On the night before the fleet was finally to leave, a convict on board the Alexander, John Powers, escaped. He managed to get up on deck, lower himself over the side into a small boat and row away. Powers first rowed over to a Dutch East Indiaman anchored in the harbour but his offer to sign up as a member of the crew was rejected. He then rowed to a nearby beach, where he intended to hide until the fleet left Tenerife. The next morning a search party of marines set out in search of him, as Hunter recorded in his journal: A little westward of the town they discovered the boat beating on the rocks and rowing in to pick her up they discovered the fellow concealing himself in the cliff of a rock, not having been able to get up the precipice. The officer presented a musket at him and threatened if he did not come down and get into the boat he would shoot him. The fellow complied rather than run the hazard of being shot and was taken on board, punished and put in irons until we got to sea, when he was liberated in the same manner as the rest. On 10 June the fleet left Santa Cruz and headed south for the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa – about fifteen hundred kilometres' sailing – where they planned to stop briefly for more fresh water and whatever fresh food could be purchased before heading across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro. Captain Hunter said that the main reason for wanting to stop at Port Praya Bay was to stock up on a fresh supply of vegetables, having not been able to procure them in Tenerife. The fleet reached Port Praya on the island of St Tiago on 19 June and had already dropped anchor when Phillip had misgivings and abandoned the stopover. Phillip said in a letter to Evan Nepean: I should have stopped for twenty-four hours at Port Praya but when off that port light airs of wind and a strong current making it probable some of the ships might not get in, I did not think it prudent to attempt it. He decided to head on with the supplies they already had, even though it would inevitably lead to water restrictions before they reached Rio de Janeiro. Over the next few weeks the fleet headed further south and occasionally passed other ships, including a Portuguese trader that fell in with the convoy for a week, a ship from the coast of Guinea bound for the West Indies and an English ship bound for the Falkland Islands. The high temperatures, humidity and heavy tropical rain would have distressed and confused the convicts, who would have been ignorant of geography and climate, and the threat to the health of those on the Charlotte became a particular concern to Surgeon John White: The weather became exceedingly dark, warm, and close, with heavy rain, a temperature of the atmosphere very common on approaching the equator, and very much to be dreaded, as the health is greatly endangered thereby. Every attention was therefore paid to the people on board the Charlotte, and every exertion used to keep her clean and wholesome between decks. My first care was to keep the men, as far as was consistent with the regular discharge of their duty, out of the rain; and I never suffered the convicts to come upon deck when it rained, as they had neither linen nor clothing sufficient to make themselves dry and comfortable after getting wet: a line of conduct which cannot be too strictly observed, and enforced, in those latitudes. Another hazard of these latitudes struck aboard the Prince of Wales, which suffered a plague of bugs. Lieutenant Ralph Clark recorded that his colleague Lieutenant William Faddy had to kill over a hundred of the insects in his small sleeping area before he was able to get any sleep. As they sailed over the equator and into the southern hemisphere, the ships' crews celebrated the 'crossing of the line'. In a traditional ceremony that paid homage to the god of the sea, Neptune, those sailors who were crossing the equator for the first time were compelled to be ritually ducked in water, lathered with tar, greased and shaved. At night the heat and humidity became insufferable, and it was decided to remove the hatches above the convict quarters to allow in some air. This was not without its consequences, however, as White recorded with distaste: In the evening it became calm, with distant peals of thunder, and the most vivid flashes of lightning I ever remember. The weather was now so immoderately hot that the female convicts, perfectly overcome by it, frequently fainted away; and these faintings generally terminated in fits. And yet, notwithstanding the enervating effects of the atmospheric heat, and the inconveniences they suffered from it, so predominant was the warmth of their constitutions, or the depravity of their hearts, that the hatches over the place where they were confined could not be suffered to lay off, during the night, without a promiscuous intercourse immediately taking place between them and the seamen and marines. The living conditions for the convicts at sea were appalling. Many had already spent years in cramped, overcrowded prisons and hulks in Britain and would now spend eight months locked up in even more congested quarters in the bowels of the transports. While the ships' officers and crews had opportunities to escape the ships and go ashore when the fleet was in port, the convicts were kept on board, and for much of this time they were locked up below deck. Because of the risk to security there were no portholes in the convicts' quarters, and the risk of fire meant the banning of candles below decks, which meant the convicts were always in the dark as well as lacking any fresh air. Rats, parasites, bedbugs, lice, fleas and cockroaches thrived on all the ships. Their bilges (the lowest part of the ship, into which all of its excess liquids tend to drain) became foul and the smell overwhelming to the convicts who were locked below decks. The convicts' exercise area in the open air at the front of the ships was only a few metres long, because all of the transports had a high wooden security wall with large metal spikes installed across the deck next to the mainmast to keep the prisoners well away from the quarterdeck and the rear of the ship. On the way to Rio de Janeiro the number of convicts who fell ill jumped dramatically. Reports of a large number of sick convicts on the transport Alexander brought John White across from the Sirius to investigate, upon which he found the following: The illness complained of was wholly occasioned by the bilge water which had by some means or other risen to so great a height that the panels of the cabin and the buttons on the clothes of the officers were turned nearly black by the noxious effluvia. When the hatches were taken off the stench was so powerful that it was scarcely possible to stand over them. White complained to Phillip, who, in turn, ordered the master of the Alexander, Duncan Sinclair, to pump out and regularly replace the bilge water. After this measure the surgeon recorded that the health of the convicts improved. The filth of the lower decks was made worse by the lack of regard of some of the convicts for hygienic behaviour. At one point in the tropics Margaret Hall on the Friendship was put in irons for 'shitting between decks' rather than off the poop deck, as was required. There is no surviving convict's account of the experience below decks on the First Fleet, but on a later convict ship the Irish political prisoner John Boyle O'Reilly was to write of the conditions: When the ship was becalmed in the tropics the suffering of the imprisoned wretches in the steaming and crowded hold was piteous to see. They were so packed that free movement was impossible. The best thing to do was to sit each on his or her berth, and suffer in patience. The air was stifling and oppressive. There was no draught through the barred hatches. The deck above them was blazing hot. The pitch dropped from the beams and burned their flesh as it fell. There was only one word spoken or thought – one yearning idea in every mind – water, cool water to slake the parching thirst. Two pints of water a day were served out to each convict – a quart of half putrid and blood warm liquid. It was a woeful sight to see the thirsty souls devour this allowance as soon as their hot hands seized the vessel. Day in and day out, the terrible calm held the ship, and the consuming heat sapped the lives of the pent up convicts. Hideous incidents filled the days and nights as the convict ship sailed southward with her burden of disease and death. The appalling conditions of the prisoners did nothing, however, to halt the prostitution and promiscuity involving the convict women and the crews. White describes the behaviour of the women as being 'so uncontrollable that neither shame (but of this they had long lost sight) nor the fear of punishment could deter them from making their way through the bulkheads to the apartments assigned to the seamen'. Ralph Clark was equally damning in his judgement of the convict women's sexual conduct on the voyage: 'I never could have thought there were so many abandoned wenches in England. They are ten thousand times worse than the men convicts and I am afraid that we will have a great deal more trouble with them.' Such was Clark's disgust that he looked forward to 21-year-old Sarah McCormick's illness giving those who had fornicated with her their just deserts: The doctor has been obliged to bleed her twice today and says that she will not live the night out – She is now quite speechless I am apt to think (God forgive) if it is not so, that she is eating up with the pox … She is one of them that went through the bulk head to the seamen – I hope she has given them some thing to remember her. Clark's low opinion of the convict women and his repeated declaration of love for his wife in his daily journal entries did not prevent him from striking up a relationship with 17-year-old Mary Branham, a convict on the Lady Penrhyn who would become his mistress in the new colony and mother his child. And this was after recording in his diary before reaching the Cape of Good Hope: Two of the convict women that went through the bulkhead to the seamen … have informed the doctor that they are with child … I hope the commodore will make the two seamen that are the fathers of the children marry them and make them stay in Botany Bay. Mary Branham was only 13 years old in 1784 when she was sentenced in the Old Bailey to transportation for seven years for stealing two petticoats, some clothing and some cloth that was worth a little more than two pounds. Clearly neither of the main punishments – flogging and chaining below decks for prolonged periods of time – was an effective deterrent. Under Arthur Phillip's influence discipline aboard ships was more lenient than severe – a policy that was not always enthusiastically endorsed by the governor's colleagues. Captain John Hunter, although a loyal deputy to Phillip, believed that the flogging of convicts Farrell and Griffiths for only twenty-four strokes and then releasing them from their chains shortly afterwards was too lenient a punishment for their planned mutiny on the Scarborough: 'This indulgence had no doubt left it more in the power of those who might be disposed to exert their ingenuity in so daring an attempt to carry their plan into execution with a greater probability of success.' When convicts became ill on the ships, there was not a great deal that could be done for them, and in most cases they were left until they got better or died. The best that most of them could hope for was a medicinal measure of rum. Unfortunately this almost always came hand in hand with the other common remedy of the time: bleeding. Draining blood from the patient was a widely used treatment for convict and non-convict patients alike. While the practice is now highly discredited and believed to have taken more lives than it saved, by the time of the First Fleet it had become a standard treatment for almost every ailment. The reasoning behind bleeding goes back to the fifth century BC, when ancient Greeks believed that many diseases were caused by an excess of 'humours' in the blood. Every surgeon on the First Fleet carried a range of instruments designed to puncture the flesh of the patient and suck out various quantities of blood. Convict deaths were an accepted part of the journey, and when anyone died there would usually be a burial at sea, which involved a simple funeral ceremony, the reading of prayers and the sliding of the deceased's body, weighted and wrapped in cloth, over the side of the ship. Most individual convict deaths were not worthy of any special mention, but there were a number of records involving the death of small children. Ralph Clark was moved to record how a small child of a convict died in the middle of the night and was buried at sea the next morning: The doctor was called up to see one of the convict womens children which was very ill and had been almost ever since it had been on board. It departs at two o'clock this morning, poor thing. It is much better out of this world than in it … At half after nine committed the body of Thomas Mason to the deep. Henry Lovall, one of the convicts read prayers over it. One of the convicts was lost when he fell overboard on the Alexander and drowned. He had apparently fallen into the seas in a high wind. The Alexander quickly lowered a boat and the Supply doubled back to aid the search, but there was a squall and a high swell and he couldn't be found. Also, on the Prince of Wales, the convict Jane Bonner fell and crushed her spine and died six days later. The crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from Tenerife to Rio de Janeiro with less fresh water and fresh supplies than they had planned took almost two months. As a precaution the water ration was cut to three pints per day for everyone a month after the fleet left Santa Cruz (which, although difficult for those on the First Fleet to adjust to, was still more than those on the Second Fleet would receive). The decision was made after Phillip called all the masters of the fleet's ships to the Sirius to assess how much water was left and how much was being used. With the new ration came the stipulation that the water could only be used for personal consumption, and washing and laundry had to be done with seawater. Two weeks after the imposition of water restrictions, and with a strong south-westerly wind pushing the fleet along at good speed, Phillip agreed to lift the water ration from three pints to two quarts per day. By the end of July, only about eight hundred kilometres and a week's sailing away from Rio de Janeiro, many of the ships began to run short of food, and the last goose was killed and eaten by the officers on the Lady Penrhyn. The ships' crews supplemented their diet with the flying fish that landed on the decks of the ships, along with fish that they caught more conventionally. Throughout this long leg of the voyage Phillip continued to have difficulty keeping the fleet together, given the differences in sailing speed of the different vessels. The fastest was the Supply, which not only helped the Alexander in its search for the man overboard but also spent much of the time turning to escort the slower ships. The slowest continued to be the Lady Penrhyn, which constantly struggled to keep up with the others. Eventually the Supply, which was again sailing ahead of the rest of the fleet, signalled it had sighted land on 2 August. Before the fleet reached Rio de Janeiro, the wind died away, and it would take another four days to reach the harbour. In these conditions it passed a number of ships from a variety of countries, including a ship from Guinea with slaves who were 'of a strong and robust appearance' and formed 'an extensive article of commerce'. Rio de Janeiro, or St Sebastian as it was then more commonly named, was a vital part of the Portuguese network of strategically positioned ports that linked up its trading empire, which dated back to the early sixteenth century. At the time of the First Fleet's arrival Rio was a thriving port, even though the Portuguese Empire, like the Spanish, had been in decline for more than a hundred years, while Britain was only beginning to build hers. Portugal possessed the earliest and the longest-lived modern European empire, spanning nearly six hundred years from the early fifteenth to the twentieth century. The Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and a decade later Vasco da Gama reached India. In 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral landed in South America, which would lead to the establishment of Brazil. Throughout the 1500s Portugal established a network of ports from Lisbon to Japan, including Goa in south-west India, Mozambique and Angola in Africa, Malacca in southern Malaya, Macao in China, Ormus in the Persian Gulf and Nagasaki in Japan. Rio de Janeiro, with an estimated population of forty thousand, was rich in its own right and exported gold, sugar, rice and rum. Its fine harbour, strategically placed on the east coast of South America, was on the trade-wind route to not only the Americas but also Asia. Arthur Phillip later explained why he favoured the apparently odd route of travelling to the southern tip of Africa via South America: It may appear perhaps, on a slight consideration, rather extraordinary, that vessels bound to the Cape of Good Hope should find it expedient to touch at a harbour of South America. To run across the Atlantic, and take as part of their course, that coast the very existence of which was unknown to the first navigators of these seas, seems a very circuitous method of performing the voyage. A little examination will remove this apparent difficulty. The calms so frequent on the African side, are of themselves a sufficient cause to induce a navigator to keep a very westerly course: and even the islands at which it is so often convenient to touch will carry him within a few degrees of the South American coast. Indeed, when the First Fleet eventually reached the Cape of Good Hope, it would encounter an American ship in Table Bay bound for India that had taken longer to sail directly from the Canary Islands than it had taken in sailing via Rio de Janeiro. On arrival in Rio de Janeiro it was again Lieutenant Philip Gidley King who was sent ahead into the port to announce to the Portuguese governor the arrival of the fleet. All eleven ships sailed into Rio in relatively good shape, considering they had been travelling for three months and had last taken aboard fresh food and water two months earlier in Tenerife. However, by the time the fleet was anchored in the harbour between twenty and thirty convicts had come down with the expedition's first outbreak of scurvy. By the eighteenth century disease – and, most prominently, scurvy – was the largest killer of seafarers, responsible for about fifty per cent of all deaths at sea. (Accidents, largely involving falling from the rigging onto the deck or into the sea, accounted for about thirty per cent; shipwrecks, fire and explosions accounted for about ten per cent; and the remainder were due to fighting enemies at sea.) It would take the European seafaring powers almost two hundred and fifty years from the first voyages of discovery in the early fifteenth century to find for themselves the simple remedy to this terrible disease, which caused livid spots to appear all over the body, bleeding from every orifice, the loss of teeth, depression and death. Until the mid-eighteenth century long sea journeys had come at great human cost, and phenomenally high levels of fatalities were accepted as inevitable until it was learned that the disease could be largely avoided with a regular intake of fresh food, particularly fruit and vegetables (although, of course, there was no understanding back then of the reason for this: their vitamin C content). By the time of his great voyages of exploration in the 1760s and 1770s Captain James Cook had successfully controlled the disease, and nearly twenty years later the lessons were well known to Captain Phillip and the surgeons of the First Fleet. The arrival of the ships in port allowed the scorbutic convicts to be treated with a fresh-food diet, while the others were in a condition that delighted the fleet's officers. Captain John Hunter was to boast that the general health of the fifteen hundred confined to the small ships of the fleet was probably better than to be found in any English town with a similar population. Arthur Phillip was to report back to England from Rio de Janeiro that the good health of the convicts was also due to the policy of getting them out regularly onto the decks both during the day and at night. During their stay in the port John White would regularly row around the different transports in the harbour to check the condition of the convicts, while the fleet chaplain Reverend Richard Johnson attended to their spiritual needs by going around to conduct church services on the decks of the ships on Sundays. The stopover also allowed repairs to the ships, particularly to the Sirius, which was found to be leaking badly. As Phillip was to report to the Admiralty from Rio de Janeiro in a letter that would be carried on the next ship leaving for England, both the top, or spar, deck and the gun deck of the ship were leaking badly and the seams between the decking needed to be refilled, or 'caulked'. The English were especially welcomed in Rio de Janeiro on this occasion as Arthur Phillip was well known and highly regarded by the Portuguese due to his service in the Portuguese navy during the war with Spain. He had also formed a friendship with the governor, Don Luis de Varconcellos, having met him on an earlier visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1783 when Phillip had arrived on the sixty-four-gun Royal Navy ship Europe. While guests of the Portuguese, Phillip and his officers were extended every courtesy – which on occasion was taken to excessive lengths. Whenever Arthur Phillip was ashore, he was attended by palace guards, who would parade at the wharf steps and escort him and his party around the city. Jacob Nagle, one of the rowers on Phillip's barge, recorded Phillip's embarrassment at this: The Governor often landed in different parts of the town, round about the skirts, because he did not wish to trouble the guards, but land where we would, we could see the soldiers running to wherever we landed and parade under an arrest for him. As part of their hospitality the Portuguese permitted the English to pitch a tent on the little island of Enchandos, about two kilometres further up the river from the anchored fleet, to use as Phillip's land office while they were in port. They also allowed Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer, to unload his scientific equipment and use the island for experiments, which included measuring and calculating the time. The 25-year-old Dawes was a lieutenant in the marines, but his great passion was science and astronomy, and he was to make a big contribution to New South Wales as a surveyor and in planning the layout of the new settlement. He was later to fall out with Governor Arthur Phillip, whom he believed did not support scientific discovery. Dawes had joined the marines as a 17-year-old second-lieutenant on 2 September 1779, and in September 1781 as a 19-year-old was wounded in action against the French off Chesapeake Bay during the American War of Independence. When he volunteered for service with the First Fleet to New South Wales, he was known as a competent astronomer, and on the recommendation of the astronomer royal, Reverend Dr Nevil Maskelyne, he was supplied with instruments and books for an observatory by the Board of Longitude. Dawes was asked especially to watch for a comet expected to be seen in the southern hemisphere in 1788. The convicts were held on the ships, locked below decks in the sweltering heat, but the crew were able to enjoy some shore leave. A number of them were to record their visits and the exotic birds, butterflies, insects and other wildlife they saw, as well as the colourful markets and coffee houses where 'they had coffee in great plenty, sweetmeats and a great variety of rich cakes'. The marines spent most of their time on the ships but were permitted occasional shore leave if they acquired a special pass. While in Rio harbour, a number of them were punished for sexual relations with the convict women. Cornelius Connell, a private in the marines, was given a hundred lashes after he was caught having sex with some female convicts, and Thomas Jones was caught trying to bribe one of the sentries to let him get below decks and among the women. Two other privates, John Jones and James Riley, were charged with similar offences but acquitted for want of evidence. The English officers were again struck by the colour and the splendour of the Roman Catholic church services. Being from Protestant backgrounds, they were accustomed to more subdued worship, in grey churches with little decoration or pomp. A number of them witnessed the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption and were amazed at what they saw, including the Lady Penrhyn surgeon Bowes Smyth: The church was decorated in a most superb manner, there was a band of music playing in the church yard … The ladies who appeared publicly at the windows and in the procession were elegantly dressed resembling actresses at a puppet show in Bartholomew Fair … At night there was a grand display of fireworks off the top of one of the churches. John White described the well-dressed citizens and how the churches were decorated with flowers and 'most brilliantly illuminated'. The 'multitudes' paraded, prayed, sang hymns and bought coloured beads from hawkers, and the throng 'jostled' to gain admission to the churches to fall on their knees and 'pray with fervour'. But he was shocked at the number of well-dressed women in the crowd who were 'unattended' and who, after dark, would 'bestow their favours' on strangers as well as acquaintances. He also described how the well-to-do were carried about the city. In earlier times they had been conveyed in 'elegant cotton hammocks' adroitly made by the native Indians, but they had been replaced by a fashion for sedan chairs: not as good as those in London but able to be carried 'at a great rate … borne on the shoulders of two slaves'. Bowes Smyth noted how he and many of the English officers in Rio had lost their fitness, such that previously easily accomplished physical exertions now took their toll: 'Being very much fatigued with my long walk yesterday I remained on board all this day: nor is it to be wondered at that I should be a good deal tired having been without any exercise for nine weeks.' While the officers only recorded the more reputable pursuits, Jacob Nagle was to later write more honestly about the typical behaviour of sailors, when he was attacked after picking up a prostitute in a local bar. Nagle and his companion were granted shore leave and had a sergeant for protection who did not want to walk the city streets but wanted to sit 'in the punch houses all day'. After Nagle left the tavern with a woman he had picked up for the night, a man followed and was about to attack him with a sword, when luckily a soldier arrived on the scene in the nick of time: One evening two of us got in to a grog shop … and a very handsome young woman being there who was very familiar with me and asked me home with her. I accepted the offer and had walked one square, arm in arm … up came a Portuguese with a great cloak on and pushed me away from her … He drew back and drew his sword and was raising his sword over his head to make a cut at my head. At that instant a soldier turned the corner … drew his sword and guarded the blow he was going to make at me. Another soldier … abused him and threatened to cut him down for meddling with me, but the fellow begged their pardons and said I had taken his wife from him. The soldiers sent him and her about their business and told me she was a poota, which is a whore. I thought I was well off to be clear of them. Criminal ingenuity also continued at every opportunity. When the fleet came in to any port, little bumboats would pull alongside and sell food and other wares to the crew. In Rio de Janeiro some convicts were buying food from them using counterfeit money. The coins had been very well constructed by Thomas Barrett on the transport Charlotte, with the help of other convicts. They were coined from old buckles, buttons from the marines and pewter spoons during the long voyage from Tenerife. John White recorded that the fake currency was almost good enough to be passed off as the real thing: The impression, milling, character, in a word, the whole was so perfectly executed that had the metal been a little better fraud, I am convinced, would have passed undetected … The adroitness … gave me a high opinion of their ingenuity, cunning, caution and address; and I could not help wishing that these qualities had been employed to more laudable purposes. Thomas Barrett had already been twice condemned to execution and twice committed to transportation. He would eventually be the first convict to be hanged in New South Wales. The fleet stayed almost a month in Rio, where its officers were able to purchase plenty of fresh food, particularly oranges, to supply to all the crew and convicts. The oranges were so abundant that it was possible for everyone to be fed several each day. Captain Hunter said that there were so many oranges in season that some of the boats passing the transports would throw 'a shower of oranges' onto the decks. John White wrote, 'the commissary supplied the troops and convicts with rice (in lieu of bread), with fresh beef, vegetables, and oranges, which soon removed every symptom of the scurvy prevalent among them.' Before leaving, the fleet also loaded many plants and seeds for planting in Botany Bay, including coffee, cocoa, cotton, banana, orange, lemon, guava, tamarind, prickly pear and eugina or pomme rose, 'a plant bearing fruit in shape like an apple and having the flavour and odour of a rose'. However, the biggest purchase while the fleet was in Rio was a hundred and fifteen pipes (sixty-five thousand litres) of rum for the remainder of the voyage and for the first three years of the new settlement, which no doubt would have been a great relief to the marines, who had earlier feared there would be no rum ration in the new colony. The local rum was produced from aquadente, a byproduct of sugar cane. Such a huge surge in demand sent the local retail price of rum soaring by more than twenty-five per cent and forced the fleet to offset its costs by buying only half the planned amount of the spirit for medicinal purposes. The large intake of grog required the reorganisation of the cargo of the entire fleet: 'It has been necessary that the store ships might receive the spirits to move part of the provisions from them to the transports.' As things turned out, the rum was of poor quality and was to attract criticism when the settlers reached Sydney and had to drink it. Robert Ross was to say that 'in taste and smell it is extremely offensive', adding that his marines drank it only out of 'absolute necessity'. The fleet was also able to purchase some of the vital stores that had been missing when it left Portsmouth, including cloth for the women convicts' clothing and musket balls. A few days before departing Rio de Janeiro, Jane Scott, the wife of marine sergeant James Scott, gave birth to a baby daughter after a twenty-seven-hour labour on the Prince of Wales. Baby Elizabeth Scott was to be one of the nine girls and twelve boys born on the ships of the First Fleet. She was more fortunate than the fourteen children born to the convict women, who would have been wrapped in torn-up adult clothing as there were no provisions made for convict babies when the ships were prepared in Portsmouth. This was in spite of the fact that many of the women were obviously pregnant before the ships set sail. The first child born to a convict was the daughter of Isabella Lawson, born less than three weeks out from Portsmouth on 31 May. Sergeant Scott, meanwhile, had little formal education but managed to keep a diary of the voyage and his three-year stay in Sydney. He and his wife were to have another child in the new colony, a son named William, who was born three years later on 4 June 1790. Scott and his little family left New South Wales to return home to England in October 1791 and arrived back at Portsmouth eight months later, in June 1792. Arthur Phillip was able to do a little spying before the fleet recommenced its journey, and he sent back to England information he had acquired about the Spanish military defence of Montevideo. The English were still technically at war with Spain at the time and had contemplated invading the Spanish port, which was some thousand kilometres to the south of Rio de Janeiro. In a letter sent secretly to the British Government before leaving the city, Phillip provided details of the two thousand two hundred Spanish soldiers that defended the north and south sides of the River Plate in the city of Montevideo, which was a larger force than previously thought. The stopover in Rio de Janeiro had been valuable in a wide array of ways.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

LEAVING CIVILISATION

It was natural to indulge at this moment a melancholy reflection which obtruded itself upon the mind. The land behind us was the abode of civilized people; that before was the residence of savages. When, if ever, we might again enjoy the commerce of the world, was doubtful and uncertain … All communication with families and friends now cut off, we were leaving the world behind us, to enter a state unknown. On 1 September, after almost a month in the port and, as White recorded, 'having now procured everything at Rio de Janeiro that we stood in need of, and thoroughly recovered and refreshed our people', the fleet was ready to continue its journey. Phillip was to spend the next two days writing lengthy reports to Lord Sydney and his deputy Evan Nepean, which would be sent back on the next ship leaving Rio for London. It would be the last opportunity for Phillip to communicate with England until the fleet reached the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa, which was more than six weeks away. A number of officers who were unable to continue on with the fleet were left behind to be put on the next available ship back to England. They included Micah Morton, the master of the Sirius, who had been badly injured when unmooring the ship in Santa Cruz harbour two months earlier. Two midshipmen were also sent home; one had been injured and the other was suffering from 'a venereal complaint which being long neglected is not likely to be cured at sea'. They were put on a British whaling ship that had called into Rio to repair leaks. On 4 September the fleet weighed anchor. As the convoy left to sail back across the Atlantic on the prevailing westerly wind to the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese on shore fired off a twenty-one-gun salute, which was answered by the Sirius. Such a salute was 'a very high and uncommon compliment', and an indication of the good relationship between the visiting English and the resident Portuguese. Four days after leaving Rio de Janeiro the convict Mary Bryant gave birth to a baby daughter and named her after the transport ship she was carried in, the Charlotte. Little Charlotte would later die of a fever in a small boat off the African coast following a daring and spectacular escape attempt by her mother and a number of other convicts. The winds picked up and the fleet made good progress thanks to a solid south-westerly. However, the high seas made many of the passengers seasick and battered the Lady Penrhyn, which was leaning so far with the wind that the sea ran into the portholes. By the middle of September the ships were finally moving into cooler latitudes. On 19 September another convict was lost overboard, this time from the Charlotte, as White described: William Brown a very well behaved convict, in bringing some clothing from the bowsprit end where he hung them out to dry, fell overboard. As soon as the alarm was given that a man was overboard, the ship was instantly hove to, and a boat hoisted out, but to no purpose. Lieutenant Ball of the Supply, a most active officer, knowing … that some accident must have happened bore down; but, notwithstanding every excursion, the poor fellow sank before either the Supply or our boat could reach him. The people on the forecastle, who saw him fall, say that the ship went directly over him, which … must make it impossible for him to keep on the surface long enough to be taken up. Towards the end of September the weather turned nasty and the fleet spent a week battling against a gale. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, aboard the Friendship, said the sea was so rough that those marines sleeping with the convict women were washed out of their beds. The Sirius was also labouring in the conditions and on inspection was found to have a number of serious problems below the waterline. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King complained that the ship should not have passed its inspection in England: For these days past and a rolling sea, the ship has laboured very much … A discovery has also been made which tends to prove … the extreme negligence of the Dock Yard officers in not giving the Sirius the inspection they certainly ought to have done … On inspection we found that not only were the top timbers rotten but also many of the futtocks were in the same condition. Only a month after the fleet left Rio de Janeiro, the stores of fresh food were once again exhausted, and rations consisted largely of salted meat. The officers were sometimes able to break the monotony of their diet; on one occasion a sheep was killed on the Lady Penrhyn and shared with the officers on the Alexander. On 6 October, a week before the fleet was due to arrive at the Cape of Good Hope, there was another attempted mutiny, this time on the convict transport the Alexander. The uprising was organised by the same John Powers who had escaped and been recaptured when the fleet was in Tenerife four months earlier. With the help of the seamen on the ship, Powers and a number of other convicts were armed with iron bars. They planned to take control of the ship by overpowering the marines shortly before they arrived at the Cape of Good Hope. Before the mutineers could rise up, they were betrayed to the master of the Alexander, Duncan Sinclair, who alerted his marines, strengthened the watch and locked all the convicts below decks. Powers was removed to the Sirius, where he was chained to the deck. The four seamen accused of assisting the insurgents were flogged and replaced by seamen from the Sirius, and the convict who had betrayed the plot was moved for his own protection to the Scarborough. The arrival at the Cape took longer than expected as the fleet was being blown away from the port. 'The wind is driving us farther to the southward than we want to go,' complained Lieutenant Ralph Clark. To bring the fleet back on course, Phillip ordered all the ships to stay close to the flagship Sirius. Finally, at daylight on Saturday 13 October the fleet sighted Lyons Head 'five leagues away' and with a fresh breeze soon saw the Cape of Good Hope ahead. By nightfall the fleet was anchored in Table Bay, where there were already more than twenty American, French, Danish, Portuguese, Dutch and English ships lying at anchor. The first European to discover the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz, sailed around the southern point of Africa in 1586. Diaz had originally called it the Cape of Storms, but the name was later changed by the Portuguese King John II to the Cape of Good Hope. Table Mountain was given its name by another Portuguese, Antonio da Saldania, some seventeen years later. The Cape was not regularly used until 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck was sent by the Dutch East India Company to establish a halfway station to provide fresh water, vegetables and meat for its trading ships travelling to and from the East Indies. At that time the Dutch were a major European trading power, with a network of ports at New Amsterdam (now New York), Suriname and Guyana in South America and Antilles in the Caribbean. The Dutch East India Company's biggest trading area was the Dutch East Indies, which covered a large area of current-day Indonesia, Malaysia and West Papua New Guinea. In the early nineteenth century Cape Town came under British control, but at the time the First Fleet arrived at the end of 1787, the port was there very much to serve Dutch maritime interests first and those of the British and other nations second. Arthur Phillip and his fleet were to find the hospitality in Cape Town very different from the treatment they had received in the Portuguese-controlled port of Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish port of Tenerife. The fleet stayed in the Cape for longer than it had planned. It had formally asked the Dutch governor for supplies and had to wait more than a week for a reply. While the crews and passengers waited, they had to make do with their own limited diet of ship's rations, supplemented by a small amount of fresh rations provided by the Dutch port authority. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King was once again the first sent ashore, this time to purchase food for the last long leg of the voyage to New South Wales. He hoped to buy eighty thousand pounds of flour, sixty bushels of wheat and eight hundred bushels of barley. However, he returned to say that the governor had told him that the colony was itself short of food and none could be spared for the English. The day after the fleet's arrival, Sunday 14 October, it was officially allowed to enter the port and Phillip, together with a number of officers, presented himself to Governor Van de Graf. A polite exchange led to more discussions about buying food. The governor told Phillip that they could purchase livestock and wine, but that there was a shortage of grain following recent disappointing harvests. In the following days Phillip took lodgings on shore and began to talk to local traders: As I found on inquiry that the last years crops had been very good, I requested by letter to the Governor and Council permission to purchase what provisions were wanted for the Sirius and Supply, as likewise corn for seed, and what was necessary for the livestock intended to be embarked at this place. To add to their troubles the harbour provided little shelter for the ships, which led Phillip to complain: This bay cannot be properly called a port, being by no means a station of security, it is exposed by all the violence of the winds, which set into it from the sea; and is far from sufficiently secured from those which blow from the land. The gusts, which descend from the summit of Table Mountain, are sufficient to force ships from their anchors … The storms from the sea are still more formidable; so much so that ships have frequently been driven by them from their anchorage and wrecked at the head of the Bay. Phillip's fellow officers were equally unimpressed and compared the Cape unfavourably to the exotic Rio de Janeiro. Bowes Smyth wrote that even the appearance of the shoreline was unappealing: There are many gallows and other implements of punishment erected along the shore and in front of the town. There were also wheels for breaking felons upon, several of which were at this time occupied by the mangled bodies of the unhappy wretches who suffered upon them: their right hands were cut off and fixed by a large nail to the side of the wheel, the wheel itself elevated upon a post about nine or ten feet high, upon which the body lies to perish. The city boasted a Calvinist church and a Lutheran church, and the impressive Dutch governor's house with its adjacent parklands reminded some of the English visitors of St James' Park in London. John White noted that the gardens were overlooked by a hospital, which was generally 'pretty full' when ships arrived after a long voyage. While the fleet waited in the harbour, many of the convicts and marines fell seriously ill with a putrid fever. White reported that the disease was worst on the Charlotte, where thirty were ill and a number expected to die. After a few days limited fresh food rations, including soft bread, beef, mutton and greens, started to arrive and were rowed out to the ships. All of the officers who could be spared were allowed on shore leave, where they could take lodgings and buy 'the comforts and refreshments to be enjoyed on land for the last and longest stage of their voyage'. Surgeon White made a number of typically stern observations about the women in the Cape: The habits and customs of the women of this place are extremely contrasted to those of the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro. Among the latter a great deal of reserve and modesty is apparent between the sexes in public. Those who are disposed to say tender and civil things to a lady must do it by stealth, or breathe their soft sighs through the latticework of a window, or the grates of a convent. But at the Cape, if you wish to be a favourite with the fair, as the custom is, you must in your own defence (if I may use the expression) grapple the lady, and paw her in a manner that does not partake in the least of gentleness. Such a rough and uncouth conduct, together with a kiss ravished now and then in the most public manner and situations, is not only pleasing to the fair one, but even to her parents, if present; and is considered by all parties as an act of the greatest gallantry and gaiety. In fact, the Dutch ladies here, from a peculiar gay turn, admit of liberties that may be thought reprehensible in England; but perhaps as seldom overstep the bounds of virtue as the women of other countries. White was also unimpressed with the local Dutch military: The Cape militia differ from the English in not receiving pay or wearing regimentals. In fact they should rather be called volunteers, who turn out for the protection of their own property, and are not subject to strict military discipline. Most of them wore blue coats, with white metal buttons, awkwardly long, and in the cut and shape of which uniformity had not been attended to. Neither was it visible in the other parts of their dress or accoutrements; some wore powder, others none, so that, upon the whole, they made a very unmilitary appearance. The officers are chosen annually from among themselves. Some of these, indeed, I observed to be very well dressed. Neglect, non-attendance, and every other breach of their military rules, is punished by fine or forfeiture, and not corporally. At this burlesque on the profession of a soldier, I could not help observing that many of them had either got intoxicated that morning or were not recovered from their overnight's debauch. The long wait for approval to purchase and load the supplies, with the convicts mostly locked below decks and most of the crew kept on board ship, began to grate on everyone's nerves. The convicts fought with each other and the marines were regularly drunk and disorderly. On 20 October a brawl between marines erupted aboard the Scarborough. Thomas Bullimore, one of those involved, would be murdered by other marines shortly after arriving in Sydney. Two days later a marine was flogged for stealing and fighting on the Alexander and another for insubordination on the Charlotte. The troubles did not end there. The second mate of the Friendship, Patrick Vallance, fell overboard while drunk: 'He had gone to the head to ease himself … and … although three men jumped overboard after him they could not save him, for soon after he sank and has not been seen since.' Although October is the second month of spring in the southern hemisphere, the weather was cold for much of the stay in Table Bay. High winds and rough seas threw the ships around, and for several days no supplies could be taken out to them as it was too dangerous to row to and from the shore. It was so rough that a boat belonging to the supply ship the Borrowdale came adrift and was blown out of the harbour towards Penguin Island. Another boat belonging to a Dutch East India ship anchored in the bay was overturned and two of its crew members drowned. Finally, after eight days, Phillip received the letter he had been waiting for from the Dutch governor, approving the purchase and loading of supplies that would allow the fleet to be on its way once again. The fleet immediately began to load up in earnest. All were aware that they needed to take with them everything they would need for survival in the new colony. Daniel Southwell, a midshipman on the Sirius, wrote home: It was a time of constant bustle as this being the last port we must take every advantage of it, for the leaving behind of many articles that are requisite and necessary would beyond here, be irreparable: and this therefore now keeps us constantly employed in getting the ships supplied with water and all the species of provision that are proper. During the next few weeks the fleet took on a large quantity of rice, wheat, barley and Indian corn, and a variety of seeds and plants, which included 'fig trees, bamboo, Spanish reed, sugar cane, vines of various sorts, quince, apple, pear, strawberry and oak, myrtle'. The loading of water and other supplies was a major task for ships coming in to port, but at least the facilities here were better designed than those at Tenerife and Rio de Janeiro. At the eastern end of the harbour there was a long wooden pier that had a number of cranes and water pipes running along it so that a number of scoots, or small boats, could load water at the same time. While still in Table Bay, the ships' carpenters constructed wooden stalls on the already congested decks of the Sirius and the transports, and more than five hundred animals were brought aboard, including cows, bulls, pigs, horses, ducks, chickens, sheep, goats and geese. The sight led one of the surgeons on the Sirius, George Worgan, to write to his brother in England, noting that each ship now looked like a 'Noah's Ark'. The animals were considered of the highest priority, and the women and some of the men convicts on the Friendship were moved to other ships to make way for thirty-five sheep. The decks of all the ships were now crowded with penned animals, whose urine and faeces would seep through the deck and onto the convicts below. As much as the fleet could possibly carry was loaded aboard. On the decks of the Sirius alone were six cows with calf, two bulls and a number of sheep, goats, pigs and chickens. In addition to the stock for the settlement a number of officers took what livestock they could on board – intended not only for the remainder of the passage but also for their private farms when they reached New South Wales. The ships also needed to be loaded with a large amount of fresh feed to keep the animals alive for the next two months. Unfortunately there was only a limited amount of space on the ships, and the hay feed would run out before the fleet reached Botany Bay, with many of the animals becoming emaciated and dying. Finally, on 13 November, 'with all people clear of scurvy', according to White, the fleet left the Cape. There was great relief at finally getting away from what had been too long a stay at a decidedly unpleasant port. Yet, as David Collins was to observe, the relief was mixed with anxiety, sadness and fear. Many felt as they headed away from the Cape that they were leaving behind all connections with the civilised world: It was natural to indulge at this moment a melancholy reflection which obtruded itself upon the mind. The land behind us was the abode of civilized people; that before was the residence of savages. When, if ever, we might again enjoy the commerce of the world, was doubtful and uncertain. … All communication with families and friends now cut off, we were leaving the world behind us, to enter a state unknown. The long haul to the east coast of Australia across the Great Southern Ocean would take more than two months and prove to be the most difficult leg yet. For the first five days after leaving the Cape the fleet made virtually no progress, as the ships were running into a fierce headwind. Even this early Phillip was concerned that with the delay they would run out of fresh water before reaching Botany Bay and decided to put everyone back onto the reduced allowance of three pints of water per day. Soon the livestock started to die. On 16 November Lieutenant Ralph Clark noted that chickens were dying on the Lady Penrhyn from disease every day; and then the Borrowdale came alongside and reported it too was losing a lot of chickens and other livestock. In the middle of November there was an epidemic of dysentery, first among the convicts and then spreading to the marines, prevailing with 'violence and obstinacy' until Christmas. No medication seemed to work, and the disease was only eventually eradicated by 'unremitting attention to cleanliness'. Despite the large number who were brought down with the dysentery over a six-week period, only one died, a marine private named Daniel Creswell, who experienced the 'most acute agonizing pain' ever seen by the chief surgeon John White. During the middle of the night on 24 November one of the seamen on the Prince of Wales fell from the topsail yard into the sea. It was so dark, and the ship was travelling so fast, that any attempt to rescue him seemed futile, and no search was launched. Only two weeks after leaving the Cape, Phillip decided to split the fleet and take the fastest ships ahead. His plan was to explore the coast of New South Wales around Botany Bay and decide on the best site for the new settlement before the others arrived. While the decision to split the fleet may have come as a surprise to his fellow officers, Phillip had planned it before leaving England, hoping to begin on the work of establishing the settlement. He may have suspected that Botany Bay might be a less than ideal site for settlement and that he would need a bit of time to explore other possible sites. Banks' journals would have been available to Phillip, the navy and the government, so Phillip may well have read his earlier, more negative comments concerning the bay as well as the fulsome recommendation he gave to the parliamentary committee. Over the next two days Phillip and some of his officers transferred from the flagship Sirius to the smaller, faster Supply and ordered that the three fastest transports, the Alexander, the Scarborough and the Friendship, leave the rest of the fleet and sail ahead with him. Expecting to reach New South Wales a few weeks earlier than the slower ships, he also took with him some convicts with gardening and carpentry skills who could help prepare the colony for the arrival of the others. Lieutenant Clark noted: Lieutenant Ball of the Supply came on board with orders from the commander and Major Ross and took away two convicts Thomas Yardsley, a gardener and Will Haynes, a cabinetmaker … The commodore means to take Scarborough and Alexander with him also and that is the reason that he is taking all the gardeners and carpenters that are in the fleet in the Supply, to have some houses and some ground turned over against the arrival at Botany Bay. According to Philip Gidley King, who was to transfer from the Sirius to sail ahead with the governor on the Supply, Phillip hoped to arrive sufficiently far ahead of the bulk of the fleet to be able to explore more than two hundred kilometres of coastline north of Botany Bay: The governor flatters himself that he shall arrive at the place of our destination (Botany Bay) a fortnight before the transports, in which time he will be able to make his observations on the place whether it is a proper spot for the settlement or not and in the later case he will then have time to examine Port Stephens before the arrival of the transports on the coast. Before leaving England, Phillip had been given permission to consider sites in New South Wales other than Botany Bay. He had written to Evan Nepean the previous March while still in London asking if he was allowed 'to make the settlement in such port as I may find the most convenient and the best answer to the intentions of the Government'. The government wrote back to Phillip saying 'there can be no objection to you establishing any part of the Territory'. However, Phillip was reminded that he was required to release the transport ships in the fleet back to the contractor as soon as possible after arriving in New South Wales. This meant he would have to decide the location of the new colony before the bulk of the convoy arrived at its destination, rather than after. A week before the fleet had left Portsmouth, Lord Sydney had told the Admiralty that Phillip had been given the authorisation to split the fleet: I am commanded to signify to your Lordships the Kings pleasure that you do authorize Captain Phillip upon his leaving the Cape of Good Hope to proceed if he thinks fit, to the said coast of New South Wales in the Supply tender, leaving the convoy to be escorted by the Sirius. King recorded that the three fast transports sailing with Phillip would be in the care of Lieutenant John Shortland, the navy-appointed agent for the transports. Meanwhile, the bulk of the fleet was left under the charge of John Hunter, the captain of the Sirius. The other six ships that formed the second convoy included the three slowest convict transports, the Lady Penrhyn, the Charlotte, and the Prince of Wales, and the three supply ships, the Golden Grove, the Borrowdale and the Fishburn. Tons of fresh water was transferred in little boats from the Alexander and the Scarborough to the slower transports, as it was anticipated they would be at sea longer and would be in greater need of supplies. It was to be another week before the winds that had prevented the fleet from making any significant progress finally changed and swung around behind them from the north-west. King recorded that they were now being swept along in 'very strong gales and a great sea'. The wind was so strong that it tore off the Prince of Wales' topsail, or main topgallant yard, causing another sailor, Yorgan Yorgannes, to be washed overboard and lost. The Supply and the faster transports had taken a different route, but they too were to encounter rough sailing. John Easty, a sailor on the Scarborough, described it as 'the heaviest sea as ever I saw'. Throughout December the four ships of the advance party sailed further into the Great Southern Ocean. On the Supply Lieutenant Philip Gidley King recorded the discomfort of all aboard: Had very strong gales of wind from the south west to the north west with a very heavy sea running which keeps this vessel almost constantly under water and renders the situation of everyone on board her, truly uncomfortable. Life for the convicts in these conditions was even more difficult. The high winds and rough seas meant they were forced to stay cramped, wet and cold below decks. The hatches were battened down for most of this leg of the journey, and they would have had very little opportunity of seeing any daylight. As Christmas approached, the wind abated before picking up again, leading King to observe that 'the cold is in the extreme here as in England at this time of year, although it is the height of summer here'. On 3 January the Supply's crew and officers saw land, which they knew to be Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). As the four ships from the advance fleet turned around the south-eastern tip of Tasmania and headed north, they were confronted with difficult conditions. The journey of more than a thousand kilometres up the coast to Botany Bay would take them another two weeks, struggling in the face of northerly winds and an adverse current, before they were able to reach Botany Bay. Meanwhile, the Alexander, the Scarborough and the Friendship, which had fallen behind weeks before, caught up and arrived in the Bay a day after the Sirius. If the first division of the fleet had found the going from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay rough, the bigger, slower, second division also had its problems. Immediately after the Supply and the three fastest transports had sailed ahead, Captain Hunter made his first big, independent decision. He ordered the seven ships under his command to change course to a more southerly route: I was at this time of the opinion that we had kept in too northerly a parallel to ensure strong and lasting westerly winds, which determined me, as soon as Captain Phillip had left the fleet, to steer to the southward and keep in a higher latitude. The decision would subject the ships under his command to the most dangerous sailing since they left England, but Hunter was correct. The new route proved faster, and they would arrive in Botany Bay seven weeks later and only a day after the last of the faster transports. In mid-December and roughly halfway from the Cape to Botany Bay they passed Kerguelen Island, which they found to be 'remarkably cold … although it was the height of summer'. Hunter was happy with their progress: We had at present every prospect of excellent passage to Van Dieman's land for although the wind sometimes shifted to the north east it seldom continued for more than a few hours before backing around again to the south west or north west. A few days before Christmas scurvy broke out among the convicts, first on the Prince of Wales and then the Charlotte. In the absence of fresh food, which was now close to being exhausted, the cases were treated with essence of malt and some wine, the only effective anti-scorbutic available. On Christmas Day the seamen worked normally and the officers tried to celebrate. On the Prince of Wales Sergeant Scott of the marines recorded that they ate beef, pork with apple sauce, plum pudding and drank four bottles of rum, which was the 'best we veterans could afford'. Judge David Collins on the Sirius said they tried to celebrate Christmas dinner in the traditional English way but noted that the weather was too rough to allow any real enjoyment. By the end of December the seas were 'mountains high'. On the Lady Penrhyn the water was ankle-deep on the quarterdeck, women convicts were washed out of their berths and the water had to be bailed out from below decks in buckets. On New Year's Day, according to Arthur Bowes Smyth, the sea poured through a hatchway and washed away the bedding from his cabin: Just as we had dined, a most tremendous sea broke in at the weather scuttle of the great cabin and ran with a great stream all across the cabin, and as the door of my cabin not to be quite closed shut the water half filled it; the sheets and the blankets being all on a flow. The water ran from the quarterdeck nearly into the great cabin, and struck against the main and missen chains with such force as at first alarmed us all greatly, but particularly me, as I believed ship was drove in pieces. No sleep this night. Newton Fowell also described the high winds and threatening seas that persisted into the New Year, in a letter to his father: 'This Year began with very bad tempestuous weather, it blew much harder than any wind we have had since our leaving England.' As the weather worsened, the fleet was forced to reduce the sail and slow down. The rolling of the ships in the rough seas was particularly difficult for the animals that had been penned on the decks. They were now in a very poor state, having had little grazing food for the seven weeks since they left the Cape. On the Fishburn and the Golden Grove about three-quarters of the chickens on board had died, which led a number of the crew to suspect they had been diseased in the Cape of Good Hope before they left. Captain John Hunter described the plight of the cattle, horses and sheep carried on ships that were not designed for such cargo: The rolling and labouring of our ship exceedingly distressed the cattle, which were now in a very weak state, and the great quantities of water which we shipped during the gale, very much aggravated their distress. The poor animals were frequently thrown with much violence off their legs and exceedingly bruised by their falls. It was not until the end of the first week of January that the bulk of the fleet passed around the bottom of Tasmania and began the journey northwards up the coast of New South Wales to Botany Bay. Captain Hunter had intended to stop and collect grass for the livestock, but he decided it would be too hazardous to land on the rocky coastline and pressed on to Botany Bay. That night, believing Van Diemen's Land was part of the same coast as their destination of Botany Bay, the officers on the Lady Penrhyn toasted 'two bumpers of claret' one to the success of the voyage and the other to safe anchorage in Botany Bay. White recorded that they saw an unexpected sight as they sailed along the coast of Tasmania: 'As we run with the land, which is pretty high we were surprised to see, at this season of the year, some small patches of snow.' The presence of snow and such volatile weather at the height of the southern-hemisphere summer would have mystified the passengers on the First Fleet. Running along the New South Wales coast, they met more bad weather and bad luck. Faced with a 'greater swell than at any other period during the voyage', they were forced to sail further out to sea when tubs containing a number of plants for the new colony, including bananas and grapes, were smashed and lost. During the storm six of the seven ships in the second convoy were damaged. According to Arthur Bowes Smyth: The sky blackened, the wind arose and in half an hour more it blew a perfect hurricane, accompanied with thunder, lightening and rain … I never before saw a sea in such a rage, it was all over as white as snow … Every other ship in the fleet except the Sirius sustained some damage … During the storm the convict women in our ship were so terrified that most of them were down on their knees at prayers. Less than a week away from Botany Bay all of the food for the animals was exhausted and there was 'nothing on board for the stock to eat but sea bread'. The second convoy finally arrived at Botany Bay on the evening of 19 January 1788. At ten minutes before eight the next morning the Sirius was in the bay and anchored, and the other transports 'were all safe in' by nine o'clock. Captain Hunter was surprised to learn that Phillip and the Supply had reached Botany Bay only two days beforehand and Shortland and the three fast transports had only arrived the previous day. Phillip was later to complain that the 'Supply, sailing very badly, had not permitted my gaining the advantage hoped for'. Phillip's failure to arrive earlier would cause many problems, as he had not had the several weeks he'd hoped for to clear land and build secure storehouses before the bulk of the convoy arrived. But, more importantly, he had insufficient time to examine alternative sites to Botany Bay. Just as he had feared, Botany Bay had to be abandoned within days because it was unsuitable. Under pressure to empty and release the contracted ships in the fleet, Phillip only had time to hurriedly explore Port Jackson, twelve kilometres further north of Botany Bay. While a better option, it would nonetheless be a struggle to establish a viable settlement there.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

ARRIVAL

We set out to observe the country, on inspection rather disappointed our hopes, being invariably sandy and unpromising for the purposes of cultivation … Close to us was the spring at which Mr Cook watered but we did not think the water very excellent, nor did it run freely. In the evening we returned on board, not greatly pleased with our discoveries. After a remarkably successful voyage the fleet arrived in Botany Bay without losing a ship and with fewer deaths than most of the convoys that would bring convicts to Australia over the next fifty years. Their joy at surviving the voyage in such good shape was, however, short-lived when they realised that Botany Bay was totally unsuitable for the new settlement; it had to be abandoned in a matter of a few days. While the British would continue to refer to Botany Bay for many decades as the site of the penal colony in New South Wales, no convicts ever actually settled there. Phillip had arrived at Botany Bay on the Supply at a little after two in the afternoon on 18 January 1788 and anchored on the north side so that 'the ships that are following might not miss the harbour'. Later the same afternoon he and his officers went ashore to inspect the site they had been sent to colonise. As was the custom, the naval officers in their smart uniforms were rowed to the edge of the shore, where the seamen would wade the last few metres carrying the officers on their backs to prevent them from getting wet. Once on shore, some of the officers examined the south of the bay, while Phillip examined the northern side where, unarmed, he made contact with a group of Aboriginal people who had been watching the arrival of the Europeans from the shore. They were naked and armed with spears but, according to Philip Gidley King, proved friendly and 'directed us, by pointing, to a very fine stream of fresh water'. The next day they were 'very agreeably surprised' to see the three transports the Alexander, the Scarborough and the Friendship arrive safely and anchor nearby. To their even greater surprise and some consternation, at eight o'clock the following morning, Sunday 20 January, they saw 'the Sirius and all her convoy coming round Point Solander'. The Sirius and the slower ships of the second convoy had in fact reached the outside of Botany Bay the night before. Had they not left their entry until the next morning, they would have arrived on the same day as the three transports. Arthur Bowes Smyth was aboard the women's convict ship the Lady Penrhyn, which arrived with the second part of the fleet. He recorded the excitement and relief of those on board at finally reaching their destination: Saturday 19th. This morning I arose at five o'clock in hopes of seeing land, but was disappointed – The Sirius and all the fleet made sail about four o'clock in the morning and at 7 a.m. we discovered land about forty miles distant. The joy everyone felt upon so long wished for an event can be better conceived than expressed, particularly as it was the termination of the voyage to those who were to settle at Botany Bay, and: it is ten weeks on Monday since we left the Cape of Good Hope; the longest period of any we had been at sea without touching at any port. – The sailors are busy getting up the cables and preparing all things for anchoring. The following day he recorded his happiness on coming into Botany Bay and seeing the four ships of the first part of the fleet all safely at anchor: Sunday 20th. The Sirius made sail at four o'clock this morning with a fine breeze … – About eight o'clock we came abreast of Point Solander and … arrive at the Bay, where we were very happy to find the four ships who had parted with … us, all safe at anchor. The Supply brig got there on Friday night, but the Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship reached it but the evening before us! Of the more than fourteen hundred people who had embarked, only sixty-nine had died. Many of the deaths had occurred before the ships left Portsmouth and in the first few weeks of the voyage, predominantly among the old and the sick, who should never have been considered for the journey in the first place. On the day he arrived in Botany Bay, Arthur Phillip had noted that they were in no way threatened by the local Aboriginal population. When the balance of the transports arrived, however, the newcomers witnessed a more threatening gesture from a large band of Aboriginal people who stood on Cape Solander shouting and waving their spears over their heads in a way that suggested the newcomers were not welcome. After less than two days looking for a suitable spot to establish their new town, the leaders of the First Fleet were forming the opinion that Botany Bay was totally unsuitable. It had insufficient fresh water and the bay was open to the region's strong southerly and easterly winds, which would not have provided the ships of the fleet with the necessary shelter. The only significant fertile soil was found by Phillip's colleagues on the south side of the bay, in a spot Cook had named Point Sutherland after one of his seamen who was buried there. Several months later Phillip was to provide a long report to Lord Sydney explaining why he had so quickly abandoned Botany Bay and settled for Port Jackson. Although Cook had suggested that the harbour was 'tolerably well sheltered from all winds', Phillip disagreed: I began to examine the bay as soon as we anchored, and found, that though extensive, it did not afford shelter to ships from the easterly winds; the greater part of the bay being so shoal shallow that ships of even a moderate draught of water are obliged to anchor with the entrance of the bay open, and are exposed to a heavy sea that rolls in when it blows hard from the eastward. Several small runs of fresh water were found in different parts of the bay, but I did not see any situation of which there was not some strong objection. Phillip's colleagues were equally unimpressed with what they saw at Botany Bay. Captain Watkin Tench had this to say: We set out to observe the country, on inspection rather disappointed our hopes, being invariably sandy and unpromising for the purposes of cultivation … Close to us was the spring at which Mr. Cook watered but we did not think the water very excellent, nor did it run freely. In the evening we returned on board, not greatly pleased with our discoveries. Surgeon Bowes Smyth also quickly realised that Botany Bay was not the fertile paradise they had been led to expect, when he went ashore on the first night his ship arrived: Upon first sight one would be induced to think this a most fertile spot, as there are great numbers of very large and lofty trees, reaching almost to the water's edge, and every vacant spot between the trees appears to be covered with verdure: but upon a nearer inspection, the grass is found long and coarse, the trees very large and in general hollow and the wood itself fit for no purposes of building, or anything but the fire – The soil to a great depth is nothing but a black sand which, when exposed to the intense heat of the sun by removing the surrounding trees, is not fit for the vegetation of anything even the grass itself, then dying away, which, in the shade appears green and flourishing; add to this that every part … is in a manner covered with black and red ants of a most enormous size. Phillip was in Botany Bay for only three days before he set off to search for an alternative location for the new settlement. With the fleet in Botany Bay and the convicts and cargo still aboard, he departed on Monday 21 January with John Hunter, James Kelty, Judge David Collins and a number of other officers to examine Port Jackson, twelve kilometres to the north. They had very little idea what to expect at Port Jackson, as the only information about it was a brief mention in Cook's journal from eighteen years ago. Cook had made only a passing observation about what he named Port Jackson as they sailed past several miles out to sea: Having seen everything this place Botany Bay afforded we at day light in the morning weighed with a light breeze … and steered along the shore NNE and at noon we were by observation … about two or three miles from the land and abreast of a bay or harbour wherein there appeared to be safe anchorage, which I called Port Jackson. Phillip's three small boats reached the mouth of Port Jackson in the early afternoon and rowed through the one and a half kilometre gap between the north and south headlands into the harbour. That night they pitched tents in the small inlet on the south side, which is still called Camp Cove today. One of the oarsmen on Phillip's boat was the American sailor Jacob Nagle, who recalls that on their first day in Port Jackson he caught some fish, watched by the governor: 'Phillip Observed the fish I had hauled in and asked who had caught that fish. I recollect he said that you are the first white man that ever caught a fish in Sydney Cove.' Mindful that more than fourteen hundred people and many starving animals were still aboard ships in Botany Bay awaiting instructions, Phillip quickly explored a number of coves that might be suitable. Later on the second day and some six kilometres deeper into Port Jackson Phillip discovered a sheltered bay about eight hundred metres long and four hundred metres wide, which had fresh water running into it. He decided it was here, and not Botany Bay, that the settlers would found the new colony. He was to describe Port Jackson as the 'finest harbour in the world' and named the site of the proposed settlement Sydney Cove after the home secretary, Lord Sydney. While he was examining Sydney Cove, a group of Aboriginal people had come down to see the Europeans. They appeared friendly and curious, and were fascinated at seeing food being cooked in a metal pot. While Sydney Cove would provide a sheltered harbour and apparently more fresh water, Phillip was forced to make a hurried decision and had no time to consider what might have been better options further along the coast. In a letter to Lord Sydney he was later to explain: My instructions did not permit me to detain the transports a sufficient length of time to examine the coast to any considerable distance, it was absolutely necessary to be certain of a sufficient quantity of fresh water, in situation that was healthy, and which the ships might approach within a reasonable distance for the … landing of stores. Meanwhile, some of the convicts back in Botany Bay had been assigned to clearing land for a settlement in case Phillip was unable to find a better alternative. But, according to Surgeon White, even the best place they could find in Botany Bay was unsuitable: Although the spot fixed on for the town was the most eligible that could be chosen, yet I think it would never have answered, the ground around it being sandy, poor, and swampy, and but very indifferently supplied with water. The fine meadows talked of in Captain Cook's voyage I could never see, though I took some pains to find them out; nor have I ever heard of a person that has seen any parts resembling them. While waiting for Phillip's return, some of the officers went ashore to see the Aboriginal people who had come down to the bay carrying spears and shields. White fired a pistol to frighten them, and his shot pierced a shield that was standing in the sand. This, White recorded, had the desired effect, because the Aboriginal people immediately learned to 'know and dread the superiority of our arms'. He describes how 'from the first, they carefully avoided a soldier, or any person wearing a red coat, which they seem to have marked as a fighting vesture'. Phillip and his party returned on the evening of Wednesday 23 January to find that the land clearing in Botany Bay was not going well, and he gave instructions for the entire fleet to immediately sail for Port Jackson, less than a week after its arrival in the bay. On the morning of 24 January strong headwinds were blowing and the English decided to wait until the following day before trying to sail out of Botany Bay. While they were waiting, the crews were shocked to see two strange ships appear outside the bay. Captain Watkin Tench, on board the Sirius, had woken at dawn and was getting dressed when he heard the news: Judge my surprise on hearing from the sergeant, who ran down almost breathless to the cabin where I was dressing, that a ship had been seen off the harbours mouth. At first I only laughed but knowing the man who spoke to me to be of great veracity and hearing him repeat his information, I flew upon the deck, on which I barely set my foot, when a cry 'another sail' struck on my astonished ear. At first it was thought the ships were British, although, as the surgeon Worgan noted, 'By noon, we could by the help of our glasses discern that they had French colours flying.' The ships were the Astrolabe and the Boussole, under the command of Captain La Perouse. They had been on a remarkable exploration voyage for nearly three years, having left Europe nearly two years before the First Fleet in June 1785. The two ships kept being blown to the south of the mouth of Botany Bay and were to be just as thwarted in getting in that day as the British were in getting out. On 25 January the entire British fleet was still being blown around the bay, and all bar one of the ships again had to abandon their efforts. The ship that succeeded where the others had failed was the nimble little Supply. It got out at midday, carrying Phillip, a number of officers including Philip Gidley King, some marines and about forty convicts. It sailed that afternoon up to Port Jackson, where it anchored for the night. King recorded it as follows in his journal: The wind blowing strong from the NNE prevented … our getting out … On the 25th … we were obliged … to wait for the ebb tide and at noon we weighed and turned out of the harbour. It seems that Governor Phillip sighted the French as the Supply successfully navigated its way out of Botany Bay but decided that dealing with them could wait till after the fleet was settled at Sydney Cove. Early on the morning of the 26th Phillip and his party were rowed ashore to the spot he had chosen a few days earlier. Here the flag was planted and a little ceremony took place. Possession was taken for His Majesty, whose health, that of the queen and the Prince of Wales, and the success of the colony was drunk. A feu de joie was fired by a party of marines and the whole group gave three cheers. Only a few dozen marines, officers and oarsmen participated in the new country's christening ceremony, while others, including the forty convicts, witnessed it from the deck of the Supply. While Phillip and his party were marking the start of the settlement of Sydney, the bulk of the fleet was still trying to sail out of Botany Bay to join them. As Surgeon Worgan recorded in his journal: Thursday 24th. The wind not favouring our departure this morning … Friday 25th … the wind coming on to blow hard, right in to the bay, the Sirius and the transports could not possibly get out. On the third day of trying, 26 January, the Sirius was the first of the remaining ships to successfully clear the bay, but, before it left, Captain John Hunter made brief contact with the commander of the French ships. Hunter had sent a lieutenant in a boat across to the French and, shortly afterwards, Captain de Clonard came across and introduced himself and the ships to Hunter. Meanwhile the remaining English ships were still having great difficulty getting away, as the wind was blowing hard and, in the words of Ralph Clark on the Friendship, there was 'a great sea rolling into the bay'. The Charlotte was blown off course, dangerously close to the rocks; the Friendship and the Prince of Wales 'could not keep in their stays' and became entangled, which resulted in the Friendship losing its jib boom and the Prince of Wales its mainmast staysail and topsail. According to Clark it was only good luck that they were not blown onto the rocks and 'the whole on board drowned for we should have gone to pieces. Thank God we have got clear out as have all the ships'. Later the Charlotte collided with the Friendship, and the surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth claimed that his ship, the Lady Penrhyn, also nearly ran aground. Bowes Smyth was to blame the near calamity on Arthur Phillip for insisting the fleet head immediately for Sydney Cove when it was dangerous to do so: Every one blaming the rashness of the Governor in insisting upon the fleets working out in such weather, and all agreed it was next to a miracle that some of the ships were not lost, the danger was so very great. At three in the afternoon the fleet had finally cleared Botany Bay and by four had entered Port Jackson for the eight-kilometre run up to Sydney Cove. There, according to Lieutenant Bradley of the Sirius, they anchored 'at the entrance to the Cove in which the Supply was laying and where the marines and convicts that came in her were camped. The convoy all anchored in and off the Cove before dark.' Finally, on a fine summer Saturday evening of what was to become Australia Day, 26 January, the entire fleet had anchored in and around Sydney Cove, more than eight months after leaving England.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

STRUGGLE

Thursday 31 January – what a terrible night it was of thunder and lightening and rain – was obliged to get out of my tent with nothing on but my shirt to slacken the tent poles … Friday 1 February. In all the course of my life I never slept worse … than I did last night – what with the hard ground spiders, ants and every vermin that you can think of was crawling over me. I was glad when morning came. The struggle to build a new life in the harsh and unfriendly Australian bush was about to begin. For the next few years life would be uncomfortable, to say the least, and most of the settlers would have no chair to sit on, no table to eat at and no bed or cot to sleep in. However, the first recorded impressions of Sydney Cove were in fact quite favourable and gave no indication that the newcomers had any inkling of the problems that lay ahead. Chief Surgeon White was even more effusive than Arthur Phillip when he described Port Jackson as the finest harbour 'in the universe'. Its many deep, protected coves would, he wrote, be capable of providing 'safe anchorage for all the navies of Europe'. Judge David Collins said the harbour was so naturally beautiful that it was a shame to dump England's worst on its shores: If only it were possible, that on taking possession of nature as we had done, in her simplest purist garb, we might not sully that purity by the introduction of vice, profaneness and immorality, but this is not so much to be wished, was little to be expected. The unloading of the ships began in earnest on the morning of Sunday 27 January. Many of the convicts were stepping onto solid ground for the first time in more than a year. Collins wrote of chaotic scenes as hundreds of people began to scramble out of the little rowboats and onto a shore where the dense vegetation came down almost to the water: The disembarkation of the troops and convicts took place from the following day, until the whole were landed. The confusion that ensued will not be wondered at, when it is considered that every man stepped from the boat literally into a wood. Parties of people were everywhere and seen variously employed; some in clearing ground for the different encampments; others in pitching tents. Or bringing up stores as were immediately wanted. And the abode of silence and tranquillity was now changed to that of noise, clamour and confusion. On that first day Captain Watkin Tench recorded an eagerness in all to begin work on the difficult task of clearing land, pitching tents and covering the unloaded stores: Business now sat on every brow … In one place a party cutting down the woods; a second setting up a blacksmiths forge; a third dragging along stones or provisions; here an officer pitching his marquee, with a detachment of troops parading on one side of him, and a cooks fire blazing up on the other. There was a particular urgency about unloading the livestock as many cows, horses and sheep had already died after the last of the fresh fodder had run out. On the day the fleet had arrived in Botany Bay, fresh grass had been cut and rowed out to the ships to keep the weakened surviving animals alive. As soon as the fleet arrived in Sydney Cove, the livestock were clumsily lowered by rope into boats, rowed ashore and left to graze on its eastern side. Earlier in the day the governor had 'marked out the lines for the encampment'. Phillip and some of his officers were to be camped on the eastern side, with the freshwater stream and most of the marines on the western side, and the convicts further to the west. The western side of the cove was steeper and rockier, and was later to be known as The Rocks. It was on this side that the tent hospital of the early colony was also established. As everyone who could be landed was working on clearing land and pitching tents, the usual Sunday religious observances were ignored. It was not until the following week that the chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, conducted the first church service, under a large tree overlooking the harbour. The following day the last of the marines and their wives and children were brought ashore, but it was to be another ten days before the majority of the female convicts were unloaded from their transports and rowed to the shore, by which time a large number of tents had been pitched for them. A number of the women convicts had somehow managed to keep some good clothing and were rowed to shore on their first morning in Sydney dressed in colourful dresses and pretty bonnets. Only five convict women had been brought ashore earlier – women 'who sported the best characters on board' – to act as cooks and domestic servants. Phillip thought that landing all of the women straight away would be a distraction to the men, some of whom had been on male-only convict transports and would not have seen a woman for the best part of a year. Phillip's caution turned out to be not unwise, because the women's eventual landing resulted in wild scenes and debauchery that shocked many of the officers. Surgeon Bowes Smyth, who had already made critical comments in his diary about the convict women, described what happened during that day, and especially during that night after the seamen later came ashore during a tumultuous storm, bringing grog with them: At five o'clock this morning all things were got in order for landing the whole of the women and three of the ships long boats came alongside us to receive them. The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed, and it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night … The scene which presented itself at this time and during the greater part of the night, beggars every description; some swearing, others quarrelling others singing, not in the least regarding the tempest, though so violent that the thunder that shook the ship exceeded anything I ever before had a conception of. Captain Watkin Tench spelled it out more clearly: While they were on board ship, the two sexes had been kept most rigorously apart; but when landed their separation became impracticable, and would have been perhaps, wrong. Licentiousness was the unavoidable consequence, and their old habits of depravity were beginning to recur. What was to be attempted? To prevent their intercourse was impossible. The next morning, Thursday 7 February, when just about everyone was finally ashore, many with hangovers, the battalion 'under arms' was marched on parade to a piece of cleared land with colours flying and pipes playing. The convicts were forced to stand in line while the formal declaration of the colony was made. It began with Judge David Collins' lengthy reading of Governor Phillip's commission. A number of officers were surprised at the apparent breadth of powers given to him. Ralph Clark noted that he had 'never heard of any one single person having so great a power invested in him as the Governor has by his commission'. This was followed by a speech from Phillip in which, according to Judge Collins, the governor promised good treatment of those convicts who deserved it and threatened severe punishment and execution for wrongdoers: He should ever be ready to shew approbation and encouragement to those who proved themselves worthy of them by good conduct and attention to orders; while on the other hand, such as were determined to act in opposition to propriety, and observe a contrary conduct, would inevitably meet with the punishment they deserved. Phillip also recommended to the convicts that they marry each other and threatened that those guilty of 'indiscriminate and illegal intercourse would be punished with the greatest severity and rigour'. Bowes Smyth described Phillip's speech as a 'harangue': He also assured them that if they tried to get into the women's tents of a night there were positive orders for firing upon them, that they were idle, not more than two hundred out of six hundred were at work; that the industrious should not labour for the idle; if they did not work they should not eat. In England thieving poultry was not punished with death, in consequence of their being so easily supplied but here a fowl was of the utmost consequence to the settlement, as well as every other species of stock, as they were reserved for breed, therefore stealing the most trifling of stock or provisions should be punished with death; that however much severity might mitigate against his humanity and feelings … justice demanded such rigid execution of the laws. After the parade the officers were invited to the governor's tent for a celebratory dinner at which 'many loyal and public toasts were drank'. Lieutenant Ralph Clark felt the occasion was spoiled by the maggots in the cold collation of mutton that had been killed the day before and complained that 'nothing will keep 24 hours in this country'. Unloading the stores and provisions would take many weeks. Initially some were simply put on the ground and covered until storehouses could be built, but the theft of food and grog was an immediate problem, which severe punishment and even executions failed to prevent. Much of the food stored on the ground was also lost to insects and parasites, many of which were completely new to the European settlers. A week after landing in Port Jackson, on 1 February, Arthur Phillip asked Lieutenant King to pay a courtesy call on the French captain La Perouse, who was still anchored in Botany Bay. King left at 2 am on 2 February, to be rowed in a cutter with Lieutenant Dawes and a marine escort, and had been instructed that when he met with La Perouse he was to 'offer him whatever he might have occasion for'. It took eight hours to row the twelve kilometres to Botany Bay, and they reached the French ships at around ten o'clock that morning. King recalled that the English delegation 'were received with the greatest politeness and attention' by La Perouse and his fellow officers aboard the Boussole. He was informed that he was not the first of the English to visit; a number of convicts had already walked the twelve kilometres overland from Port Jackson to Botany Bay and had been refused the opportunity of escaping on the French ships. The French thanked King for the offer of assistance and made exactly the same offer of help to the English. La Perouse said he expected to be back in France in fifteen months but had enough supplies on board to last three years and would be happy to provide Phillip with anything he needed. During their cordial meeting King learned of the remarkable voyage of the French since they had left the French port of Brest three years earlier. They had sailed around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast from Chile to California and Kamschatka in eastern Siberia before sailing south to Easter Island, Macao in China, Manila in the Philippines, the Friendly Isles, the Sandwich Isles and Norfolk Island. When the French ships had been in Kamschatka, they had been told that the British intended establishing a colony at Botany Bay, and so La Perouse was surprised to see nothing there when he arrived except the English fleet attempting to leave. As Judge David Collins noted: It must naturally create some surprise in M. de la Perouse to find our fleet abandoning the harbour at the very time when they were preparing to anchor in it. Indeed he afterwards said, that 'until he had looked round him in Botany Bay he could not divine the cause of our quitting it … having heard at Kamschatka of the intended settlement, he imagined he should have found a town built and a market established. King was also told of how a number of French officers and crew had been massacred and many others wounded by natives on Mauna Island in the Isles des Navigateurs less than two months before, on 11 December. Among the thirteen who were killed were the captain of the Astrolabe, M. De Langle, eight officers, four seamen and a boy. La Perouse explained that the French had been on good terms with the islanders for a period of several days, during which the French had 'furnished … every article of stock in the greatest profusion for barter' and trading had taken place. Then, when everything was ready for their departure, De Langle asked La Perouse if they could collect more fresh water from the island, and two longboats and two smaller boats were duly sent ashore. On landing the boats were surrounded by locals who 'were armed with short heavy clubs by which means they rendered the French arms useless'. The order to fire the muskets was given and the French believe about thirty natives were killed, but not before many of their own were also killed. A number of the French managed to swim from the longboats and scramble onto the two rowboats before making their escape back to their ships. La Perouse had also lost twenty-one crew when two boats were destroyed in the surf off the Alaskan coast in July 1786. Despite these tragic losses La Perouse said that not a single person had died on the French ships from scurvy during their three years at sea, suggesting that the French were even more effective at managing the disease than the English. King describes the French vessels as having been 'fitted out with the greatest liberality'. Governor Phillip had had to fight the bureaucracy for all his supplies and had left Portsmouth short of many essentials, but La Perouse's situation, according to King, had been very different: Monsieur de La Perouse told me that the king told him to get whatever he wanted and added that if he was now at Brest and had to equip his ships for the remainder of his voyage, that he could not think of any article that he should be in need of. King was particularly impressed with the array of scientists on the French expedition, which included botanists, astronomers and natural historians and an impressive range of astrological and navigational equipment. The French also carried three timepieces on each ship, whereas the English carried only one for the entire fleet. After dining with La Perouse and his fellow officers, King and his colleagues were taken ashore to where the French had established a stockade with two cannons around a number of tents housing a range of scientific equipment. King said his farewells on the night of 4 February and at five o'clock the next morning left to row back to the English settlement in Port Jackson. The return boat trip took even longer, as they were 'obliged to row all the way against the wind and a great swell', and King and his party did not reach Sydney Cove until 7 pm, some fourteen hours later. Over the next few weeks there was little further contact between the English, busy trying to establish their new home, and the French, who were preparing for the next leg of their long voyage of exploration. However, shortly before the French left Botany Bay Captain John Hunter of the Sirius paid them an informal visit and, like King, was impressed by the cordiality and hospitality of his hosts: At the beginning of March at which time … the two French ships were preparing to leave the coast, I determined to visit M de La Perouse before he should depart, I accordingly with a few officers sailed around to Botany Bay in the Sirius long boat. We stayed for two days on board the Boussole and were most hospitably and politely entertained and very much pressed to pass a longer time with them. At the very time that Hunter and his party had gone to visit the French, Judge David Collins described how the captain of the Astrolabe, Monsieur de Clonard, came from Botany Bay 'to bring round some dispatches from Monsieur de La Perouse, which that officer requested might be forwarded to the French ambassador at the court of London, by the first transports that sailed for England'. Within two more weeks the French quietly left Botany Bay, with the two commanders, Phillip and La Perouse, never having met. The Astrolabe and the Boussole were never seen again and were believed to have sunk off the coast of the New Hebrides with all the crew drowned. Back in Sydney the new settlers were shocked by the harshness and volatility of the climate, even though it was the middle of the southern-hemisphere summer. Less than a week after arriving, five sheep belonging to the lieutenant-governor and quartermaster were killed by lightning under a tree during a heavy storm. Phillip noted that the branches and trunk of the tree 'were shivered and rent in a very extraordinary manner' and was later to report that nothing had prepared them for the savageness of the weather: 'This country is subject to very heavy storms of thunder and lightening, several trees have been set on fire and some sheep and dogs killed in the camp since we landed.' A number of the other members of the First Fleet, including the surgeon from the Sirius, George Worgan, also recorded their surprise at the violence of the local climate, for which they were totally unprepared: The thunder and lightning are astonishingly awful here, and by the heavy gloom that hangs over the woods at the time these elements are in commotion and from the nature and violence done to many trees we have reason to apprehend that much mischief can be done by lightning here. Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the marines recorded in his journal how difficult it was to sleep in the first week during the kind of tumultuous summer storms that he had never experienced in England: Thursday 31 January – what a terrible night it was of thunder and lightening and rain – was obliged to get out of my tent with nothing on but my shirt to slacken the tent poles … Friday 1 February. In all the course of my life I never slept worse my dear wife than I did last night – what with the hard ground spiders, ants and every vermin that you can think of was crawling over me. I was glad when morning came. Watkin Tench was later to describe the fierceness and changeability of the hot summer winds, which were 'like a blast from a heated oven'. The temperature one day 'peaked at a hundred and nine degrees farhenheight, which killed some of the vegetables that had been planted'. He went on: It is changeable beyond any other I have ever heard of; but no phenomena sufficiently accurate to reckon upon are found to indicate the approach of alteration … clouds, storms and sunshine pass in rapid succession. Of rain, we found in general not a sufficiency, but torrents of water sometimes fall. Thunderstorms in summer are common and very tremendous. The settlers were having great difficulty clearing the tough Australian bush. They found that many of the tools they had brought with them from England were not strong enough, particularly the wood-cutting tools, for the gnarled hardwoods of Australia. Joseph Banks may have been right in saying there was 'abundant timber', but, as Phillip was to report, the new settlers were to find the Australian gum trees far from ideal for building with: The timber is well described in Captain Cooks voyage but unfortunately it had one very bad quality, which puts us to great inconvenience; I mean the large gum tree, which splits and warps in such a manner when used green and to which necessity obliged us, that a store house boarded up with this wood rendered it useless. Captain Tench said that the local timber was close to unusable and described how it had delayed the construction of buildings: The species of trees are few, and, I am concerned to add, the wood universally of so bad a grain as to almost preclude a possibility of using it; the increase of labour occasioned by this in our buildings has been such, as nearly exceed belief. Surgeon White also noted the lack of suitable building materials in his journal in March 1788: The principal business going forward at present is erecting cabbage-tree huts for the officers, soldiers, and convicts; some storehouses, &c.; and a very good hospital; all which in the completion will cost a great deal of time and trouble, as the timber of this country is very unfit for the purpose of building. Nor do I know any one purpose for which it will answer except for fire-wood; and for that it is excellent: but in other respects it is the worst wood that any country or climate ever produced, although some of the trees, when standing, appear fit for any use whatever, masts for shipping not excepted. Strange as it may be imagined, no wood in this country, though sawed ever so thin, and dried ever so well, will float. Repeated trials have only served to convince me that, immediately on immersion, it sinks to the bottom like a stone. The landscape was foreign and the newcomers had no knowledge of how best to exploit the natural resources. In another contrast with the La Perouse expedition, which brought scientists and botanists, Phillip, although an experienced farmer, was later to confess that his lack of knowledge of this strange new environment was making the task of establishing the colony more difficult: I must beg leave to observe, with regret, that being myself without the smallest knowledge of botany, I am without one botanist, or even an intelligent gardener in the colony; it is not therefore in my power to give more than a superficial account of the produce of this country, which has such a variety of plants that I cannot with all my ignorance help being convinced that it merits the attention of the naturalist and the botanist. Sydney had two great advantages over Botany Bay: fresh water and a sheltered harbour. However, very soon the settlers were to realise that not only was the timber virtually unusable, but the local soil was poor and they would have trouble trying to grow their own food. After only a few weeks the general health of the settlers began to deteriorate and there was an outbreak of the scurvy that had been kept at bay for so much of the long voyage from England. There were already too few workers available to help build the new settlement, and the few skilled carpenters were committed to repairing the transport ships that were soon to return home to England: The people were healthy when landed but the scurvy has for some time appeared among them and now rages in the most extraordinary measure. Only sixteen carpenters could be hired from the ships and several of the carpenters were sick. It was now the middle of February; the rains began to fall very heavy and pointed out the necessity of hutting people; convicts were therefore appointed to assist the detachment in this work. The tent hospital established on the western side of the cove was soon filled with cases of camp dysentery and scurvy. Chief Surgeon John White said of the patients, 'More pitiable objects were perhaps never seen.' Back in London, when botanist Joseph Banks heard of the outbreak of scurvy in that first winter he was critical of the settlers' ability to cope. He suggested that the colony should learn to find and eat the local 'culinary vegetables': 'They must by degrees learn more and more the use of those vegetables which are found wild in the country. I think it will be useless to send out essence of malt to them as a medicine.' But Surgeon White protested that while he had found a 'small berry like a white current' and a native blueberry called Leptomeria aceda that proved to be a good anti-scorbutic, it is 'far from sufficient to remove the scurvy', which 'prevails with great violence'. The newcomers could have learned something from the local inhabitants, but a belief of racial superiority prevented them from taking any lessons from the Aboriginal people, who had survived here – despite the scarce resources – for thousands of years. The new settlers had, as mentioned earlier, encountered local Aboriginal people on the first day they had landed in Botany Bay, and again when they first came to Port Jackson. On both occasions there had been no violence, which gave Phillip and his colleagues confidence that the Aboriginal people would not be a problem when they moved to Sydney Cove. In the instructions given to Phillip the British Government had made it clear that it wanted good relations, if possible, with the locals, 'and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them'. Over the first few months of the new settlement there was little contact, but as the year progressed there were a number of incidents where convicts died, and similar incidents where Aboriginal people died, which would add to increasing hostility between the white and black peoples. This hostility would shape relationships not only for those who arrived with the First Fleet but also for the settlers of the next two centuries. Erecting buildings proved difficult and slow. It took days for a team of men to cut down a single tree, drag it to the saw pit and cut it into usable strips of timber. There were only sixteen ship's carpenters, most of whom were kept busy on their ships before leaving for their return journey within a few months of arriving. This left the fledgling colony with only twelve convicts with carpentry skills. Initially the entire settlement lived in tents, and even after two years most settlers had only graduated to living in crude shacks made of timber beams against which they would lay bark from the local cabbage tree. These 'little edifices' proved to be ineffective shelters in the heaviest weather, when rain would pour through the doors and cracks. In the early years there was no sewerage system and no established roads, and during heavy rain the paths would become fast-running filthy streams that would undermine and flood the little dwellings. More than two years after arriving, Judge David Collins witnessed the devastation caused by floods, as heavy rains washed many of the convicts' hovels away: 'The rain came down in torrents, filling up every trench and cavity, which had been dug about the settlement, and causing much damage to the miserable mud tenements, which were occupied by the convicts.' The building of better accommodation was delayed; it was a higher priority to erect public stores that would provide security from theft, insects and the weather. It would be several months, nevertheless, before the first storehouse could be built. Measuring one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet wide (thirty by seven and a half metres), it was used for Sydney's first church service under shelter before the provisions were moved in. It had been expected that religion would play a big role in the new colony, and the responsibility for faith was vested in the chaplain of the settlement, Reverend Richard Johnson. Johnson soon became one of the busiest men in the colony. He held services, either in the open air or in a storehouse, performed all the functions of the church – baptisms, marriages, burials – attended the execution of condemned men and worked hard among the convicts. It would be more than five years before a temporary church of wooden posts, wattle and plaster was built, before which Johnson had no place to conduct divine services except for any hut that happened to be empty. The reverend was to marry a number of convicts within months of arriving. Judge David Collins said that while the marriages were encouraged, many took place for the wrong reasons: It was soon observed, with satisfaction, that several couples were announced for marriage; but on strictly scrutinising the motive, it was found in several instances to originate in the idea, that the married people would meet with various little comforts and privileges that were denied to those in a single state; and some, on not finding those expectations realised, repented, wished and actually applied to restore their former situations. Still, many marriages lasted. Mary Parker had been convicted in the Old Bailey in April 1786 for stealing some clothing and cloth valued at three pounds, two shillings and sixpence and sentenced to seven years' transportation. She sailed on the First Fleet on the Lady Penrhyn and met and married John Small in Sydney. He had been convicted in Devon for assault and robbery in March 1785 and had sailed to the settlement on the Charlotte. When they were married by the Reverend Johnson under a tree in Sydney Cove in October 1788, more than fifty weddings had already been performed in the new colony. Mary and John would have seven children, and their descendants would become one of the largest of a number of convict families in Australia today who can still trace their ancestry back to the First Fleet. The marines had been promised a barracks, but when it still had not been built at the onset of winter they built their own shelter with the help of some of the ships' carpenters, as Tench described: As winter was fast approaching, it became necessary to secure ourselves in quarters which might shield us from the cold … The erection of barracks for the soldiers was projected and the private men of each company undertook to build for themselves two wooden houses of sixty-eight feet in length and twenty-three feet in breadth. The first substantial buildings were rectangular timber structures measuring about twelve feet by nine feet (three and a half by two and three-quarter metres). The corner posts were about six inches (fifteen centimetres) square and buried deep in the ground, with other posts placed at intervals of about three feet (almost one metre) to hold up the timber wall panels. The roofs were of thatch, or of reeds spread between timber 'battens'. By the middle of the first year there were only four of these buildings completed, which Phillip needed to secure the stores behind strong walls and under lock and key. The construction of brick or secure stone buildings would take even longer. Although there was plenty of good stone and clay for bricks, there was no known local source of lime, traditionally used to make the cement that would bind the bricks together. Crushed and burned oyster shells were used as a substitute. Even the governor lived in a framed tent for the first eighteen months of the colony. His tent, made by Smith & Company in St George's Fields and brought out from England, was set up on the eastern side of Sydney Cove. Phillip complained it was 'neither wind nor water proof'. Finally Phillip was able to leave his tent, as the first brick building to be completed was the governor's house. It was officially opened on the king's birthday, in June 1789, nearly eighteen months after the fleet arrived. When building had begun, Phillip had laid a foundation stone with the inscription: ARTHUR PHILLIP, ESQ. Captain General in and over his Majesty's territory of New South Wales, and its dependencies; Arrived in this country on the 18th day of January, 1788, with the first settlers; And on the 15th day of May, in the same year, the first of these stones was laid. The imposing two-storey, double-fronted house, with its nine large windows across the front and two smaller windows on either side of the arched doorway, would be the governor's official residence for fifty-seven years, before it was demolished and replaced with an even larger dwelling a few hundred metres away. Some of the foundations of the original house remain today, under the corner of Bridge and Phillip Streets. Because there was no architect in the colony, the governor's house was designed and built by the convict brickmaker James Bloodsworth. In addition to the governor's residence Bloodsworth was responsible for the early establishment of the colony's first brickworks, about a mile from Sydney Cove at what later became the Haymarket at the end of Darling Harbour. The First Fleet had only brought out five thousand bricks, but with abundant clay and plenty of water the Brickfield, as the site was called, was quickly producing a large quantity of bricks. Brickmaking was back-breaking work, and as there were no carts the completed bricks had to be carried nearly two kilometres from the brickworks to the building site at Sydney Cove. George Worgan was impressed with how quickly the brickworks had been established: I walked out today as far as the brick grounds, it is a pleasant road through the wood about a mile or two from the village for from the number of little huts and cots that appear now, just above the ground, it has a villatick village like appearance. I see they have made between twenty and thirty-thousand bricks and they were employed in digging out a kiln and for the burning of them. No doubt grateful for the fine house, Governor Arthur Phillip pardoned Bloodsworth in 1790 and appointed him superintendent of the colony's buildings. James Bloodsworth had been convicted in the Kingston on Thames court of stealing and sentenced to seven years' transportation in October 1785. In the colony he was to partner Sarah Bellamy. Although it is not known if they ever married, they had eight children together. Sarah was only 17 years old when she was convicted in the Worcester Assizes for stealing money and sentenced to seven years' transportation, only a few months before Bloodsworth. Bloodsworth decided against returning to England at the end of his sentence and chose to stay in Sydney. When he died in 1804, he was afforded a flattering obituary in the Sydney Gazette, Sydney's first newspaper: On Wednesday last died, generally lamented Mr. James Bloodsworth, for many years Superintendent of Builders in the Employ of the Government. He came to the colony among its first inhabitants in the year 1788 and obtained the appointment shortly after his arrival. The first house in this part of the Southern Hemisphere was by him erected and most of the public buildings since have been under his direction. After six months a few buildings other than the storehouse had been completed, including a blacksmith's shack and a guardhouse on the eastern side of Sydney Cove. The governor's house was also under construction. Nearby were less substantial huts for the Reverend Richard Johnson and his wife Mary, Judge David Collins and a number of other officials. Phillip now wanted the more permanent buildings to be positioned in a less haphazard manner and had plans for the building of an orderly city, with streets up to sixty metres wide. However, the plans were never implemented. While building work was forging ahead slowly but steadily, moves towards self-sufficiency in the production of food were progressing rather less well. The settlers had only limited success at growing food and exploiting the local natural resources. Everyone was issued a weekly food ration, convicts and marines alike, although the marines were also given their grog ration. In the early days the officers fared better, especially on celebratory occasions such as the king's birthday in June, where they were treated to a feast of mutton, pork, duck, fowl, port Madeira and good English porter. The king's birthday was a major event in the colony's calendar, and even the convicts were given rum. To begin with the food ration included salted beef, salted pork, rice, peas and flour. However, over the next two years the allocation would be progressively reduced as the colony ran out of food. Eventually even the officers would be forced to accept starvation rations. The seeds that had been brought from Rio de Janeiro and the Cape, including lemons, limes, figs, grapes and oranges, were sown but fared badly. Surgeon George Worgan recorded that: Indigo, coffee, ginger, castor nut oranges, lemons and limes, firs and oaks, have vegetated from seed, but whether from an unfriendly deleterious quality of the soil or the season, nothing seems to flourish vigorously long. Worgan's own attempt to grow vegetables was equally unsuccessful: I put peas and broad beans in, soon after I arrived (February) the peas podded in three months, the beans are still in blossom (June) and neither plants are above a foot high, and out of five rows of the peas each three foot in length, I shall not get above twenty pods, however my soil is too sandy. Many of the other officers also developed their own small plots of land, but these too proved to be unproductive in the poor soil around Sydney and were 'successively abandoned' as farming moved west of Sydney. The settlers had found some local wild vegetables to supplement their diet but only a limited amount, not enough to sustain a colony of well over a thousand people. What they found included a plant resembling sage near the seashore, a kind of wild spinach and a small shrub with greenish leaves. Arthur Phillip established government farms and gardens on which the convicts were obliged to work during the week. However, due to the quality of the soil, they did not prove as productive as hoped. The settlers had only limited success at fishing. A number of species that had been part of the local Aboriginal diet were rapidly depleted when extensively harvested to feed the new settlement, which had many more mouths to feed. This certainly seems to have been the case with the giant stingrays that in Cook's time had been so prevalent that he initially called Botany Bay 'Stingray Bay'. When Cook had anchored in the bay, some of the rays were so heavy that they needed to be gutted in the water and still weighed hundreds of pounds when pulled aboard. Captain Tench, who regularly fished all night when the colony was short of food, described the slim pickings thus: 'the universal voice of all professional fishermen is that they never fished in a country where success was so precarious and uncertain'. Occasionally the pot was improved by the addition of a bird or an animal (including emus and kangaroos), but these too soon became scarcer around Sydney. One local plant that attracted the newcomers was the sarsaparilla vine, which looked like a bay leaf, tasted a little like liquorice root and was found to be a good substitute for tea. Chief Surgeon White used it medicinally, finding it to be a good 'pectoral', for clearing the respiratory tract. 'Sweet tea', as it became known, was thought to have a number of restorative and health benefits. John Nicol, who was to sail as a steward on the Lady Juliana in the Second Fleet, found it was already being widely used in Sydney when he arrived and brought some back to England via China: They have an herb in the colony they call sweet tea. It is infused and drank like the china tea. I liked it much; it requires no sugar and is both bitter and sweet. There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had born in the colony. Everyone went to see her, and I among the rest. It was a strange sight, her hair quite white. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea. I brought away with me two bags of it, as presents for my friends; but two of our men became quite ill of the scurvy, and I allowed them the use of it, which soon cured them, but reduced my store. When we came to China, I showed it to my Chinese friends, and they bought it with avidity, and impugned me for it, and a quantity of the seed I had likewise preserved. I let them have the seed and only brought a small quantity of the herb to England. The sarsaparilla leaves would attract a lot of attention in London after the publicity surrounding the First Fleet convict Mary Bryant, who escaped from Sydney with her husband, two children and seven other convicts. The party managed to reach Koepang in Timor before being recaptured, and Mary Bryant was one of five who survived and were eventually returned to London. Her sensational story generated support and sympathy and she was eventually pardoned with the help of James Boswell. She famously gave him as a thank-you present some sarsaparilla leaves that she had somehow kept throughout her ordeal. The small amount of produce that was locally grown or caught notwithstanding, the weekly ration was less than adequate from the start, and many convicts ate all their food before the next issue and then resorted to stealing to survive. This left those who had had their food stolen with little option but to steal from someone else. Almost all the crimes committed in the early days of the colony involved the theft of food. Captain Tench noted that it was surprising how 'few crimes of deep rye, or a hardened nature have been perpetuated during the first few years'. The first criminal court in the new colony was convened only two weeks after landing, on Monday 11 February, to hear charges against a number of convicts. One was found guilty of assault and sentenced to one hundred and fifty lashes, and a second was banished for a week on a small rocky island with only bread and water for stealing a biscuit from another convict. The third was found guilty of stealing a plank of wood and sentenced to fifty lashes but later forgiven, and the sentence not carried out. Judge David Collins said the mildness of the first punishments seemed to have encouraged rather than deterred others from committing more serious offences. Before the end of the month the court was reconvened to hear evidence of a plan by some convicts to rob the public stores. One of the convicts, Thomas Barrett, was the first to be hanged in the new colony, but his colleagues were given a last-minute pardon. As Surgeon John White recorded in his journal: February 27th. Thomas Barrett, Henry Lovell, and Joseph Hall, were brought before the criminal court and tried for feloniously and fraudulently taking away from the public store beef and pease, the property of the crown. They were convicted on the clearest evidence, and, sentence of death being passed on them, they were, about six o'clock the same evening, taken to the fatal tree, where Barrett was launched into eternity, after having confessed to the Rev. Mr. Johnson, who attended him, that he was guilty of the crime, and had long merited the ignominious death which he was about to suffer, and to which he said he had been brought by bad company and evil example. Lovell and Hall were respited until six o'clock the next evening. When that awful hour arrived, they were led to the place of execution, and, just as they were on the point of ascending the ladder, the judge advocate arrived with the governor's pardon, on condition of their being banished to some uninhabited place. Within a week convicts Daniel Gordon and John Williams were tried and convicted of stealing wine. Because Williams was regarded as an 'ignorant black youth', the court recommended that the governor show him mercy, and he was accordingly pardoned. Gordon, who was also black, was sentenced to death, but at the gallows this was changed to banishment. The following day James Freeman was tried for stealing seven pounds of flour from another convict. He was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, but while under the ladder, with the rope about his neck, he was offered his free pardon on condition of performing the duty of the common executioner as long as he remained in the country, 'which, after some little pause, he reluctantly accepted'. William Shearman, his accomplice, was sentenced to receive 'on his bare back, with a cat-o'-nine-tails, three hundred lashes, which were inflicted'. Within six months of arriving, as the thieving escalated, Collins argued that harsher punishments were unavoidable: Exemplary punishments seemed about this period to be growing daily more necessary. Stock was often killed, huts and tents broken open, and provisions constantly stolen, particularly about the latter part of the week; as many of those unthrifty people, taking no care to husband their provisions through the seven days that they were intended to last them, had consumed the whole by the end of the third or fourth day. The floggings were savage but were not designed to incapacitate the convicts. As a later account describes, unless it was night time, the convict was expected to go back to work immediately after the punishment: He was immediately sent to work, his back like bullocks liver and most likely his shoes full of blood and not permitted to go to the hospital until next morning when his back would be washed by the doctors mate and a little hog's lard spread on with a piece of tow, and so off to work … It was the theft of food that led to the decision to grow vegetables on what was to become known as Garden Island, about two kilometres out from Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. It was felt that the vegetables would have a better chance of being harvested on the island, as it was more difficult for thieves to reach. For most of the convicts life in the new settlement was harsh, with poor accommodation and inadequate food that lacked nutrition. Conditions were crowded, with more than a thousand people packed into an area of little more than two square kilometres. It was little different from living in a prison; there were no bars and fences, but equally there was nowhere to go except into the seemingly endless bush. Most of the convicts felt no commitment to the building of a new society. For most, beginning a colony on the other side of the world would have been daunting. They had been banished from their homeland. Few believed they would ever see their home or loved ones again. While many wanted to return to England after their sentences had been served out, Britain made it clear that they were not wanted and that they should be provided with no assistance or cooperation if they tried to arrange a passage home. Governor Phillip was told in no uncertain terms that the government thought the convicts were incapable of living honestly in Britain and should be encouraged to stay away. Phillip was also told that the convicts would have to arrange and pay for their own passages home – which was extremely unlikely, because practically none of them had money for the fare. After the transport ships that had brought the convicts out to New South Wales had left for their journey home, the convicts would have despaired all the more of ever getting back to England.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

FRICTION IN THE SETTLEMENT

We have laboured incessantly since we arrived here to raise all sorts of vegetables and even at this distant period we can barely supply our tables, his Excellency not excepted. This together with the miserable state of the natives and scarcity of animals, are convincing proofs of the badness of the country. You will no doubt have a flattering public account but you may rely on what I have advanced. Every gentleman here, two or three excepted, concur with me in opinion and sincerely wish the expedition may be recalled. Between the convicts and their masters was a wide cultural and social chasm. The officers showed little comprehension or understanding of the convicts, whom they regarded in every respect as inferior. The differences extended even to language, as many of the convicts spoke different dialects and often could not be understood by the officers. Captain Watkin Tench refers to a number of the convicts who spoke a 'flash' or 'kitty' language and required a translator when they were being tried in the colony's criminal court, which was now up and running. The officers' low opinion of the convicts worsened the longer they were forced to coexist in the struggling settlement. Several months after arriving in Sydney, Surgeon John White said that the convicts were so hardened in wickedness and depravity that many were totally insensible to the fear of corporal punishment, or even death itself. The convicts were assigned to work from 7 am till 3 pm each day and on Saturday until 12 pm, usually on construction or on the vegetable farms. Outside these hours they were free to work for themselves. However, Phillip was to complain that the convicts were lazy and not useful for the building of the new settlement: 'The convicts, naturally indolent, having none to attend them but overseers drawn from amongst themselves and who fear to exert any authority, makes this work go on very slowly.' Within six months of arriving, Phillip had written to Nepean asking for more thought to be given to selecting the convicts who were sent out: 'In our present situation I hope that few convicts will be sent out for one year at least, except carpenters, masons and bricklayers, or farmers who can support themselves and assist in supporting others.' The convict women had even fewer skills to contribute to the building of the colony. Captain Tench was moved to remark that most of the women 'lived in a state of total idleness, except for a few who are kept at work in making pegs for tiles, and picking up shells for burning into lime'. Phillip, in a letter to Lord Sydney, stated that he thought the colony had no future as a convict settlement and suggested that free settlers, who could use the convicts to develop the place, were what was needed. He had no confidence that the convicts at work could be effectively supervised by the military, but thought settlers with an interest in their own enterprises would be able to get more out of them: Your Lordship will, I hope judge it expedient to send out settlers to whom a certain number of convicts may be given; they my Lord, will be interested in cultivating the land and when a few carpenters and bricklayers are sent out who will act as overseers, and have some little interest in the labour of the convicts who are under their care, a great deal of labour will be done by them who are employed on public works. Phillip had written to Evan Nepean with the same message: 'If fifty farmers were sent out with their families they would do more in one year in rendering this colony independent of their mother country as to provisions, than a thousand convicts.' The low opinion they held of the convicts did not prevent a number of the officers from living with convict women and having children, even if the officers in question had a wife and other children waiting back in England. At the end of their sentenced terms the male convicts could be granted land to become farmers. They were allowed forty acres of land and an additional four acres for each of their children. Women convicts were ineligible for land grants when their term expired; they could either marry someone with land or return to England. All those who took land were obliged to live on it and cultivate it, during which time they could continue to draw rations from the public store for twelve months. Phillip had his doubts about the ability of the convicts to make good farmer settlers. Few had a background in farming and fewer felt any commitment to building a new life in this land, where they had been forced to live. A further complication arose when an increasing number of convicts came to Phillip claiming their term of sentence had expired, only to find that their freedom could not be confirmed because the record of their convictions had not been sent out from England: The masters of the transports having left with the agents the bonds and whatever papers they received that related to the convicts, I have no account of the time for which the convicts are sentenced, or the dates of their convictions; some of them, by their own account, have a little more than a year to remain, and, I am told, will apply for permission to return to England. The convicts were understandably unhappy. Phillip rejected their claim that they should be paid wages and suggested Judge Collins take their details until the matter could be settled. Even two years later the situation was still not resolved. On 15 April 1790 Phillip again sought instructions as to what he should do with convicts who claimed their sentences were up: I have to request that the necessary instructions may be sent out respecting those convicts who say their terms of transportation are expired of which we have a very great number, very few who are being desirous of becoming settlers in this country. Four months later he was to write again to say that there were now thirty convicts claiming they had served their time and would want passages back to England. The first convict to seek a grant of land in the new colony was James Ruse, who as a 22-year-old had been convicted of stealing in the Cornwall Assizes in July 1782 and sentenced to death. He was reprieved to be transported for seven years to Africa but spent almost all of the next five years aboard the Dunkirk hulk in Plymouth before being sent with the First Fleet on the Scarborough. In July 1789 he claimed his sentence had expired and requested a land grant so he could become a farmer. He was one of the minority of convicts who had some farming experience. In the absence of Ruse's records, however, Arthur Phillip would not initially grant him land. He relented in November 1789 and allowed him to farm an allotment until he could be given title when proof of his freedom arrived. With the help of Phillip he was given clothes, food, seeds, livestock, a hut and some help to clear the land. Ruse proved to be industrious and managed to make a success of farming. Although not the first person to cultivate land in the colony on his own behalf, Ruse was the first ex-convict to seek a grant, as most of the other emancipated convicts showed no inclination to take up agriculture. Undeterred by famine, drought and the depredations of convict life, Ruse applied himself diligently to his task and proved not only a hard worker but also, by local standards, a successful farmer. By February 1791 he was able to support both himself and his wife, Elizabeth Perry, a convict whom he had married on 5 September 1790. In April 1791 he received the title to his land, the first grant issued in New South Wales. Phillip's first report back to England about the new colony was dated 15 May 1788, almost four months after the fleet had arrived. In this report he outlined some of the difficulties facing the early settlement and foreshadowed something of the looming food crisis. His long handwritten account was put aboard the returning ships of the fleet that would reach England in March the following year. In his report Phillip explained that Botany Bay had been quickly abandoned as a site for the colony because there was insufficient water, much of the coastal land was unhealthy swamp and the harbour provided too little shelter for ships. He explained that he was forced to settle on Sydney Cove due to the instructions to unload the ships and release the vessels at the earliest possible date, even though this site, too, had been found to have limited water and available fertile soil. Phillip admitted that progress in establishing the new colony was slow. Having been a farmer, he recognised that the harsh vegetation, the rocky ground and the absence of fertile soil would make things difficult: 'The necks of land that form the different coves and bear the water for some distance are in general so rocky that it is surprising such large trees should find sufficient nourishment.' Even at this early stage there were warning signs that the new colony was not going to be able to produce enough food: The great labour in clearing the ground will not permit more than eight acres to be sown this year with wheat and barley. At the same time an immense number of ants and field mice will render our crops very uncertain. Part of our livestock brought from the Cape, small as it was, has been lost and our resources in fish is also uncertain. Some days great quantities are caught but never enough to save any part of the provisions; and at times fish are scarce. Phillip added that the Sirius would soon sail north to purchase more livestock. Within months, however, the food shortage would be so great that the more immediate need of grain caused plans to change. The flagship would instead be sent on an urgent run to collect food from the Cape of Good Hope. The challenges and problems of the new settlement in Sydney did not absorb Arthur Phillip to the extent that he forgot his orders, which included an instruction to colonise Norfolk Island, some fifteen hundred kilometres north-east of Sydney. Phillip's instructions, signed by King George III, had explicitly called for the early settlement of Norfolk Island: Norfolk Island … being represented as a spot which may hereafter become useful, you are as soon as circumstances will admit of it, send a small establishment thither to secure the same to us, and prevent it being occupied by the subjects of any other European power. The British wanted to secure the island, which had been noted by Cook on his voyage eighteen years earlier, as part of the empire. It was believed it could produce a superior hemp or flax for sails and canvas – both vital for the Royal Navy. Accordingly, on 1 February, within a week of arriving in Sydney Cove, Arthur Phillip asked his young protégé Lieutenant Philip Gidley King to organise to take the Supply with a small group to settle the island. Before leaving for Norfolk Island, King was issued with detailed written instructions from Phillip. 'After having taken the necessary measures for securing yourself and people, and for the preservation of the stores and provisions', he was to grow the flax plant and cotton, corn and other grains with the seeds they had taken with them. They were to be left with six months' provisions but were expected to procure vegetables and fish locally. Labour for the development of the colony was to be provided by the convicts, 'being servants of the Crown till the time for which they are sentenced is expired, then labour is to be for the public'. Finally King was ordered to ensure that religion was observed and prayers of the Church of England were to be read 'with all due solemnity' every Sunday. At 7 am on 14 February King set sail to his new post on the tiny tender the Supply with perhaps the smallest ever party to establish a colony of the British Empire. His group of twenty-three included a surgeon, a carpenter, a weaver, two marines, eight male convicts and six female convicts. The 33-year-old surgeon, Thomas Jamieson, was an Irish Protestant who had sailed as surgeon's mate with the Sirius in the First Fleet. Jamieson would stay on Norfolk Island for eleven years before taking up the post of senior surgeon in New South Wales. The little party took two weeks to sail the fifteen hundred kilometres to Norfolk Island on the seventy-foot long HMS Supply, which was commanded by Lieutenant Henry Ball. On the way they passed an island where they observed giant turtles. Ball was to name the island Lord Howe, after one of the lords of the Admiralty. The Supply spent a week sailing around the rocky shores of Norfolk Island in high seas trying to find somewhere to land, until at last King discovered a small gap in the reef. It seems that Cook had encountered the island on an uncharacteristically calm day eighteen years previously, as he had managed to anchor in a reef on the north side of the island. For two years King supervised this little establishment, organising the clearing of land and struggling against grubs, rats, hurricanes and occasionally troublesome convicts. Thanks to the fertile soil he was able to report favourably on the island's prospects, although when the Supply left to return to Sydney he had not found the promised flax, which had been the major reason for the settlement: 'We have not seen a leaf of flax or any herbal grass whatever, the ground being quite bare, which is rather extraordinary as Captain Cook says that flax is more luxuriant here than in New Zealand.' Phillip then had to report the absence of flax to London, noting that the French commander La Perouse had also failed to find it when he had called in on Norfolk Island the year before: The small quantity of flax that has been procured is sufficient to show the quality but the flax plant described by Captain Cook I have never met with, nor had the botanists that accompanied Mons La Perouse found it when I saw them, and which was sometime after they arrived. King believed that Cook may have mistaken another local plant for flax. However, a year later he was able to report that they had finally found flax growing on the island, but that 'it in no manner resembles the flax of Europe'. It was never to become a significant crop on the island. Having put King and his party safely ashore, Ball returned to Sydney on the Supply. He again travelled via Lord Howe Island. The island is about a thousand kilometres south of Norfolk Island and about the same distance east of Sydney. It is about eight kilometres in length and was uninhabited but with plentiful bird life and at that time of year abundant with turtles. This time Ball took sixteen of the giant turtles back to Sydney. Among the convict women who had been taken to Norfolk Island was Ann Inett, who, at the relatively mature age of 31, became Philip Gidley King's housekeeper and lover. She had been convicted in 1786 in the Worcester Court of stealing a petticoat, two aprons, a pair of shoes, five handkerchiefs, a silk hood and other clothing, with a total value of a little under one pound. Initially condemned to be hanged, her sentence was commuted to seven years' transportation to New South Wales. Ann Inett went on to have two children with King, both boys, who were named Norfolk and Sydney. When King returned to England for a short time two years later, he married and brought his new wife back with him to Norfolk Island. He was to have three more children with her, named Phillip, Maria and Elizabeth. Nevertheless he continued to care for his first two boys, both of whom eventually became officers in the navy. In October 1788 Phillip sent more convicts to Norfolk Island on the store ship Golden Grove before it returned to England with the Fishburn. By that time King was able to report some success with growing food on the island. Unlike the settlers in Sydney they had managed to grow a variety of vegetables, and after an initial failure they looked forward to a good harvest of grain. King reported that the soil was good, the people were healthy and that he felt the island could be self-sufficient in food production within two years, as long as they were provided with some cattle. Towards the end of the first year of the settlement of Norfolk Island there was a mass escape plan involving most of the convicts. When next the Supply came to the island, the plotters intended abducting the ship's surgeon then sending a message for the marines aboard to come and rescue him. Once the marines had come ashore, they planned to send another message to the remaining marines on the Supply saying that the first boat with their colleagues had hit a reef and they should come to help. This, they hoped, would enable the convicts to then seize the now defenceless ship. The scheme was discovered when the plotters tried to recruit Lieutenant King's gardener, and the convict woman who was living with the gardener told King of the plan. Forewarned, King was able to quickly round up the ringleaders, and the escape was thwarted. In his second major report back to England, in July 1788, Arthur Phillip stated that the settlement around Sydney Cove was still struggling. He said that he had hoped to have given 'a more pleasing account of our present situation'. However, the building program was going too slowly, the convicts needed proper supervisors, they could find no limestone for cement, more cattle had died or had been lost in the bush and they still had stores to unload from the ships but did not yet have the storehouses to secure them. Phillip warned Nepean that it would take the colony a long time to become self-sufficient and that for some years it would be heavily dependent on supplies from England for its survival: At present no country can afford less support to the first settlers, or to be disadvantageously placed for receiving support from the mother country, on which it must for a time depend. It will require patience and perseverance, neither of which will, I hope be wanting. The problems the settlers were having establishing the colony did not prevent Phillip telling the British Government what they wanted to hear. He wrote that he had no doubt 'but that this country will prove the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made'. However, Major Robert Ross, the commander of the marines, strongly disagreed. In a letter sent back to the Admiralty at the same time as Phillip's, Ross said that Sydney was destitute and could never support a self-sufficient colony: Might I presume to intrude an opinion on their Lordships with respect to the utility of settlement upon this coast, at least upon this part of it, it should be that it never can be made to answer the intended purpose or wish of Government, for the country seems totally destitute of everything that can be an object of a commercial nation, a very fine harbour excepted, and I much fear that the nature of the soil is such as will not be brought to yield more than sufficient sustenance for the needy emigrants whose desperate fortunes may induce them to try the experiment. Here I beg leave to observe to their Lordships that the above is but a private opinion. In September Phillip wrote to Lord Sydney to explain why he had not followed the instruction he had received before leaving London to go and fetch women from one of the Pacific islands in order to address the shortage of women in Sydney. Continuing in his previous vein, he said that the colony was in no shape to accommodate the women: 'With respect to sending to the islands for women, your Lordship will, I believe, think that in the present situation of this colony it would be only bringing them to pine away a few years in misery.' Captain Tench wrote candidly in his journal after the first few months that the colony had little commercial value to Britain other than as a refuge for unwanted convicts. In a chapter titled 'Some thoughts on advantages which may arise to the mother country from the forming of a colony', Tench said the settlement was 'unequalled' for a place to send convicts but 'when viewed in a commercial light, I fear its insignificance will appear very striking'. For the colony to be self-sufficient in food, he said, the British Government would need to send out a 'sufficient military force' to cultivate the ground, and even then the 'parent country will still have to supply us for a much longer time with every other necessity of life'. While Phillip was continuing to report favourably on the potential of the colony throughout the year, Ross may not have been the only officer who was sending back different accounts. An unsigned letter from a marine officer sent in November 1788 claimed that Sydney was struggling and that flattering reports being sent to London should be disregarded. The letter claimed that almost all the officers in the settlement wanted the venture abandoned and the men recalled to England: We have laboured incessantly since we arrived here to raise all sorts of vegetables and even at this distant period we can barely supply our tables, his Excellency not excepted. This together with the miserable state of the natives and scarcity of animals, are convincing proofs of the badness of the country. You will no doubt have a flattering public account but you may rely on what I have advanced. Every gentleman here, two or three excepted, concur with me in opinion and sincerely wish the expedition may be recalled. Towards the end of the year, and faced with failed harvests in Sydney, Phillip authorised the settlement of Rose Hill, some twenty-five kilometres to the west of Port Jackson, where the soil was more fertile. By the end of the year a few more buildings had been erected in Sydney: a small stone house was built for Major Robert Ross, the lieutenant-governor and commander of the marines, two storehouses had been completed and the hospital was still under construction. An observatory had also been established on the point of the western side of Sydney Cove, near the current-day southern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Lieutenant Dawes, the marine officer and astronomer, had set up equipment to observe a comet that had last been seen in 1661 and that would, according to calculations, return in 1788. The point was named Maskelyne Point after the astronomer royal who had arranged for the instruments to be sent with the First Fleet, but it later became known as Dawes Point. This is where the Sydney Observatory building stands today. As the settlers approached Christmas of the first year, there were still only a few solid structures in Sydney Cove, with most people living in shacks or tents. There were no solid roads. Only a quarter of the settlers were involved in cultivating the land for food, the first harvests had failed and they remained almost totally dependent on the food brought from England. Relations with the local Aboriginal people had deteriorated, the marines were disaffected and the convicts generally showed no interest or motivation in the building of a new world. The management of the struggling colony was made more difficult by the increasing friction between Governor Phillip and the Marine Corps, headed by Major Robert Ross. Central to the problem was lack of clarity as to the duties and responsibilities of the marines. Phillip had very few officers at his disposal for supervising the convict workers, and he had expected the cooperation of the officers of the Marine Corps in ensuring the convicts worked effectively at farming and building the new settlement. The marine officers, on the other hand, believed they were there to maintain order among the convicts and provide protection from any possible assault from hostile natives. They saw their role as military, not civil. Phillip felt frustrated by what he saw as a petty lack of cooperation from the start, writing to Lord Sydney: The officers who compose the marine detachment are not only few in number, but most of them have declined any interference with the convicts, except when they are employed for their own particular service. I requested soon after we landed that officers would occasionally encourage such as they observed diligent, and point out for punishment such as they saw idling or straggling in the woods. This is all I desired, but the officers did not understand that any interference with the convicts was expected, and that they were not sent out to do more than the duty of soldiers. Phillip also complained in the same letter that the marine officers refused to sit on the criminal court: 'The sitting as members of the Criminal Court is thought a hardship by the officers, and of which they say they were not informed before they left England.' The marines and their commander Major Ross, on the other hand, felt they were not afforded the respect or regard they deserved. In a letter to London Ross criticised Phillip for not consulting with anyone else in the colony, saying, 'from our Governors manner of expressing himself … he communicates nothing to any person but to his secretary'. Ross and some of his fellow officers were also resentful that the fortress they had expected to be constructed in Sydney had not been. It had always been part of the plan for the new settlement and was intended to form the centre of the marines' barracks. However, Phillip had judged very early on that an assault by the Aboriginal people was unlikely and that constructing accommodation, storehouses and other civic buildings was a higher priority. Ross complained directly to the Admiralty: Here in justice to myself and the detachment under my command, I must observe to their Lordships that the detachment is at this hour without any kind of place of defence to retire to in case of an alarm or surprise, though I have in justice to myself repeatedly mentioned and urged his Excellency to get something or other erected for this purpose. Ross also complained that the entire marine detachment was still living in tents and that not enough was being done to build their barracks: We still remain under canvas, no habitations being provided for either officers or men but what they themselves with the assistance of four carpenters and a few others, convicts (of all trades) has been given me for the use of the detachment, were for some time erecting and when any of them will be finished … is impossible for me to say. These were not even the first sources of friction between Ross and Phillip. Quite early on in the first year Ross had wanted to arrest five of his marine officers who had refused to reconvene a court martial involving a marine. The case involved an allegation that a marine private, Joseph Hunt, had struck another marine, William Dempsey. A third, Thomas Jones, had intervened and was abused by Hunt. The court found Hunt guilty and sentenced him to either ask for a public pardon from Dempsey or receive a hundred lashes. Ross was outraged by the decision, saying that a prisoner could not be permitted to choose his own punishment and that the court should reconvene and decide one punishment or the other. Captain Watkin Tench, who had convened the court with his four lieutenants, insisted the law did not allow a reconsideration of a court martial and effectively disobeyed his superior's orders. Ross wanted the five officers arrested and court-martialled but, as there were only four captains and twelve lieutenants in the whole settlement, Phillip felt there were already too few officers in service and didn't want the matter to go any further. In the end there were not enough officers to reconvene the court martial. Tench and his colleagues resumed their normal duties and that is where the matter rested, except for the damage to the marines' morale and the standing of Ross with his colleagues. While these arguments were taking place, Phillip had written to London protesting that he had 'used every means in my power to prevent a general court-marshal, the inconveniences of which were obvious' but his proposal was 'declined' by Ross. Robert Ross also wrote to London insisting that his authority and the morale and good order of the marines required that the formal disciplinary procedures be followed. Without this 'decisive step', he wrote, it would be 'absolutely impossible' for any commanding officer to properly carry out his duties. The original incident involving a private in the marines may have been relatively trivial, but it demonstrated to the British Government that the two most senior officers in the colony of New South Wales could not resolve their differences and work in harmony. Ross believed that the Marine Corps was being treated no better than the convicts. In the same letter to the Admiralty he protested that the marines were forced to survive on exactly the same rations as the convicts, except for receiving a ration of rum that was close to undrinkable: I shall take the liberty of mentioning to their Lordships the quantity of the provisions served to myself, the officers and men of the detachment, in which there is now no difference between us and the convicts, but in half a pint per day of Rio spirits, which in taste and smell is extremely offensive. The marines also complained that they were punished as much and often more severely than the convicts. Phillip had demonstrated from the first week of the voyage that he did not want to provoke a convict uprising through the imposition of excessive punishments on them. His subsequent interventions secured more lenient punishment of convicts, while the punishments of the marines went ahead. They tended to come from the same lower social classes as the convicts and were accustomed to stiff justice and rough discipline, so this resulted in an obvious disparity that would have created much resentment among the marines. Major Robert Ross does not appear to have been a very popular figure in Sydney with any group, though. Judge David Collins claimed an 'inexpressible hatred' for him, which is somewhat understandable, given Collins' closeness to Governor Phillip. However, some of Ross' own officers, including his deputy, Ralph Clark, also recorded that relations between Ross and others became so strained that he ceased to be on speaking terms with his senior colleagues.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

THE FLEET GOES HOME

The scurvy had now arrived to such a height among the crew that eleven were unable to move and the remaining part were so exceedingly feeble from the effects of it as scarcely to be able to navigate the ship so that our situation was become extremely critical … In the months following the arrival of the fleet and the unloading of the convicts and supplies, the nine contracted ships had to leave to return to England. Those left behind watching their last connection with the world they knew sail over the horizon had the sense of being 'cut off … from the rest of civilized nature' and a feeling of profound desolation. The nine ships would have mixed fortunes on their voyages home. As there was a shortage of fresh food in Sydney, all of them set off with inadequate provisions. According to Phillip all of the contracted ships – except the Fishburn and the Golden Grove – were completely unloaded of their cargo and cleared to go before the end of May, but they all needed major work to be made seaworthy for the journey home. It was found that 'the worm had so much destroyed their sheathing to have worms eating the timber' and it was necessary that the ships be pulled up and put on their sides so the carpenters could replace the wooden supports. The Charlotte, the Lady Penrhyn and the Scarborough were the first to be 'discharged from Government service', in late March, but it took another six weeks for the necessary repairs to be carried out so the ships could set sail. They departed in early May after being at the settlement for a little over three months, and while they were the first ships to leave they would not be the first to reach England. The Lady Penrhyn left Sydney on 5 May 1788, and the Scarborough the following day. The Charlotte left early on 6 May and by mid-morning was heading down Port Jackson, according to its captain, Thomas Gilbert, 'with light breezes and frequent showers of rain'. Before being cleared to go, the ship was twice searched for any convicts who may have hidden away below decks. Captain Gilbert had decided to take a more easterly route through the Pacific Ocean to China than had ever been undertaken before, and with 'no chart to guide me and with dangers of which I was entirely unacquainted' kept a record of the voyage. Having unloaded its cargo of supplies and more than a hundred convicts in Sydney, the almost empty ship was on its way to pick up its cargo of tea with a crew 'not exceeding thirty', several of whom were only boys. Within a week of leaving Sydney and with no fresh food, the crew began to contract scurvy. Captain Gilbert headed straight for Lord Howe Island, which was the closest place to Sydney where he could stop for provisions and find some fresh food. Arthur Phillip had ordered Gilbert before he left not to seek provisions on Lord Howe Island, saying that the available fresh food on the island should be for the settlers in Sydney Cove. As Captain Gilbert wrote, Phillip told him that Lieutenant Ball, standing off the island in the Supply at that point, 'had directions to prevent my landing on this newly discovered land of promise'. Gilbert said that his crew had tried to find enough food in Sydney and had fished 'as often as possible' before leaving, but that fish, while 'palliative', would not 'altogether alleviate' scurvy: The situation of my ships company rendered it necessary that I should if possible procure a supply of fresh provisions and vegetables as the scurvy had begun to make a rapid progress amongst them. I was determined to endeavour to surmount every difficulty and land upon the island. When he reached the island and was trying to find a spot to anchor, he saw the Supply and also the Lady Penrhyn, which had left Sydney the day before his ship. To Gilbert's surprise Lieutenant Ball of the Supply sent for him to come over, telling him that the island 'afforded plenty of turtle, fowls, fish, cocoa nuts and cabbages'. The following day Gilbert and members of his crew went ashore but without Ball, who did not want it 'supposed that he conducted us to the island'. Once on the island they found large fat birds 'walking with less fear and concern than geese in a farm yard' as well as large eggs, fat pigeons, partridges in 'great plenty' and cabbages. The uninhabited Lord Howe Island was the home of some unique animal life. While briefly there, the surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn, Arthur Bowes Smyth, made the earliest known drawing of the now extinct white gallinule. He also observed the bell magpie, or currawong, and four now rare or extinct birds that have been identified as the Lord Howe Island pigeon, the booby, the Lord Howe Island rail or woodhen and an extinct species of parakeet. Bowes Smyth kept a valuable journal of the First Fleet voyage and early settlement, as well as recording much of the wildlife in the new colony. He was believed to have been the first white man to have seen an emu, which he included in his illustrations. He died shortly after arriving back in England in April 1790 and was buried at his home town of Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex. The next day the Scarborough appeared at the island. It had been agreed in Sydney that the three ships would rendezvous off Lord Howe Island and sail together to China, but a few days later, according to Gilbert, 'when daylight broke we found the Lady Penrhyn gone'. Now abundantly supplied, the Charlotte and the Scarborough headed off together for Norfolk Island, almost another thousand kilometres further to the north. On the way there Gilbert was shocked to learn that two deserters from the Sirius were aboard the Charlotte, having stowed away before it left Sydney – this despite the ship having been searched twice by the marines before leaving. Gilbert said he protested 'against their conduct' but that they had sailed too far to take the men back and said he would 'swear an affidavit' to the British authorities at the earliest opportunity – though there is no record that he did. A week later the two ships were off Norfolk Island. Here Gilbert had intended landing to collect timber for ships' masts that he hoped to sell in China but, finding 'a tremendous surf on all sides of the island', they decided against trying to land and continued on their journey. For the next month the ships sailed further north in 'hot and sultry' weather with occasional calms and rainy spells, until they came across some islands, one of which Gilbert named Gilbert Island after himself. He named the Marshall Islands after the captain of the Scarborough. While among the islands, they invited aboard a number of natives who had paddled their canoe alongside and despite language difficulties managed a friendly exchange of nails and fish hooks for some local matting and seashells. Deciding against accepting an invitation to go ashore with the natives, the two captains sailed on past other new islands that Gilbert was to name Daniel's, Pedder's and Arrowsmith, and through a passage he would name Fordyce's Passage. He suggested in his journal that all the islands he was passing might 'prove to have safe and convenient harbours' and such 'necessities' as to allow regular trade between New South Wales and China. They had now been sailing for two months, and despite the fresh food from Lord Howe Island and a little more from the Gilbert and Marshall islands, scurvy again became a problem. As Gilbert wrote: 'Captain Marshall informed me that ten of his men were down with scurvy. Having been for so long without procuring refreshment from on shore, that disorder, so fatal to seamen, now began to grow alarming in both ships.' The ships were now in a difficult position. Gilbert admitted he had sailed too far north and calculated that with the onset of the south-west monsoon they would not be able to reach Formosa (Taiwan) and then China until the later north-east monsoon, which was some months away. He also thought that because of the 'sickly state of the crew' they would be unable to reach Japan, where the currents 'were rapid and uncertain' anyway. With no other choice, he decided to turn around and head south. 'I never intended to have gone so far northward. There being no alternative but that of returning southward while we had it in our power to do so.' A week later Captain John Marshall sent the Scarborough's boat across to inform Gilbert that Marshall's brother was dangerously ill with scurvy. Gilbert went across himself with what medicines they had on board. Neither ship had a surgeon, as most of the surgeons who had sailed on the First Fleet were now in Sydney and surgeon Bowes Smyth was on the Lady Penrhyn, which they had last seen off Lord Howe Island. Gilbert found the situation aboard the Scarborough to be serious: Mr. Marshall's case was however very obstinate; he had languished some time under that disorder and as we were not able to make any land, where the sole effective remedy against it could only be obtained, from the benefit of air on shore and from the use of fruit and vegetables, it had now arrived to such a height to deprive him of life. Over the next two weeks the number of cases of scurvy increased and another seaman died. The Charlotte was in as bad a condition as the Scarborough, and as they reached a critical stage Gilbert decided to head for Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, more than two thousand kilometres south of Japan and about two thousand kilometres east of the Philippines: The scurvy had now arrived to such a height among the crew that eleven were unable to move and the remaining part were so exceedingly feeble from the effects of it as scarcely to be able to navigate the ship so that our situation was become extremely critical, which induced me to make the best of my way to the island of Tinian, and this I signified to Captain Marshall. A week later they reached the island, where they quickly found some oranges, coconuts and cabbages and put the sick ashore 'to receive the benefit of land air as soon as possible'. Tarpaulins and sails were used to make a shelter for them, while those who were fit enough went inland to kill wild pigs and birds. After only three days, and worried about the high surf and the reef, they 'with great difficulty' brought the sick aboard again. In the high seas there were not enough able-bodied men to pull in the anchor, so instead the chain was cut. Gilbert noted that this drastic action was taken in the nick of time: Had the ship remained a quarter of an hour longer in the bay, I am fully persuaded, and my officers and the whole ships company are of the same opinion, that she must inevitably have driven ashore upon the reef. The Scarborough made a similarly quick departure, prompting Gilbert to admit that he had been 'obliged to forego all the benefits' he had hoped for as they had left before collecting enough fresh food, and the sick had not had time to recover. Three weeks later the Lady Penrhyn would also stop at Tinian Island and find the Charlotte's anchor buoy. For the next few weeks the two ships sailed on towards China, treating their sick with wine and 'such other anti scorbutic' as they had on board. On 3 September, almost four months after leaving Sydney, they sighted Bashi Island, north of the Philippines and south of the islands of Formosa and Grafton. According to Gilbert Bashi Island had been named by Captain James King, who had taken command of the Resolution on his way back to England after Cook had been killed in 1779 in Hawaii. A week later, on 9 September, the Charlotte reached Macao. Macao was the Portuguese island port on the mouth of the river leading to Canton. Gilbert noted that the city, like most of the Portuguese Empire, was in decline, having been 'formerly richer and more populous than it is at present' and having 'lost much of its ancient consequence'. The Charlotte would soon be joined there by the Scarborough and, in the following month, by the Lady Penrhyn. They would load up a 'valuable cargo of teas and china ware' and sail for England. Incredibly, despite the scurvy that afflicted and killed many on the other ships, Gilbert was to boast that not one crew member had died of the disease on the Charlotte. His only fatality occurred after the ship reached Macao, when the boatswain died and was buried on Dean's Island. This death, Gilbert insisted, had less to do with the ship and more to do with the boatswain's excessive drinking once they had reached the shore. The Lady Penrhyn, which had left Sydney for China the day before the Charlotte and the Scarborough and arrived in Macao a month later, had experienced its own difficulties en route. Lieutenant John Watts, aboard the Lady Penrhyn, kept an account of the journey. He had sailed as a midshipman with Captain James Cook's third voyage on the Resolution, being promoted during the expedition to able seaman. According to the Naval Chronicle of 1801 Watts had been tattooed all over his body by natives of the Pacific islands he had visited in the course of the voyage with Cook. Watts recorded that a month after leaving Sydney and passing the islands that were to be named the Macaulay Islands and the Curtis Islands, scurvy broke out on the Lady Penrhyn and disabled almost the entire crew: The scurvy now began to spread very fast among the crew, and by the 6th, they had nine men unable to get out of their hammocks, and many others complained very much: swelled gums, the flesh exceeding black and hard, a contraction of the sinews, with a total debility; were the general appearances. Wine was daily served out to them, and there was sour-krout on board, but the people refused to eat it. From this to the 17th they had little variety; by that time the people were in a deplorable state, for with every person on board, the Captain included, they could only muster ten men able to do duty, and some of them were in a very weakly state: sour-krout, which before had been refused, now began to be sought after, and they had all the Captain's fresh stock, himself and officers living solely on salt provisions. A few days later, and despite being almost halted by a lack of wind followed by frequent heavy storms, the ship managed to reach Tahiti. Its men were told they were the first white people to visit the island since Cook had been there more than a decade earlier. The natives, who remembered Cook, were pleased to see the Lady Penrhyn and brought fresh food to the stricken crew: When anchored they had only three men in one watch, and two in the other besides the mates, and two of these ailing; the rest of the crew were in a truly deplorable state. Their first care was naturally to procure some refreshments, and it was a pleasing circumstance for them to see the natives flock round the ship, calling out 'Tayo Tayo,' which signifies friends; and 'Patri no Tutti,' Cook's ship; and bringing in very great plenty cocoa nuts, breadfruit, plantains and taro, and a fruit known by the name of the Otaheite apple; they also brought some hogs and fowls. The Tahitians' friendliness was in spite of the fact that they had suffered from the earlier visit of the English. According to Watts: Great numbers of the natives had been carried off by the venereal disease, which they had caught from their connections with the crews of the Resolution and Discovery; nor were the women so free from this complaint as formerly, especially the lowest class, the better sort seemingly not wishing to hazard the catching so terrible a disorder. Within a few weeks and with access to plenty of fresh food, the diseased crew, 'who had recovered in a most astonishing manner', were once again able to work the ship. The Lady Penrhyn was by no means the first ship to enjoy sexual experiences with the Tahitians, and it was with the crew's 'great reluctance' that Captain Sever ordered the ship to depart on its next leg to the Society Isles. After stopping at a number of other nearby islands, the ship loaded a huge amount of food, including sixty large pigs, fifty piglets, a hundred and fifty chickens, a large quantity of coconuts, green vegetables, sugar cane, taro and yams, and about a hundred pumpkins. Watts said the crew were not only perfectly recovered, but also, with so much fresh food aboard, they had every 'reason to hope that they would not be any more alarmed for their safety'. On 15 September they stopped on Saypan Island in the Marianas, having seen bullocks grazing on the shore, and brought aboard a young steer. Ten days later they reached Tinian Island and saw in the water a buoy with a severed anchor chain and a sign identifying it as belonging to the Charlotte, indicating it had passed this way some time before. Stopping again, they loaded aboard more fresh food, including pigs and chickens and some green breadfruit and guavas, limes and 'sour oranges', which was enough to last them until they reached Macao on 19 October. In all, their journey from Sydney had taken them a little more than five months. Finally, loaded with their East India Company cargo of chinaware and tea, the three ships sailed from Macao in November 1788 and arrived back in London the following April. This was a month later than three of the other ships of the First Fleet, which had left Sydney the previous July and sailed a more direct route to England. These three ships were the Alexander, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale. They sailed from Sydney on 13 and 14 July 1788 with the Friendship, but the latter ship would not reach England. When planning their route back to England, the masters of the four ships had considered going south from Sydney, east under New Zealand and then below Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. However, the season was thought to be too far advanced for them to attempt this southern course, and the passage by Cape Horn was objected to by the governor. It was winter in the southern hemisphere and the ships would not be able to sail in the high latitudes, so it was decided they should head north up the east coast of Australia, then west either through the Endeavour Straits or even further north above New Guinea. When the ships reached the top of Australia, they took the more northerly course, tracking the route charted by Captain Carteret of the Royal Navy some ten years earlier. This would take them between New Britain and New Ireland, off the east coast of Papua New Guinea. Although the dangers of scurvy were well known, the settlement in Sydney was itself already short of fresh food when the ships departed, and, like the Charlotte, the Lady Penrhyn and the Scarborough, they were unable to take with them any food that would have helped keep scurvy at bay. All the ships had left England with portable soup, but even this was now almost totally exhausted. Portable soup was made from boiling meat, offal and vegetables into a thick paste, which was then dried out and cut into cakes, like modern-day stock cubes. The soup was prepared on board by dissolving the tablets in boiling water. It was presumed that the four ships would regularly stop after leaving Sydney and collect fresh vegetables and fruit on the islands they passed. For various reasons this did not occur, and it was to have terrible consequences. The ships were under the command of Captain John Shortland, the First Fleet's naval agent, who sailed on the Alexander. The Friendship, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale went ahead, as the Alexander required some last-minute preparations. It was agreed that the ships would rendezvous at Lord Howe Island. Two days after leaving Sydney, the ships were struggling against the wind and spent the day and evening tacking first into a north-west wind and later to the east-south-east. By midnight the Alexander could see only the Friendship and had lost sight of the Borrowdale and the Prince of Wales. Shortland, although still hoping to join up with the other ships, decided to press on in an easterly direction. However, after encountering more difficult weather, he abandoned the planned rendezvous and headed off with the Friendship in a more northerly direction. They were not to sight either the Prince of Wales or the Borrowdale for the rest of the voyage. Shortland ordered the Alexander and the Friendship to head north to Carteret Harbour in New Ireland, which had been discovered and charted by Captain Phillip Carteret in 1768. After being at sea for nearly four weeks, they arrived at the harbour to be met by a number of canoes carrying natives bearing 'rind of an orange or a lemon, the feathers of tame fowls and other things that might be procured on shore'. One of the natives handed up to Captain Shortland what he thought to be a breadfruit. Despite their fresh food being all but exhausted and knowing that a variety of fruit could be purchased here, Shortland decided to press on, failing to see how vital the food would ultimately become to his crew. This was a big mistake, as Shortland was later to confess: From what was seen in the possession of these people, there can be no doubt that their land produces cocoa-nuts, breadfruit bananas, and most other vegetables of the Society and Friendly Isles. Nor was it without the greatest regret that I declined the invitations of the natives and proceeded without touching for refreshments, which doubtless might have been obtained in plenty but the length and uncertainty of the passage seemed to forbid the least delay; nor was it at this time foreseen how much superior to every other consideration the acquirement of a wholesome change of diet would be found. So the ships pressed on with their food stocks depleted, and Shortland continued with the detailed mapping of his route. A month later they passed through the straits that separate the Bougainville and Choiseul islands, on the northern end of the Solomon Islands chain. Inevitably the scurvy arrived with a vengeance, affecting first the crew of the Alexander and then those on the Friendship. Five of the Alexander's crew were unable to work and complained of soreness in their legs and difficulty breathing. Their gums were sore and bleeding and their teeth so loosened they could only eat the rice and flour from their rations with difficulty. As they approached the equator and the weather became hotter and more sultry, the scurvy on the Alexander spread among the crew, despite efforts to control it including smoking the ship and washing it down with vinegar, and issuing the crew increased rations of beer, port and wine. They passed the Palau Islands on 11 September and, seeing cocoa palms on a small island, lowered a boat from each of the ships to fetch fresh fruit and vegetables for the sick. Duncan Sinclair, the master of the Alexander, was on one of the boats and complained that they were only able to acquire about thirty green coconuts before he felt sufficiently threatened by the natives on the island that he 'returned as expeditiously as I could'. By the end of September most of the Alexander's crew were now disabled with the illness and men began to die. The Friendship, which till now had fared better, was also reporting that fewer men were able to work. On 27 September the Alexander neared Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Two weeks later the fleet was to the west of Borneo when the Friendship struck a reef but was pulled off without incurring any serious damage. By now eight men on the Alexander had died and the ship was reduced to two men in each watch; there were only four men and two boys still fit for duty. The Friendship had only five men left who were able to work the ship. In an attempt to get as many of the sick to work as possible, the crew were offered double pay when the ship reached Batavia (present-day Jakarta). By the time another two weeks had passed, it was no longer possible to sail both ships any further. The masters of the ships, Duncan Sinclair of the Alexander and Francis Walton of the Friendship, agreed to abandon the smaller Friendship and transfer all the surviving crew to the Alexander on condition that Walton be allowed half the freight of the Alexander when the ship reached England. It took four days for the remaining able-bodied men to transfer the supplies across from the Friendship to the Alexander, then the Friendship was bored with holes and set adrift to sink. The Alexander sailed on and passed Pamanookan on northern Java on 5 November. They had now been at sea for almost four months with virtually no fresh food, and by now only one sailor and the officers were physically capable of going aloft to handle the ship's sails. To add to their woes, later that day four boats flying Dutch and Portuguese colours chased them. Three of the boats had eighteen oars and the other either twelve or fourteen, and Shortland says he had no doubt they meant to seize the Alexander. Throughout the day every effort was made, by both the healthy and the sick, to hoist more sail and outrun their pursuers. Shortland eventually ordered the ship's guns to be fired over the pursuers' heads, after which they pulled away and headed for shore. On 19 November, as they limped towards the port of Batavia, the fatigued crew were unable to sail further when the wind dropped. The Alexander dropped its anchor between the islands of Alkmara and Leyden at the mouth of Batavia, fired its gun and signalled for assistance. At first no help came, but the next day a passing Dutch ship sent six sailors over to help sail the stricken ship into port, and the following day it sent over fresh food. When the ship finally moored in Batavia, the sick were sent to the local hospital, 'where several of them died, being too far gone for any accommodation or skill to recover'. The Alexander finally left Batavia on 6 December on the next leg of its journey to Cape Town, with only four of the original crew – the rest were either dead or had not yet recovered. When the Alexander reached Cape Town on 18 February 1789, its crew encountered the Sirius, which had left Sydney the previous October, some three months after the Alexander. The Sirius, under the command of Captain Hunter, had already been in Table Bay for six weeks, picking up urgently needed food to take back to Sydney. Hunter had heard reports of the misfortune of the Alexander and the Friendship from a Dutch frigate that had earlier arrived in Cape Town from Batavia: On the 19th January a small Dutch frigate arrived here from Batavia from which I learned Lieutenant Shortland had arrived at that port with a single ship, about the beginning of December in a very distressed condition, that he had buried the greatest part of the ships company and was assisted by the officers and the company of the above frigate to secure his vessel and hand the sails, which could not have been done without assistance, and that he had been reduced to the necessity, some time before his arrival, to sink the other vessel, which was in company with him for the purpose of managing one out of the remaining part of the two ships companies, without which he never could have reached Batavia with either: for when he arrived there he had only four men, out of two crews who were capable of standing on deck. A month later, as Hunter was leaving Table Bay, the Alexander limped into the port: On the 18th of February, to my no small satisfaction (for I was preparing to sail the next day), Mr. Shortland arrived in the Alexander transport. I was going off from the shore, when I discovered the ship coming round Green Point; I rowed directly on board, and his people were so happy to see their old friends in Table-Bay, that they cheered us as we came alongside. I now received from Mr. Shortland an exact confirmation of all the intelligence which I had received concerning him from the officers of the Dutch frigate. Hunter had also heard what had happened to the other two ships, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale, which had become separated from the Friendship and the Alexander off the New South Wales coast some seven months earlier. Two English ships had been seen in Rio de Janeiro, and their crews were also in a terrible condition. From the description given to him, Hunter was in no doubt that the ships were the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale: A Dutch ship arrived here from Rio de Janeiro. By this ship I received information of the arrival at that place of two vessels from the east coast of New Holland, that had arrived singly, and in very great distress, from sickness, and death of many of their people, that the first which arrived, had her name on her stern (Prince of Wales – London) from which circumstances there could be no doubt of its being one of our transports. The other vessel was also well described that I knew it to be the Borrowdale store ship. The officers of this India ship observed further that they were so weak that had they not been boarded by boats without the harbour, they had been unable to bring their vessels to safety. The Borrowdale and Prince of Wales, after losing contact with the Alexander and Friendship, had taken the other route after all. Even though it had been decided in Sydney before they left that they should return to England by heading west back to Cape Town, the two private transports had gone the easterly route around Cape Horn. Hunter was told that there was so much 'sickness and death' on the ships in Rio de Janeiro that the crew were unable to sail any further and had to be helped into Rio's harbour. The Borrowdale and the Prince of Wales, with their depleted crews and some additional seamen they signed on in Rio de Janeiro, would finally reach England in March 1789. The Alexander left Table Bay on 16 March 1789 and arrived at the Isle of Wight in England on 28 May. By any measure the voyage of the Alexander and the Friendship had been calamitous. They had lost contact with the other two ships, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale, within two days of leaving Sydney; they had failed to rendezvous at Lord Howe Island; and they had also failed to ensure they were carrying sufficient quantities of fresh food. These events and mistakes saw almost all of the crew dead or incapacitated and required the scuttling of a perfectly good ship, the Friendship. Shortland, however, would be congratulated on his leadership because he was able to provide detailed charts and maps of his journey – even though earlier explorers, including Carteret and Bougain, had mapped much of it before. The arrival of the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale in England, with the first news of the First Fleet since its arrival in Botany Bay more than a year before, attracted widespread public interest and extensive coverage in the newspapers in England. The first news had been brought back on the Prince of Wales, but England would have to await the arrival of the Borrowdale to read Arthur Phillip's more extensive dispatches. The General Evening Post reported on 24 March that 'The Prince of Wales from Botany Bay arrived at Falmouth, brings an account of the fleet being all safe arrived at Botany Bay'. The same day the Whitehall Evening Post reported that 'The two ships of war, the Sirius and the Supply' and the convict transports 'had made good their voyage to Botany Bay'. The paper went on to say that Arthur Phillip's dispatches for the British Government were on the Borrowdale, which had not yet reached England. Similar stories ran the same day in the Evening Advertiser and the London Advertiser, and in The Times three days later. Within two days the Borrowdale arrived carrying Arthur Phillip's reports and dispatches, and far more detailed stories appeared in a number of papers, including the General Evening Post, the London Chronicle, the Advertiser and the Whitehall Evening Post. The reports covered details of the voyage of the First Fleet, the decision to abandon Botany Bay, the clearing of land in Sydney Cove for the new settlement, a description of the 'bushy' bearded and 'fuzzy' haired Aboriginal people, kangaroos ('as big as sheep'), bird life, soil and climate. On 27 March the Evening Advertiser reported that a copy of Phillip's first dispatches was being sent to King George III, 'by royal command, for the perusal of his Majesty'. Until now all the stories had reported positively on the expedition. Indeed, on the same day as the story above, the London Advertiser got a little carried away with its description of Sydney, 'where Natures gifts appeared equal to all their wishes – the verdure strong and rich, and the springs of the best water'. However, on 28 March Felix Farley's Bristol Journal reported that the information brought back on the Borrowdale indicated that all was not well in the new settlement: The accounts they bring are far from favourable, they lost all their livestock, the soil is not so good as represented, nor can they prevail on the natives to converse with them, or supply them with provisions, of which they are short. Book publishers were quick to cash in on the public excitement. On 28 March an advertisement appeared in the World for the first of many journals to be published by officers who had sailed on the First Fleet: 'In a few days will be published: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. By Captain Tench of the Marines. Printed by Debrett.' At this time Tench was still in Sydney and he would not return home to England for another three years. He had nevertheless managed to complete his first manuscript and have it taken back on the first available ship for publication in London. The government was quick to react to the news from New South Wales and the positive spin given to the venture in the newspapers. On 30 March it was reported in the Public Advertiser that the government had 'come to the resolution to send out all convicts sentenced to transportation, and all respites, in the next fleet that is to sail for Botany Bay, in order that his Majesty's gaol in the Kingdom may be once cleared'. The last two ships to leave Sydney to return to England were the store ships, the Golden Grove and the Fishburn. Their release had been delayed by the need to build secure storehouses to receive the provisions still held on the ships, particularly on the Fishburn, which had a large quantity of rum aboard that was most at risk of theft. The Fishburn was finally unloaded and ready to depart at the end of September. The Golden Grove, which had been cleared earlier and was waiting on the readiness of the Fishburn, had in the meantime been sent with more settlers to Norfolk Island, returning on 10 October. On 19 November these last two ships left to return to England via Cape Horn. They were the only two contracted ships of the First Fleet that would return without encountering serious misadventure. After reaching England, the Golden Grove worked carrying freight on the London to Jamaica run until it disappeared from the records in 1804. There are no surviving records as to what happened to the Fishburn after its return home. Back in the colony, with all the contracted ships departed and the Sirius off to fetch food, only the little Supply remained, which only added to the sense of isolation felt by the thousand settlers who were struggling to survive at the end of their first year in Sydney.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE

The natives revenge by attacking any stragglers they meet … Relations between the new settlers and the Aboriginal people were characterised by a mutual incomprehension that gradually worsened. The settlers had virtually no knowledge or understanding of the local inhabitants beyond the brief observations of Cook and Banks, who had stayed barely a week in Botany Bay almost eighteen years earlier. The first European encounter with the Aboriginal people on the east coast of Australia came on the day Cook landed in April 1770: As we came in, on both points of the bay, several of the natives and a few huts, men women and children on the south shore abreast of the ship, to which place I went in the boats in hopes of speaking with them, accompanied by Mr. Banks, Dr. Solander, and Tupia a native Polynesian who had voluntarily joined Cook on the Endeavour at Tahiti – as we approached the shore they all made off, except two men, who seemed resolved to oppose our landing. As soon as I saw this I ordered the boats to lay upon their oars, in order to speak to them; but this was to little purpose, for neither us nor Tupia could understand one word they said. We then threw them some nails, beads, etc., ashore, which they took up and seemed not ill pleased with, in so much that I thought that they beckoned to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fired a musquet between the two, which had no other effect than to make them retire back, where bundles of their darts lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us, which caused my firing a second musquetload, with small shot and although some of the shot struck the man, yet it had no other effect than to make him lay hold a target. Immediately after this we landed which we had no sooner done than they throwed two darts at us this obliged me to fire a third shot soon after which they both made off, but not in such haste but what we might have taken one, but Mr. Banks being of opinion that the darts were poisoned made me cautious how I advanced into the woods. Later the same day, when Cook encountered them again, he said they 'all fled at my approach' and in his journal he was later to record that 'I do not look upon them to be a warlike people, on the contrary I think they are a timorous and inoffensive race, no ways inclinable to cruelty.' Banks concurred but in harsher terms. After observing the lack of aggression in the Aboriginal people over a five-day period from the end of April to early May 1770, even when the English provoked them, he was to record in his journal, 'Myself in the woods botanizing as usual, now quite void of fear as our neighbours have turned out such rank cowards.' As we have seen, he elaborated on this theme nine years later when giving evidence to the House of Commons inquiry that had examined Botany Bay as a site for the transportation of convicts: Banks apprehended there would be little possibility of opposition from the natives, as during his stay there in the year 1770, he saw very few and did not think there were above fifty in the neighbourhood, and had reason to believe the country was very thinly populated, those he saw were naked, treacherous, and armed with lances, but extremely cowardly. The Gadigal Aboriginal people around Sydney Cove had no knowledge of the Europeans. The short visit by Cook's party in 1770 had been to Botany Bay, which was mainly inhabited by different tribal groups, and it is unlikely that any of those living around Port Jackson ever saw one of Cook's men. There were almost thirty different Aboriginal groups living within about a forty-kilometre radius of Sydney at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet. There were about ten groups around Port Jackson, with the Gadigal language group predominant around Sydney Cove and on the south of the harbour. There is no reliable count of the local Aboriginal population at the time. Cook had said they were not numerous, and Phillip reported that there might have been about fifteen hundred spread out through the entire Sydney region, including Botany Bay, Port Jackson and Broken Bay and 'the intermediate coast'. Certainly the Aboriginal population in the area was in the hundreds rather than the thousands. The arrival of a thousand European settlers concentrated on Sydney Harbour was to have a devastating impact on the local environment – causing not only a scarcity of resources but also the introduction of diseases that the Aboriginal people had no immunity to. An outbreak of smallpox wiped out a large number of the local people a year after the settlers arrived. Each group or tribe had its own language or dialect and was distinguished by its bodily decorations, songs, dances, tools and weapons. It is believed that there was some migration north and south along the coast, which meant that any one group could understand and communicate with another. There was less mixing between the hinterland and the coast. When the Aboriginal Bennelong, who was from the coastal Wangal group, went with a party of settlers twenty-five kilometres west to Parramatta in 1789, he was unable to understand what the locals were saying. In Governor Phillip's original written instructions from King George III the settlers had been ordered to develop friendly relations with the Aboriginal people: You are to endeavour by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption … it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence. Phillip had himself written of the importance of good relations with the Aboriginal people in his 'vision' of the colony before leaving England: I think it is a great point gained if I can proceed in this business without having any dispute with the natives, a few of which I shall endeavour to persuade to settle near us and who I mean to furnish with everything that can tend to civilize them, and to give them a high opinion of the new guests. Part of this civilisation would require clothing the black man. Within months of arriving Phillip was to write to England seeking food, clothing and blankets for an increasingly desperate colony. At the same time he asked the British Government to send out clothing to cover the Aboriginal people: Clothing for the natives, if sent out will I daresay be very acceptable to them when they are among us. I should recommend long frock and jackets only, which will equally serve men and women. On arrival in New South Wales the governor had given instructions that the Aboriginal people were to be treated in a friendly way. The surgeon George Worgan wrote in his letter of 12–18 June 1788: The governor gave strict orders, that the natives should not be offended, or molested on any account, and advised that wherever, they were met with, they were to be treated with every mark of friendship. In case of their stealing any thing, mild means were to be used to recover it, but upon no account to fire at them with ball and shot. Phillip's colleagues saw little to justify the respect he wanted shown to the locals. Almost all of them were to record negative views about the Aboriginal people, and when their journals were published back in England they would help shape a European view of the Aboriginal people that would last for the next two centuries. Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth believed they were stupid and lazy, and reflected this attitude in comments in his journal: Upon our landing seven or eight of the natives came close up to us – They were all provided with lances of a great length pointed with the bone of a sting ray at one end and a piece of oyster shell at the other, grown or rubbed to a fine edge and one of them had a heavy bludgeon which I persuaded him to exchange with me for a looking glass. They were all perfectly naked rather slender, made of a dark black colour, their hair not wooly but short and curly. – Every one had the tooth next the fore tooth in his upper jaw knocked out, and many of them had a piece of stick about the size of a tobacco pipe and six or eight inches in length run through the septum of the nostrils, to which from its great similitude we ludicrously gave the name of a Sprit Sail Yard. They all cut their backs bodies and arms which heal up in large ridges and scars. They live in miserable wigwams near the water which are nothing more than two or three pieces of the bark of a tree set up sideways against a ridge pole fastened to two upright sticks at each end – they are about two or three feet high, and few amongst them are to be found which are weather proof. Their principal food consists of fish which they in general eat raw – Sometimes they feast upon the kangaroo, but I believe them to be too stupid and indolent a set of people to be able often to catch them: from the appearance of many of the lofty trees we saw, some way up the country having regular steps chopped at about two foot asunder in the bark of the tree quite up to the top where the tree begins to branch out, there is reason to suppose they mount these with large stones where they lie in ambush till some kangaroos come under to graze when they heave the stone upon them and kill them. The 37-year-old Bowes Smyth was one of the first who had sailed with the First Fleet to return to England and publish his journal. He was only in New South Wales for four months before he sailed back on the Lady Penrhyn, which returned to England via Lord Howe Island, Tahiti and China. American seaman Jacob Nagle also provided an early indication of the views of the white settlers about the Aboriginal people: The natives here are the most miserable on the sea coast I ever saw … They have some huts of bark but when the weather is cool, they generally get on the lee side of the harbour in the caves and hollow rocks and they always carry their fire with them to kindle a small fire at the entrance or otherwise in the middle of the cave. They chiefly live on fish. I have seen them have yellow root but it was so noxious and slimy that I could not bear it in my mouth. Not all of the assessments of the Aboriginal people were condescending and dismissive. Watkin Tench acknowledged that the lack of 'advancement and acquisition' might support the view that they 'were the least enlightened and ignorant on earth', but he argued that on more detailed inspection they 'possessed acumen, or sharpness of intellect, which bespeaks genius', citing some of their tools and weapons the manufacture of which 'display ingenuity'. Tench described them as more diminutive and slighter than Europeans, 'especially about the thighs and legs' and doubted that any reached the height of six feet. They wore no clothes, did not wash and if they did, it would 'not render them two degrees less black than an African Colony'. They lived in crude huts that 'consist only of pieces of bark laid together in the form of an oven, open at one end and very low', although long enough for a man to lie full length. They carried lances and stone hatchets and manufactured small fishing nets. The canoes they used to fish were as crude as their huts, 'being nothing more than a large piece of bark tied up at both ends by vines', yet they were experts at paddling for miles out into the open sea. Tench noted that they made their fire by 'attrition', friction from rubbing wood together, and nearly always they carried a fire in the base of the canoes for the immediate cooking of the fish they caught. They cultivated no food and were entirely hunters and gatherers. Tench said that meat was rarely eaten raw, 'unless pressed by extreme hunger', but broiled, with their vegetables, on an open fire. They used no cooking utensils and were fascinated, as has been mentioned earlier, when they first saw meat cooking in a pot on one of the settlers' fires. Their diet was based on fishing, and when fish could not be caught they would collect the oysters and other shellfish around the shores. Tench said they also dug up and ate fern roots and a number of different wild berries. He observed that the Aboriginal people were often hungry, and to alleviate the sensation of hunger they tied a vine ('ligature') tightly around their stomachs. Tench had seen English soldiers do something similar. When given bread by the Europeans, they chewed it before spitting it out. They liked the salted pork and beef they were given, but most would not drink alcohol a second time. Many kept domesticated dingoes. Tench said the women were distant and reserved and most had the two top joints of the little finger of their left hand cut off. The men typically had one of their incisor teeth ceremonially removed, and Tench witnessed it being done to a number of them: The tooth to be taken out is loosened by the gum being scarified on both sides with a sharp shell. The end of a stick is then applied to the tooth, which is struck gently several times with a stone, until it becomes easily moveable, when the 'coup de grace' is given by a smart stroke. Notwithstanding these precautions, I have seen a considerable degree of swelling and inflammation follows the extraction … It is seldom performed on those who are under sixteen years old. The initial contact between the Europeans and the Aboriginal people had been friendly enough. When the fleet landed in Botany Bay, and a few days later in Sydney Cove, the exchanges between them were quite amicable as the English handed out ribbons and trinkets as gestures of friendship. Before the fleet had left Portsmouth, 'toys, ribbons and other trifling articles' were put on board the ships as presents for the Aboriginal people 'in order to preserve their friendship that they will live peaceably with the new settlers'. After only a few months, however, attacks against the settlers were on the rise. Surgeon John White believed that this was in retaliation for the stealing of food and for assaults on the Aboriginal people: 30th May 1788. Captain Campbell of the marines, who had been up the harbour to procure some rushes for thatch, brought to the hospital the bodies of William Okey and Samuel Davis, two rush-cutters, whom he had found murdered by the natives in a shocking manner. Okey was transfixed through the breast with one of their spears, which with great difficulty and force was pulled out. He had two other spears sticking in him to a depth, which must have proved mortal. His skull was divided and comminuted so much that his brains easily found a passage through. His eyes were out, but these might have been picked away by birds. Davis was a youth, and had only some trifling marks of violence about him. This lad could not have been many hours dead, for when Captain Campbell found him, which was among some mangrove-trees, and at a considerable distance from the place where the other man lay, he was not stiff nor very cold; nor was he perfectly so when brought to the hospital. From these circumstances we have been led to think that while they were dispatching Okey he had crept to the trees among which he was found, and that fear, united with the cold and wet, in a great degree contributed to his death. What was the motive or cause of this melancholy catastrophe we have not been able to discover, but from the civility shewn on all occasions to the officers by the natives, whenever any of them were met, I am strongly inclined to think that they must have been provoked and injured by the convicts. By July Captain Tench recorded that the Aboriginal people wanted little to do with the white man. 'They seemed studiously to avoid us,' he said, 'either from jealousy, or hatred.' Eight months after arriving Phillip confessed that the white men knew little of the Aboriginal people and the Aboriginal people resented the white man's presence. He wrote to tell Lord Sydney of an idea he had for the two groups to learn more about each other: I am sorry to have been so long without knowing more of these people but I am unwilling to use any force and hope this summer to persuade a family to live with us, unless they attempt to burn our crops, of which I am apprehensive, for they certainly are not pleased with our remaining among them, as they see we deprive them of fish, which is almost their only support; but if they set fire to the corn, necessity will oblige me to drive them to a greater distance, though I can assure your Lordship that I shall never do it but with the greatest reluctance and from absolute necessity. A month later Phillip was to admit that he thought it unlikely that an Aboriginal family could be persuaded to voluntarily join the white community and it might be necessary to use force to bring them over: I now doubt whether it will be possible to get any of these people to remain with us, in order to get their language without using force; they see no advantage that can arise from us that may make amends for the loss of that part of the harbour in which we occasionally employ the boats for fishing. Shortly after he was to note a further deterioration in relations, when he recorded that the locals were increasingly avoiding the settlers. He thought it was because the convicts had been stealing from them, and they in turn had been attacking and murdering stragglers from the camp: The natives now avoid us more than they did when we first landed and which I impute to the robberies committed on them by the convicts, who steel their spears and fizgigs, which they frequently leave in their huts when they go a fishing and which the people belonging to the transports purchase … This the natives revenge by attacking any stragglers they meet and one of the convicts has been killed since the Sirius sailed. On New Year's Eve of the first year of settlement and, in Tench's words, 'tired of this state of petty warfare and endless uncertainty', Phillip decided that some of the Aboriginal people should be abducted and brought into the white settlement. He believed that bringing them into the settlement would help bridge the language and cultural gap and provide the British with someone who could help communicate with the natives. Lieutenants Henry Ball and George Johnston of the marines were duly ordered to go down to the north side of the harbour to bring back as many Aboriginal people as possible. Watkin Tench described the expedition: Pursuant to his resolution, the governor on the 31st of December sent two boats, under the command of Lieutenant Ball of the Supply, and Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines, down the harbour, with directions to those officers to seize and carry off some of the natives. The boats proceeded to Manly Cove, where several Indians were seen standing on the beach, who were enticed by courteous behaviour and a few presents to enter into conversation. A proper opportunity being presented, our people rushed in among them, and seized two men: the rest fled; but the cries of the captives soon brought them back, with many others, to their rescue: and so desperate were their struggles, that, in spite of every effort on our side, only one of them was secured; the other effected his escape. The boats put off without delay; and an attack from the shore immediately commenced; they threw spears, stones, firebrands, and whatever else presented itself, at the boats; nor did they retreat, agreeable to their former custom, until many musquets were fired over them. When they reached Sydney, the captive caused a lot of excitement when he was brought out of the boat tied up: 'the clamorous crowds flocked around him'. After many 'unsuccessful attempts were made to learn his name', he was called Manly by the Europeans, after the name of the beach where he was abducted. Watkin Tench, who helped bath, dress and feed Manly, recorded the episode in considerable detail: He appeared to be about 30 years old, not tall but robustly made … His hair was closely cut, his head combed and his beard shaved. To prevent his escape, a handcuff with a rope attached to it was fastened around his left wrist, which at first highly delighted him; he called it Ben-gad-ee (or ornament), but his delight turned to rage and hatred when he discovered its use. The next morning, New Year's Day, Manly was taken in a boat down the harbour 'to convince his countrymen that he had received no injury from us'. When they reached Manly, a number of his people came to talk to him and asked why he didn't jump from the boat there and then. 'He only sighed, and pointed to the fetter on his leg, by which he was bound.' Perhaps to compensate for his abduction, Manly was given much more to eat than the standard ration: He dined at the side table at the Governors and ate heartily of fish and ducks, which he first cooled. Bread and salt meat he smelled at but would not taste, our liquors he treated in the same manner and could drink nothing but water. Over the next months Manly settled down and managed to communicate his real name – Arabanoo – but his continued detention failed to cause any significant improvement in the relationship between the settlers and the locals, which, as Tench wrote, had been the entire justification for the abduction: One of the principal effects which we had supposed the seizure and captivity of Arabanoo would produce, seemed as yet as great a distance as ever; the natives neither manifested signs of increased hostility on his account, or ask any explanation … of their countryman who was in our possession. Two months later sixteen convicts left their work at the brick kiln and marched to Botany Bay to steal fishing tackle and spears from the locals. They were attacked. One of the convicts was killed and seven were wounded. Phillip ordered that the survivors be 'severely flogged' in the hope that it would impress the Aboriginal people. However, the gesture backfired, wrote Tench, as the locals were appalled at the sight of the Europeans savagely flogging their own people: 'Arabanoo was present at the infliction of the punishment; and was made to comprehend the cause and necessity of it; but he displayed on the occasion symptoms of disgust and terror only.' In April 1789, more than a year after the arrival of the First Fleet, there was an outbreak of smallpox that was to kill a large number of the Aboriginal people. Some estimates suggest that as much as half the local population died. Only one European perished, a sailor from the Supply. The first symptoms of smallpox included a fever, headaches, joint and muscle pain and a feeling of exhaustion followed by frequent vomiting. After several days of shivering a rash appeared and developed into skin blisters. In severe cases the blisters became so dense as to coalesce into giant pustules. If the individual survived, the pustules left scars or 'pocks', which resulted in the disease being called the 'speckled monster' in the eighteenth century. Death was slow, painful and probably came as a relief for those who were severely affected. Those who were weaker, the very young and the very old died swiftly. Smallpox was a greatly feared disease and an outbreak could spread quickly and kill many people. The first recorded epidemic was in ancient Egypt and seems to have reached Europe around the fifth or sixth century AD. By the eighteenth century it was a regular occurrence in Europe and in the colonies of north America. The process of eradicating smallpox among Europeans had begun with the realisation that survivors could never contract the disease a second time. This led to the process of 'variolation', whereby a healthy person would be deliberately infected with material from someone with the disease in the hope of inducing a mild case of infection and thereby bringing about an immunity. The practice resulted in the death of between two and three per cent of those who were inoculated but saw a dramatic reduction in the number of epidemics. The Aboriginal people had no exposure or resistance to the disease that was to devastate their population. Arthur Phillip noted that some who were infected had left their camp, saying that the disease 'must have been spread to a considerable distance as well as inland and along the coast'. The settlers provided some medical help, and Arabanoo went to the aid of as many of his people as possible. The fetter was removed from his leg so he could move around the area but he too was struck down and died six days later. By this stage Arabanoo had become popular among the settlers. He was buried in the governor's garden, and Phillip and all the officers of the settlement attended the funeral. The white settlers could not account for the outbreak, although it must have been brought into the area by the First Fleet. If it had been carried by one of the new settlers, why hadn't it appeared before now, almost fifteen months after their arrival? And why wasn't it evident among any other of the Europeans? Arthur Phillip speculated as to how the disease could have arrived in the colony: Whether the small pox, which has proved fatal to great numbers of the natives, is a disorder to which they were subject before any Europeans visited this country, or whether it was brought by the French ships, we have not yet attained sufficient knowledge of the language to determine. It never appeared on board any of the ships in our passage, nor in the settlement, until some time after numbers of the natives had been dead with the disorder. Another possibility is that the disease was released from one of the vials that the surgeons had brought as a source of variolation, but the surgeons denied it. After the death of Arabanoo the settlers sought a replacement and conscripted two Aboriginal men, Bennelong (also known as Beneelon) and Colbee, into their service. The two men joined two Aboriginal children, Abaroo and Nanbaree, who were taken into the settlement when their parents died during the smallpox epidemic. Bennelong was to adjust to the white man's environment better than his colleagues. For most of the time he seemed happy to live among the English. He wore their clothes and was an effective liaison between his people and Governor Phillip. As Tench noted, he also enjoyed a drink: He became at once fond of our viands food and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight. He was the only native we knew who immediately showed a fondness for spirits. Bennelong went to live in a little house built by the settlers for him in Sydney Cove. The area later became known as Bennelong Point and provided the site for the Sydney Opera House around a hundred and fifty years later. He was highly regarded by the English, as Tench wrote: His powers of mind were certainly far above mediocrity. He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language, faster than his predecessors had done. He willingly communicated information, sang, danced and capered, told us all the customs of his country, and all the details of his family economy. Love and war seemed his favourite pursuits; in both of which he had suffered severely. His head was disfigured with several scars; a spear had passed through his arm, and another through his leg. Half of one of his thumbs was carried away; and the mark of a wound appeared on the back of his hand. The cause and attendant circumstances of all these disasters, except one, he recounted to us. 'But the wound on the back of your hand, Beenalon. How did you get that'. He laughed and owned that it was received in carrying off a lady of another tribe by force. 'I was dragging her away. She cried aloud and stuck her teeth into me.' Despite being held in regard by the settlers, and initially being happy in the white man's world, Bennelong fled back to his own people early in 1790. Some months later Phillip was told that Bennelong had been seen, and he took a boat with armed marines to recapture him across to Manly Cove on the northern side of Port Jackson where the Aboriginal people were feasting on a beached whale. With the rowers sitting in the boat, Phillip went ashore with his fellow officers carrying gifts for the locals. As a gesture of friendship Phillip withdrew a knife from his belt and threw it on the ground, but it frightened one of the natives, who quickly lifted his spear with his foot and threw it at Phillip. The four-metre lance went through Phillip below the shoulder blade and the barb came out of his back. Phillip and his colleagues hurriedly stumbled down the beach towards the boat. One of the marines, Lieutenant Waterhouse, tried to pull the spear out but, realising it would cause more damage, broke off the shaft instead. As they pulled Phillip onto the boat, the crew fired off a round from their muskets to aid their escape. It took two hours to row back up the harbour. Phillip lay on the floor of the boat, conscious but bleeding, and his colleagues expected him to die. When they reached Sydney Cove, the surgeon William Balmain thought at first that his subclavian artery had been severed, but after treating the wound he saw that the injury was not as serious as he had feared. Bennelong, who had not been involved in the wounding of Phillip, expressed concern at the incident and began calling at Sydney Cove asking after the welfare of the governor. Eventually contact was reestablished and Bennelong moved back to Sydney Cove. When Phillip returned to England in 1792, he took Bennelong and another Aboriginal man, named Yemmerrawanne, with him. Yemmerrawanne was reportedly unhappy in London and became ill and died, but Bennelong seemed to enjoy himself, initially at least. He wore laced shirts and embroidered waistcoats and was a novel figure in British society. In May 1793 he was taken to meet King George III. In London he learned to box, skate and smoke and adopted some of the English manners, including the use of knife and fork, bowing and drinking toasts. After more than two years Bennelong longed to go home, and he returned to Sydney in September 1795. By now he was drinking heavily and constantly fighting, which resulted in his losing the respect of many of his own people. He died a sad figure aged about 50 in 1813. The failure of the Aboriginal people and the Europeans in Australia to understand each other was exacerbated by fundamental differences in their respective societies. The Aboriginal people accepted that different groups had rights to different territory. The Europeans, by contrast, treated all of the land as entirely their own; by their law it now belonged to King George III and to his heirs and successors. Survival in the harsh Australian environment required a sensitive relationship between the people and the land and the sea, yet the First Fleeters took everything they could, depleting the natural food supply and chasing away many of the other animals. The Aboriginal people shared what they had, but the English, committed to the idea of individual property, saw them as scavengers when they asked for food. Over the next two centuries these fundamental differences would disrupt and destroy a civilisation and culture that had survived for thousands of years.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

CRISIS

Famine … was approaching with gigantic strides, and the gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections … Still we were on the tip toe of expectations … every morning from daylight until the sun sank did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail … all our labour and attention were turned to one object – the procuring of food. The First Fleet settlers had struggled in the early days to establish a new home, but over the next two years a growing food shortage was to create a crisis that would threaten the survival of the entire settlement. From the start food was rationed, although it was envisaged that the restrictions would gradually be eased as the colony developed its own food supply. The fleet had sailed with only two years' worth of supplies, and having spent the best part of a year on the voyage out from England it was important that sufficient crops were sown immediately on arrival. But within two months of arriving an assessment of available food stocks resulted in what was to be the first of a series of cuts to the food ration. Over the next two years the standard issue would be progressively reduced to starvation levels. The shortage of food in the settlement was made worse by theft from the public stores. Phillip, who had initially demonstrated a tolerance that raised the eyebrows of even his most loyal officers, now agreed to the most severe treatment of those caught taking food. The governor 'signified … his resolution that the condemnation of anyone for robbing huts or stores should be immediately followed by execution'. It had been hoped that they might have been able to at least partially offset the lack of fresh food with turtle meat. In February of 1788, when Lieutenant Henry Ball had ferried Philip Gidley King and his small party of settlers to Norfolk Island on the Supply, he had brought back from Lord Howe Island sixteen large turtles each weighing more than a hundred and fifty pounds. More of the turtles would have given the settlement a good source of fresh meat. In May Lieutenant Ball was sent back to Lord Howe Island to collect as many as he could load onto the Supply, only to find that the turtles they had seen there earlier had already migrated further north for the winter. According to Surgeon White the return of the Supply to Sydney without any turtles was 'a dreadful disappointment to those who were languishing under the scurvy, many of whom are since dead, and there is great reason to fear that several others will soon share the same fate'. Fishing proved to be erratically successful, and there was the occasional hunted emu or 'stray kangaroo which fortune now and then threw in our way', but by the middle of the first year the settlers became 'utter strangers to the taste of fresh food'. By July White was to complain that illness was aggravated by the lack of vital food. At the time he reported that a total of one hundred and fifty-four marines and convicts were too sick to work: The distress among the troops, their wives and children, as well as among the convicts, who have been ill for want of necessaries to aid the operation of medicines has been most materially and sensibly felt … The articles include sugar, sago, barley, rice, oatmeal, currents, spices, vinegar, portable soup and tamarinds … Constantly living on salt provisions without possibility of change make them more necessary. In the same month Phillip sent the first clear signal to England that the settlement was heading for crisis. In a long letter he told Lord Sydney that the original plan that required the settlers to bring out with them only two years' provisions, after which they would be self-sufficient, had failed. Phillip wrote that he had hoped to 'provide a more pleasing account of our present situation' but that the colony 'must for some years depend on supplies from England'. In his opinion, 'A regular supply of provisions from England will be absolutely necessary for four or five years, as the crops for two years to come cannot be depended on for more than what will be necessary for seeds.' In September Phillip wrote again to say that the first harvest had failed and yielded only enough food to support the colony for a 'few days'. Consequently none of the grain was fed to the settlers but was instead saved as seed for the following year's sowing: It was now found that very little of the English wheat had vegetated and a very considerable quantity of barley and many seeds had rotted in the ground, having been heated in the passage and some much injured by weevils. All the barley and wheat likewise, which had been put aboard the Supply at the Cape were destroyed by the weevil. Phillip also described the sorry state of the colony's livestock: The greatest part of the stock brought from the Cape is dead, and from the inattention of the men who had the care of the cattle, those belonging to the Government and two cows belonging to me are lost … All my sheep are dead and a few only remain of those purchased for Government. The loss of four cows and two bulls falls very heavy. Although the pigs and chickens 'thrive and increase fast', he admitted that: I have now given up all hopes of recovering the two bulls and four cows that were lost, and one sheep only remains of upwards of more than seventy which I had purchased at the Cape on my own account and on Government's account. In July Phillip had written that the failure of the new colony to grow any significant food meant that all of the settlers would be largely dependent for another year on the food that was still in two small storage sheds: 'All the provisions we have to depend on until supplies arrive from England are in two wooden buildings, which are thatched. I am sensible to the risk but have no remedy.' Clothing was also wearing out and replacements running short. As the first winter came, many of the settlers, including the marines, had worn out their shoes and were forced to go about their business barefoot: 'Clothing in this country is full as necessary as in England, the nights and mornings being very cold; and before any supplies can be sent out most of the people will be without shoes, the most necessary article.' Phillip would complain in September: 'The clothes for the convicts are in general bad and there is no possibility of mending them for want of thread; it is the same with shoes, which do not last a month.' The settlement also needed 'some kind of covering' for the children, as children's clothing had never been included in the original planning. The combination of disease and the shortage of food was taking its toll, and more people died in the first eight months after arriving than had died on the eight-month voyage from England: fifty-two had died in the colony by September, compared with forty-eight while sailing from England. Sadly, the dead on land included twenty-three women and children. The marine captain Watkin Tench admitted that before the end of the first year the settlers were increasingly desperate for supplies and living every day in the hope that ships from England would appear with fresh provisions: 'We had long turned our eyes with impatience towards the sea, cheered by the hope of seeing supplies from England approach, but none arriving.' In August, while exploring the head waters of the river that ran from the mountains in the west into Port Jackson, Phillip had found fertile soil and decided to establish a settlement at what was to become known as Rose Hill, thinking that this area might be ideal for the colony's food production. The situation was so urgent in September, though, that with the food stocks declining and 'the fear of not having grain to put into the ground next year', Phillip decided to send Captain Hunter on the Sirius to Cape Town to fetch grain and flour. As Hunter was to record: In the month of September, Governor Phillip signified to me, that it was his intention very soon to dispatch the Sirius to the Cape of Good Hope, in order to purchase such quantities and provisions as she might be capable of taking on board. Before it could leave, the Sirius had to be made shipshape, as its maintenance had 'been much neglected'. For the next month Captain Hunter 'employed an old man, the carpenter's yeoman, and a convict caulker' to help prepare the ship for its voyage. It had originally been planned that the Sirius would be sent to the Cape to collect more livestock, given the losses and death of so much that came with the fleet at the beginning of the year. However, the failure of the first year's harvest in both Sydney and Norfolk Island left the colony with a more immediate need of food; and the Sirius was not large enough to carry both livestock and grain. A month after Hunter left on his quest to southern Africa, the food ration in the colony was reduced by a third. To reach the Cape of Good Hope and return quickly Hunter decided to circumnavigate the globe by sailing east under New Zealand and then under Cape Horn at the bottom of South America before heading east again to reach Sydney: At that season of the year the route to the eastward by Cape Horn promised fairest for an expeditious passage; I therefore steered for the South Cape of New Zealand which I passed on the 12th November and made the coast of Terra del Forego on the 26th November. The voyage was to prove difficult from the start. Within a day of leaving Sydney a major leak was discovered below the waterline that required the water to be pumped out of the Sirius all the way to Cape Town: On the day I sailed from Port Jackson the ship sprang a leak, which admitted two feet four inches water in the four hours but as before my arrival here we had discovered it to be about two or three feet below the wale, starboard side, I hope to have it stopped before I sail on my return to the coast of New South Wales. It appears that the ship's maintenance team of the old man, the carpenter's mate and the convict caulker had not done a good job. Even though it was now approaching the height of the southern-hemisphere summer the prevailing winds took the Sirius in latitudes towards the Antarctic, amid snow and icebergs: 'The weather proved intolerably cold. Ice, in great quantity, was seen for many days; and in the middle of December … water froze in open casks upon the deck in the latitude of forty-four degrees south.' By late November the crew began to be disabled with scurvy. As many of the crew had eaten very little fresh food since they had last been in the Cape of Good Hope on their way to New South Wales the year before, the illness came as no surprise to Hunter. He had nothing on the Sirius for its treatment except for 'a little essence of malt'. Their only hope, he said, was 'for a speedy passage' to their destination, where they would have access to fresh food that would 'reinstate their health'. Aboard the Sirius the American seaman Jacob Nagle described going around Cape Horn at Christmas and passing dangerously close to more than thirty giant icebergs and large pieces of floating ice, which was 'the most dangerous in the night'. He also said they passed whales that were 'very numerous and that were so thick that we could not count them' and their spouting soaked all the crew on deck with spray. Nagle was one of the many crew stricken with scurvy who collapsed. He had to be 'carried below three times in one night'. The disease decimated the crew and 'some died in the sight of the Cape'. The ship finally reached Robben Island, about eight kilometres from the mouth of Table Bay, on New Year's Day 1789. Fresh fruit was immediately brought on board for the sick; the following day they entered Table Bay. Nagle described how he and the others stricken with scurvy tried to eat the fresh fruit: when 'biting an apple, pear or peach the blood would run out of our mouth from our gums'. By the time they arrived at the Cape of Good Hope after roughly ninety days' sailing, more than half of the crew were too ill to work the ship, according to Hunter: When we arrived in this bay, we had just twelve men in each watch, and half that number, from scorbutic contractions in their limbs, were not able to go aloft … Immediately after our arrival, I directed that sick quarters should be provided for the sick, which was done, and the invalids, to the number of forty, were landed under the care of Mr. Worgan, the surgeon of the ship. Hunter was keen to be away with the relief food as soon as possible but was delayed in Cape Town loading the supplies because he had so many sick crewmen. He also had only two little boats to bring the cargo from the shore, 'Governor Phillip having found it necessary to keep the Sirius' long boat and a smaller boat for the use of the settlement, which reduced our number to two six oared cutters'. At the time of their arrival Table Bay was very busy and it was difficult to hire additional boats. Hunter also needed to repair the Sirius, which was still leaking badly. He had the ship 'heeled', or put on its side, and a number of holes plugged, but reported that the ship would need major repair work 'below the wales' when they eventually returned to Port Jackson. Nagle and four other seamen deserted the Sirius in Table Bay, objecting, Nagle said, to the behaviour of the young midshipman who was in charge of the boat that was ferrying and loading food onto the ship: He begin upon the whole boat crew with his rattan without any provocation and being a stripling not more than 15 years of age I told him we would not be treated in such a manner by a boy. When we got on shore, five out of the six left the boat not intending to return any more. Nagle was persuaded to return when Hunter admonished the midshipman and confined him for three weeks to his cabin as punishment, but the other four crewmen disappeared and 'never did return'. Hunter left Table Bay on 20 February 1789, after more than seven weeks in the port. His voyage back to Sydney was even more difficult than that of the previous year, when he had sailed as commander of the slower ships in the First Fleet. This time he did not 'meet with the westerly winds quite so soon as I expected, or as we had done the last time we had made this passage'. When later on the voyage back they finally met with strong winds, the weather closed in so much that they were unable for some days to calculate their exact position: It may not be improper here to observe, that three days had now elapsed without a sight of sun during the day or a star during the night from which we could exactly determine our latitude … the gale not in the least likely to abate, and the sea running mountain high, with very thick weather, a long dark night just coming on, and an unknown coast I may call it, (for although it has been seen by several navigators, it is not yet known) close under our lee; nothing was now left to be done but to carry every yard of canvass the ship was capable of bearing, and for every person on board to constantly keep the deck. After finally rounding Tasmania and heading north, they again encountered strong headwinds and did not reach Port Jackson until early May, having been away seven months. Tench described the relief felt by everyone in the settlement on seeing them: May 1789. At sunset, on the evening of the 2nd instant, the arrival of the Sirius Captain Hunter from the Cape of Good Hope was proclaimed and diffused universal joy and congratulations. The day of famine was at least procrastinated by the supply of flour and salt provisions she brought us. The Sirius had brought vital relief to Sydney, but, after the initial excitement, reality set in. Its cargo of flour was not enough to make up for all the other declining food stocks of the colony. David Collins captured the disappointment: 'The Sirius brought one hundred and twenty seven thousand weight of flour for the settlement … but this supply was not very flattering as the short space of four months at a full ration, would exhaust it.' If the first year for the colony had been difficult, the second year was to be much worse. Theft of food from the stores and from other people was rife, as was pillaging from the vegetable gardens before the food was ripe for harvest. Increased punishments, including executions, could not control it. In March 1789 six marines were caught stealing large quantities of food and grog from the public store. Nobody seemed to notice that the stores had been gradually depleted for 'upwards of eight months' or that the marines had excessive amounts of alcohol that they shared with some of the convict women. The scheme was uncovered when one morning the commissary was conducting the usual inspection of the food store and found a broken piece of key stuck in the lock. The locksmith identified it as belonging to a marine private named Joseph Hunt, who had regularly been in trouble in the settlement. Hunt turned and gave evidence against the other marines. They had had the key made so that when one of them was posted at night to guard the store, he would allow the others entry to steal food and grog. If a night patrol passed the store while the thieves were inside, 'the door was found locked and secure' with the guard outside and the 'store apparently safe'. On Friday 27 March all six marines were hanged on a scaffold that had been built between the storehouses. In August a convict called John Harris persuaded Judge David Collins and Arthur Phillip to establish a night watch from among the more trusted convicts – and so Australia's first police force was formed, though it is not clear if it made any difference to the level of thefts. By the beginning of November in the second year of the settlement the standard rations of flour, salted meat and peas or rice were reduced again. By now everyone knew that the settlement was in a state of crisis, and all attention was focused on where the next intake of food would come from. Watkin Tench wrote: Famine … was approaching with gigantic strides, and the gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections, and adopted the most extravagant conjectures. Still we were on the tip toe of expectations … every morning from daylight until the sun sank did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded and the telescope was lifted to the eye … all our labour and attention were turned to one object – the procuring of food. By the end of 1789, two and a half years after leaving England and nearly two years after arriving at Sydney, the only food in addition to that which had been brought with them had been the few months' supply of flour brought by the Sirius and some very small harvests of locally grown crops. The settlement was running out of other supplies as well. Towards the end of 1789 the colony ran out of candles 'so that everyone was obliged to go to bed the moment it was dark'. On 1 November 1789, following a calculation of the remaining food, a decision was made to further cut the food ration: 'Every man from the Governor to the convict' had their ration cut by a further third – except for women feeding babies. By the end of December the new settlement at Rose Hill had, thankfully, registered its first decent harvest – two hundred bushels of wheat and thirty-five bushels of barley. By comparison Sydney Cove only produced twenty-five bushels of grain, which vindicated Phillip's decision to establish the new settlement. Welcome though the harvest was, for the hungry mouths of Sydney it was not to be enough. By early in the new year the flour they had brought from England had completely run out and they were forced to begin eating into the modest supply that had been brought back from the Cape of Good Hope. By May the following year almost all the food in the colony would be gone. In the letters written from Sydney Cove in 1788 Phillip had asked for the urgent supply of additional food and provisions but also for convicts who had skills required in the colony and overseers to supervise the convicts at work. In April 1789 Lord Sydney had written to the lords of the Admiralty to say that King George III had authorised the urgent dispatch of a supply ship to relieve the colony: The letters which have been received from Captain Phillip Governor of New South Wales representing that a great part of the provisions sent out with him to the settlement lately made upon the coast has been expended and that there is an immediate occasion for a further supply, together with certain articles of clothing, tools, implements for agriculture, medicines etc …. His Majesty has given orders that one of his ships of war of two decks, with only her upper tier of guns, shall forthwith be got ready to carry out the said provisions and stores. Within a month the Admiralty had responded by appointing Lieutenant Edward Riou as captain of the HMS Guardian, which would take fresh supplies to New South Wales. The Guardian had been built five years earlier in the Limehouse shipbuilding docks in London, a big forty-four-gun naval frigate. At one hundred and forty feet long (forty-two and a half metres), it was bigger than all the ships of the First Fleet. When it was converted for transporting cargo, and the guns on the lower decks taken out, it was capable of carrying more than nine hundred tons of food and other supplies. The 27-year-old Riou had joined the navy as a 14-year-old midshipman in 1776 and had sailed with Cook on his third great voyage up the west coast of America. He later served on the Romney under Vice-Admiral John Montague in the British North Atlantic station and was promoted to lieutenant in 1780. The Admiralty had also instructed that twenty-five convict tradesmen and farmers be sent out in response to Phillip's request for more convicts with skills to further the development of the settlement. This was to be the first time that convicts were chosen because they might be suited to serving out their sentences in the new colony. Another of Phillip's concerns was addressed by the Admiralty, who had been asked by Lord Sydney to ensure that convict overseers also be sent on the Guardian. Phillip had complained that the convicts had no effective supervision, since the marine officers refused to oversee the convicts at work and relying on other convicts as supervisors had not succeeded: About eight to ten persons should also be engaged and take their passage in the said ship, to be employed as overseers of the convicts. These measures … have been strongly recommended by Captain Phillip … from having found by experience that the convicts placed as overseers have not been able to enforce their orders and carry that command which persons in a different situation would be likely to do. The overseers who sailed on the Guardian included Philip Divine and Andrew Hume, who had been supervisors of convicts in the hulks at Woolwich, John Barlow, who had served as an officer in the army, and John Thomas Dodge, a former surveyor, gardener and commander of an American merchant ship. In addition to being loaded with food and other provisions the Guardian was to have a special shed built on its quarterdeck for trees and plants that were to be transplanted in Sydney. This addition was the result of botanist Joseph Banks' direct lobbying of King George III, who gave instructions for it to be built and two gardeners sent on the ship: Having laid before the King a letter from Sir Joseph Banks, proposing that a small coach may be erected on the quarterdeck of the Guardian for the purpose of conveying to Port Jackson in pots of earth such plants and trees as will be useful in food or physique and cannot conveniently be propagated by seed … I am commanded to signify your Lordships pleasure … that you do give orders that it may be immediately erected. It took several months to organise, transport and load the supplies onto the Guardian – almost a thousand tons in all. The cargo included a large amount of grain, ninety-three pots containing vegetables, herbs and fruit, and livestock, including sheep, horses, cattle, goats, rabbits and poultry. Also on board were the twenty-five 'artificers', or qualified convict tradesmen, and ten agricultural supervisors, or overseers. The Guardian had been due to sail at the end of June 1789 but was delayed and did not leave until 12 September. By the time the Guardian left Portsmouth, the Lady Juliana, the first of the Second Fleet ships, carrying more than two hundred women convicts, had already been gone a month. However, by sailing the more direct route down the African coast rather than going across the Atlantic, the Guardian was able to overtake the Lady Juliana and reached Cape Town on 24 November while the Lady Juliana was still in Rio de Janeiro. At the Cape of Good Hope Riou was made further aware of the plight of the colonists in New South Wales when he was told how John Hunter had been there in the Sirius earlier in the year, using Admiralty bills of credit to buy much-needed food before hurrying off with the supplies for the hungry settlement. Realising the urgent need for his relief supplies, Riou wasted no time in topping up, loading the ship with more cattle and horses as well as one hundred and fifty fruit trees, before leaving Cape Town on 11 December. They had stayed in port for only two weeks. As Christmas approached, the Guardian was making good time. It was more than a thousand kilometres to the east and south of Cape Town, deep in the Great Southern Ocean, sailing in fresh breezes and surrounded by fog and large 'islands of ice', as Riou described. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, in need of drinking water for both the crew and the livestock, the Guardian lowered its small boats over the side. According to the master of the ship, Clements: 'The cutter and the jolly boats were hoisted out and sent with a petty officer and a boats crew in each to gather up the broken pieces of ice, which were floating at a distance from the main body.' The ship's captain, Edward Riou, was well aware of the hazards of sailing in these waters and noted the conditions in his journal: We found the great emission of fog from this mountain of ice darken the hemisphere to the leeward of it … The horizon became clouded all around and in less than a quarter of an hour we were again shut up in a thick, close general mist and scarce able to see the ship's length before us. From this it was apprehended there were many more such islands of ice floating in these seas, which appeared very dangerous. At 7.45 pm, as the watch was changing, the Guardian crashed into an iceberg. Clements recalls that as it happened he was handing over the watch to Mr Harvey, the master's mate, and had just remarked 'how much more dreadful it would be to be ship wrecked before an island of ice than among rocks, when the noise reached the cabin and gave the fatal signal of failure'. As the ship shook from end to end, Riou ran immediately up onto the deck. 'The scene appeared abysmal beyond relief' the front of the Guardian had wedged under a giant iceberg that appeared to be twice as tall as the mainmast of the ship. It was quickly established that the rudder had broken away and the tiller was broken in two places, but the extent of any damage below the waterline was not yet apparent. As Clements was to later recall: When at last the sails filled she began to forge off but struck again and continued crashing on the ice underneath her until she at last got clear … The wind was blowing hard and we soon lost sight of the ice. Our spirits then gained new vigour and served to supply fresh strength. The joy was short-lived, however, because within half an hour it was discovered that there was more than two feet of water in the hold, and the water level was rising fast. All available hands were put to the pumps, but they were unable to stem the rise. To lighten the ship Riou immediately ordered the crew to jettison as much of the cargo as possible that was destined for New South Wales: 'All hands that could be spared were set to work to clear the deck of cattle, booms, the hay, gun carriages, bows and spare anchors, and below decks aft, of provisions.' By nine o'clock at night the pumps were all at work but the water level had risen in the hold to over three feet and gaining. At ten the water reached five feet and men were tiring at the pumps, so they were split into two shifts to work alternately every half-hour, with breaks in between: The captain ordered refreshments to be allocated to each man, taking particular care that the grog should not be made too strong. Every man received the first supply with biscuits and cheese, which seemed to give them fresh spirits to return to their laborious duty. The rum was soon nearly expended but the captain thought it would be extremely dangerous to open the hold to get at more, for fear the men's getting at it; wine and water was accordingly given in lieu of it. At midnight the water level reached six feet and 'it was blowing a strong gale and an immense sea was running'. All night long the crews continued to pump and by sunup the next morning – Christmas Day – at last the water level below decks began to fall. By that afternoon the crew were exhausted: 'About this time the crew became almost unable to perform any duty, from their limbs being benumbed by the frequent transition from the heat of labour and having rested in wet clothes.' By five in the afternoon the water had risen again, and Riou severely bruised his hand when it was crushed by a crate they were endeavouring to throw over the side. By 4 am on Boxing Day the water level was nearing seven feet for the first time. To make matters worse, during the night the topsails, which had been left unattended, were torn to pieces 'by the violence of the wind and the ship was left to the entire mercy of a most tremendous sea'. Up to this point the crew had not been told of the seriousness of their predicament, but around six o'clock on the morning of Boxing Day the ship's carpenter came up and reported that the water was as high as the orlop, or lowest deck, and gaining about a foot every hour. A number of the crew, already exhausted, resigned themselves to the inevitable sinking of the ship and certain death and broke into the rum store: 'A few of the more profligate escaped with utmost vigilance and secreted themselves below, where they got intoxicated with liquor and became insensible of their danger.' Amazingly, while all this was going on, Riou went to his cabin and wrote a letter to the Admiralty in which he declared 'there seems to be no possibility of my remaining many hours in this world' and praised all the crew for their honourable conduct. No mention was made of the fact that a number of crew were comatose with alcohol: If any part of the officers or crew of the Guardian should ever survive to get home, I have only to say their conduct after the fatal stroke against an island of ice was admirable and wonderful in everything that related to their duties, considered either as private men or on his Majesty's service. By evening, when the water was up to the lower gun deck and it appeared the ship was about to sink, everyone on board was given the option of abandoning ship and going aboard one of the five small boats. Riou decided to go down with his ship: 'As for me, I have determined to remain in the ship and shall endeavour to make my presence useful as long as there is any occasion for it.' The boatswain was ordered to make sure every little boat had oars, a mast and a sail, a compass, a cask of water and 'other necessities', but their loading proved to be extremely difficult and resulted in panic and chaos. A number of the little boats were buffeted against the side of the ship in the high seas: We then set to work and hoisted out the cutter on the starboard and lee side and afterwards the other boats on the booms; they were all fortunately got into the water with very little damage but the sea was immensely high and it was with great difficulty they were kept from being stove to pieces along side. The largest boat was quickly adrift of the Guardian. It had only seven men aboard, but no food or water. In desperation a number of the men jumped into the icy water trying to reach the boats. According to Riou, 'If these men lived out the day it would be the utmost: indeed, I am inclined to think they could have survived a few minutes.' Clements, on one of the boats, watched one of the others sink and then lost sight of another. Sixty-two men of the original one hundred and twenty-three stayed on board the Guardian, either because they could not safely board one of the lifeboats or because they thought their chances of survival were better trying to keep the Guardian afloat. Among those who stayed was Thomas Pitt, the nephew of the prime minister, two midshipmen, the ship's carpenter, the surgeon's mate John Fairclough, thirty seamen and boys, twenty-one convicts and three of their supervisors. Of the five small boats, only one was ever heard of again. Among its fifteen survivors was Clements, who would later record their nine-day ordeal in an open boat in freezing conditions. He described how they boarded late in the afternoon on Boxing Day in squally and cloudy conditions and tried to head 'as much northward as the sea would allow' but finally lost sight of the only other boat that they still had contact with. There was very little drinking water, so they rationed it out in the bottom of a tobacco canister at the rate of about two gills, or a little less than a quarter of a litre, for each person each day. After four days they were running out of food and divided 'our last fowl … and received a small thimble of rum each'. By New Year's Eve, according to Clements, they were so thirsty that 'many people this day drank their urine'. There was still some cheese and ham on board but it remained uneaten: We could not eat the smallest crumb till supplied with additional measure of water to moisten our lips. We dropped our bit of biscuit into the water and afterwards sipped a little of it with each mouthful to force it down. On 4 January 1790 they sighted a ship about four hundred kilometres east of Natal off the east coast of Africa: One day more of such misery as we suffered in the last twelve hours, would have certainly terminated the lives of some, and the others must soon after have paid their debts to nature. At day break the gunner, who was then at the helm, discovered a ship at a little distance from us … Our joy at this sight was great beyond expression. It was a French ship, the Viscountess of Brittany, which was on its way to the Cape from India. Fifteen days later the survivors were landed safely back in Table Bay, which they had left nearly two months earlier. Meanwhile, it was thought that the Guardian had sunk, and when the news reached London The Times reported that 'The Captain made every exertion possible to save the ship' but 'with the rest of the crew are all supposed to have perished'. However, Riou and sixty-one of the remaining crew who had stayed on the waterlogged ship somehow stayed afloat for two months, travelling without an effective rudder at a maximum speed of barely four knots. By the end of the first week in January the water was above the lower deck as the exhausted crew continued to pump it out. For several weeks the ship drifted across the Indian Ocean to the south of Cape St Mary in Madagascar and back towards Africa. On 21 February, two months after it began sinking, the Guardian was seen by a passing Dutch packet boat that was carrying mail from the Spice Islands and Batavia back to Europe. The Dutch ship was 'providentially steering a high southerly latitude' and assisted the half-sunken Guardian back to the Cape of Good Hope. The ship was now beyond repair, with a large part of its hull missing and much of its structure torn away. Riou reported to the Admiralty that repairing the ship would be pointless, the 'cost would be so immense, together with refitting her, as to exceed the value of a new ship'. On 12 April the disabled vessel was torn from its moorings in a fierce gale and beached, and the cargo that had not been thrown overboard was salvaged and put ashore. Over the next three months first the Lady Juliana and then the three convict transports from the Second Fleet – the Neptune, the Surprize and the Scarborough – arrived in Cape Town and were ordered to take aboard some of the Guardian's salvaged supplies 'from Lieutenant Riou for use in the colony'. Salvaged items that finally reached Sydney included leather, clothing, linen and two hundred casks of flour, but much of what was vitally needed in the colony, including salt, rice, oatmeal, sugar and medicines, was 'perfectly spoilt and useless', according to Riou's letter to Lord Stephens of the Admiralty. In the same letter Riou praised the surviving twenty convicts who had stayed on the stricken ship and who were now to be sent on with the Second Fleet to Sydney to complete their sentences. As a result of these representations the British Government authorised their pardons, provided they did not return to England until their time for transportation was completed. Of the overseers and qualified convict tradesmen who had been sent on the Guardian at Phillip's request, only five made it to Sydney on the Lady Juliana: Of the five superintendents who have arrived only one is a farmer, two say they were used to the farming business when they were 17 and 19 years of age but they cannot … instruct the convicts or direct a farm; and we are in great want of a good master carpenter, brick and tile master. Prior to the arrival of the Lady Juliana in early June 1790 the Sydney Cove settlers had been forced to cut the food rations again. The previous November the ration had been cut by a third. In April, in the absence of any relief, it had been cut to half the standard ration, and many in the colony were too hungry to work: The settlement had been at two thirds of the established rations from the 1st of November and now it was reduced to something less than half a ration, consequently little labour could be expected from the convicts and they are only employed for the public in the mornings leaving the afternoons to attend their gardens. Everyone was given the same: a small amount of flour, pork and rice. Even with the reduced ration the food was expected to totally run out later in the year – the pork by July, the rice in the first week of September and the flour in November.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

A WAITING GAME

We were surprised to see a boat, which was known to belong to the Supply, rowing towards us. On nearer approach, I saw Captain Ball make an extraordinary motion with his hand, which too plainly indicated that something disastrous had happened … A few minutes changed doubt into certainty and to our unspeakable consternation we learned that the Sirius had been wrecked on Norfolk Island … At the beginning of the third year of the settlement the Supply had returned from Norfolk Island with news from Philip Gidley King that the settlement there had reaped a successful harvest of grain and that the vegetable gardens were also doing well. On receiving the news, and aware that Sydney was rapidly running out of food, Phillip decided to send two hundred convicts and a force of marines with their families to Norfolk Island, where their prospects for survival would be much better. King, who by this time had been on Norfolk for more than two years, had reported that the soil was good and they had managed to harvest good crops of vegetables and other crops. He also said there were plenty of birds and fish. Phillip was able to use the venture as an opportunity to recall his protégé, Philip Gidley King, in order to send him back to England to comprehensively report on the settlement. At the same time he would rid himself of his nemesis Major Robert Ross, who would replace King as commander of Norfolk Island, since the greatly enlarged colony there would need a proportionately enhanced force of marines. In justifying his decision to send Ross, Phillip said that the marine commander was so hot-tempered that he would only talk to him when it was absolutely necessary: I readily acknowledged the assistance I received, but the warmth of temper, which has been the source of many discontents, has obliged me for some time past to avoid, as far as the service permits, calling on the Lieutenant Governor otherwise than as the commandant of the detachment. Some of Phillip's colleagues were equally delighted to be rid of the unpopular marine commander. Judge David Collins, who despised Ross, later wrote to his father detailing the happy news and suggesting Ross' day of retribution had arrived: 'Since Major Ross went from here, tranquillity may be said to have been our guest … While here he made me the object of his persecution – if a day will come – a day of retribution.' To take such a large party and supplies to Norfolk Island required both of the remaining two ships left in the colony – the Sirius and the Supply – and would leave Sydney with no ships at all. On a cool and cloudy morning, 3 March 1790, the marines and their officers boarded the two ships, and the following morning nearly two hundred convicts were put aboard. The next day the ships were seen leaving Port Jackson heads with their two hundred and seventy passengers and heading into huge seas that almost blew them onto the rocks at North Head. After that rocky start the two ships made good time, however, and reached Norfolk Island after only eight days' sailing, but the now familiar huge surf prevented them from landing in Sydney Bay on the south side of the island. Both ships sailed round to Cascade Bay on the northern side and managed with some difficulty to unload most of their passengers over the next two days, before high winds blew the ships back out to sea. They had not yet managed to unload all of the provisions for the new settlers. Realising they were unlikely to be able to unload their cargo in Cascade Bay, the ships returned to the south side and Sydney Bay. Early on the morning of 19 March, despite high seas and strong winds, Hunter managed to steer the Sirius into the bay, where it met up with the Supply, which had already arrived there. Later in the morning the crews had started loading the stores onto the small boats to be rowed to shore when the Sirius was caught in the surf and dragged onto the reef. Captain Hunter was well aware of the dangers of trying to anchor the Sirius off Norfolk Island – which was renowned for not having anything resembling a natural harbour – but felt that those on the island were desperate for the unloading of their provisions: We had put on shore from the Sirius and the Supply two hundred and seventy people, and had no opportunity of sending any stores with them, as we were now driven out of sight of the island. I knew the exhausted state of stores there; I was also acquainted with the many difficulties which Lieutenant Ball, commander of the Supply, had met with in the different voyages he had made from Port Jackson to this island, with provisions; and the length of time he had, in some of those voyages, been obliged to cruise, before he could have any access to the shore; so continually does the surf break all round it. These considerations gave me much anxiety and uneasiness. American seaman Jacob Nagle was on the Sirius when it hit the reef. He described things as fairly calm at the time: A fine pleasant day with a light breeze off shore all the seamen that could muster hook and line was catching gropers not thinking of any danger or at twelve o'clock, when thinking of going to dinner, Captain Ball of the Supply brig hailed us and informed Captain Hunter that we were too close in the swell of the surf having hold of us … and Captain Ball, being at a distance out side of us, perceived it sooner than we did. Immediately we made sail that we could set, and a light breeze off shore, but the wind and swell driving us in. As the water poured into the torn hull, the crew were ordered to cut away the masts in an attempt to lighten the ship and allow it to pull clear of the reef, but the damage was already too great. When they opened the hatch, according to Nagle, there was already four feet of water in the hold. Late in the day it became obvious they were in a hopeless situation and a pulley was made that allowed the crew to be taken one by one to the safety of the beach. Over the next few days the crew worked 'both night and day, so we had no rest' to salvage as much of the cargo as possible before the stricken vessel completely broke up. One of the survivors of the wreck was the second-lieutenant of the Sirius, Newton Fowell, who noted that some of the officers lost 'part of their clothes and all of their live stock' but that his loss was, luckily, 'not very great' as he was able to salvage his trunk, even though most of his clothes were badly stained. Fowell described how, during the salvage operations, two convicts went out to the stricken ship to throw dying livestock – which had been three days without water – overboard. Instead of carrying out this duty, the convicts found some grog, lit themselves a fire and stayed to get drunk. When they ignored the order to come ashore, another convict was sent with the instruction that if they did not obey the order he should throw them both overboard. The next morning they came ashore. Major Robert Ross now found himself commander of an island with a population of around seven hundred people, which included the original party who came with Philip Gidley King and those who had come since. The new settlers had lost a large proportion of their food and other provisions with the sinking of the Sirius, and Ross immediately stamped his authority on his new realm by declaring martial law. In a letter he sent back to Phillip, he said that the morning after the sinking of the Sirius he 'judged it necessary … to proclaim marshal law' so as to preserve what food was left and to stop anyone from killing or plundering any livestock. He immediately reduced the food ration and stopped the hunting of wild birds. Jacob Nagle, who would be stranded on Norfolk Island for almost a year because of the sinking of his ship, was unimpressed with Ross' authoritarian rule: Lieutenant Governor Ross was a merciless commander to either free man or prisoner. He had us under three different laws; the seamen were still under navy laws, the soldiers under military laws, besides the civil laws and the marshal laws of his own directions, with strict orders to be attended for the smallest crime, whatever the neglect of duty. Nagle describes how the crew of the Sirius survived on Norfolk Island. Not wishing to live in the barracks with the marines, they built a village of shacks near the beach. Many of the convict women were assigned to collect rushes for thatching the roofs of the shacks and ended up living with the seamen. The convicts were assigned to clear land for a garden where, according to Nagle, the ground was 'rich black soil'. They were initially given rations of 'a pound and a half-pound of flour and a pound and a half-pound of grain mixed together and a few ounces of meat' a week, but in only six weeks the meat ran out. They were easily able to supplement their meat ration by catching birds, however, which were plentiful on the island. To start with they ate the large gannets: 'A sea fowl, apparently as big as a goose, would come open mouthed at you, but destroying a good many, they left the island.' Then they hunted the mutton bird on Mount Pitt on the north-west of the island, which, according to Nagle, was the only reason they survived: These bird seemingly as god would have it, was the saving of us, as it was the chief living we had while they lasted … We would start out in the afternoon and reach the mount by dusk. I suppose about four or five miles up hills and down steep valleys … when we arrived on the mount we would knock up a fire and wait till the birds begin to fall. There would be sailors, soldiers and convicts, to the amount of fifty or sixty a night. By calculation there would not be less than twelve to fourteen hundred destroyed of a night. When they began to drop, we would go down into the vales and the more we hollered 'ho, ho, ho', the birds would come running, crying out 'ke, ke, ke' thinking it was their mate or their young, and by that means every man would take home what he thought sufficient in his knapsack, which would be twenty or thirty or more. When completed, every man would light his torch and set out homewards, all in a line, as the path was small and in this season of the year was heavy rains. By the time we got to town, would be eleven or twelve o'clock at night, all wet and muddy. Nagle said that Ross tried to stop the sailors from hunting the birds but that Captain Hunter disagreed. When Ross had one of the seamen flogged, Hunter ordered his second in command from the Sirius, Lieutenant Bradley, to issue leave passes to any of his crew who wanted one: About this time the Governor issued orders that no man dare kill a bird at Mount Pitt … he had a convict which he sent daily to the mount for birds who discovered one of our seamen that had killed two or three and the Governor Ross punished him with two dozen. Through his tyrannical behaviour, Captain Hunter and him did not agree while on the island. He would not allow the soldiers or convicts to go a foraging and wished the Captain to prevent us likewise but as the Governor clapped sentries on the roads which led around the island, that no one could go anywhere without a pass, the Captain ordered Mr. Bradley to give the seamen a pass whenever they called upon him for one … He Hunter told him Ross he did not wish his men to starve while there was anything to be got by foraging around the island. Ross' tyrannical rule of Norfolk Island would last only eleven months, as he and the rest of the marines were recalled by the British Government to be replaced by the newly formed New South Wales Corps, under Major Grose, which would arrive on the Second Fleet ships from June 1790. The instructions terminating Ross' appointment, in a letter written by the home secretary, Grenville, on Christmas Eve 1789 – some months before Ross went to Norfolk Island – were totally unambiguous: Major Grose has been appointed to succeed to the Lieutenant Government of New South Wales and on his arrival you will direct Major Ross and his officers of the marine corps operating under his command together with such of the non-commissioned officers and private men as may be desirous of returning home, to be embarked as soon as possible for that purpose. The devastating news of the sinking of the Sirius was brought back to Sydney by the Supply. Watkin Tench recalled being rowed out to meet Lieutenant Ball in Port Jackson with Arthur Phillip: The Governor … determined to go down the harbour and I begged permission to accompany him. Having turned a point about halfway down, we were surprised to see a boat, which was known to belong to the Supply, rowing towards us. On nearer approach, I saw Captain Ball make an extraordinary motion with his hand, which too plainly indicated that something disastrous had happened … A few minutes changed doubt into certainty and to our unspeakable consternation we learned that the Sirius had been wrecked on Norfolk Island … On the same day that the news of the sinking of the Sirius arrived, Arthur Phillip called together his senior colleagues in Sydney to discuss their predicament. Until then Phillip had rarely confided in or consulted with anyone. At the meeting the severity of the food situation was outlined and a decision made to yet again cut the food ration. It was now down to starvation levels. Everyone would receive a weekly ration of one kilogram of now very old salted pork, which had dried out and shrivelled, half a litre of peas and fifty-five grams of rice. The only significant addition to the ration would be whatever vegetables the gardens could deliver and from fishing, which had already proved to be unreliable and irregular. Phillip of course did not know that the Guardian, carrying urgent relief supplies, had been shipwrecked. However, he correctly guessed that because such a long time had passed since he had pleaded for more food that an accident must have occurred: 'From the time which has passed since my letter might be supposed to have been received in England, there was reason to suppose some accident had happened to the store ships sent out.' As the hungry colony approached its third winter, many of the clothes had been worn out to rags. Captain Watkin Tench tartly observed: 'There is nothing more ludicrous … than the expedients of substituting, shifting and patching, which ingenuity devised to eke out wretchedness and preserve the remains of decency.' Tench went on to describe the severity of the situation: The insufficiency of our ration soon diminished our execution of labour. Both soldiers and convicts pleaded such loss of strength as to find themselves unable to perform their accustomed tasks, the hours of public work were accordingly shortened … every man was ordered to do as much as his strength would permit and every other indulgence was granted. Tench also said that a number of people died of starvation and that he witnessed one case himself: I was passing the provision store when a man with a wild haggard countenance who had just received his daily pittance to carry home came out. His faltering gait and eager devouring eye led me to watch him and he had not proceeded ten steps before he fell. I ordered him to be carried to the hospital, where, when he arrived he was found dead. On opening the body the cause of death was pronounced to be inanition an empty stomach. In April 1790, after more than two years in the colony, Chief Surgeon John White finally exploded. In a savage and honest letter to a friend in England he described what was not contained in any of the official letters or journals of Phillip or any of the officers, who would have been careful when they wrote not to offend their superiors. The letter, which was published in a number of London newspapers in December 1790 and January 1791, caused a sensation: Hope is no more, and a new scene of distress and misery opens our view … For all the grain of every kind which we have been able to raise in two years and three months would not support us three weeks …. Limited in food and reduced as the people are, who have not had one ounce of fresh animal food since first in the country. White also lashed out at the British Government. He could not have known at the time that the Guardian, hurrying to bring them relief supplies, had been wrecked only weeks away from reaching New South Wales a few months earlier. Nor would he have known that the Second Fleet was on its way; already in Cape Town, it would arrive in Sydney two months later. 'In the name of heaven, what has the ministry been about. Surely they have forgotten or neglected us, otherwise they would have sent to see what had become of us, and to know how we were likely to succeed.' White believed the whole expedition was a failure, and couldn't understand why the location hadn't been more carefully vetted before settlers were dispatched: From what we have already seen we may conclude that there is not a single article in the whole country that in the nature of things could prove of the smallest use or advantage to the mother country or the commercial world … It would be wise by the first steps to withdraw the settlement at least such as are living, or remove them to some other place. This is so far out of the world and the tract of commerce that it could never answer. The Reverend Richard Johnson reflected the desperation of the settlers in a tone perhaps even more bitter than White's: 'Tis now about two years and three months since we first arrived at this distant country. All this while we have been as it were, buried alive … our hopes are almost vanished.' With the Sirius lost and with food running out, Phillip had no choice but to send the last surviving ship off to Batavia to hunt for food. Lieutenant Ball, on the tiny Supply, was to collect as much food as could fit on the seventy-foot tender and hire any other vessel he could find in Batavia to bring additional supplies. On board he had Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who was returning to England at the request of Arthur Phillip to report directly on the colony. In Batavia King was able to board a Dutch packet, the Snelheid, which set off less than a month later. Shortly after the ship left the Dutch port, 'a putrid fever made its appearance' and killed many of its crew. This forced it into Mauritius, where King, who was also ill, had to recuperate for most of August and part of September. The ship then resumed its journey via the Cape of Good Hope back to Holland. King was put over the side and into a local English boat as they passed by Beachy Head off the Sussex coast. He reached London four days before Christmas in 1790. A number of the crew of the Supply also became sick when they reached Batavia, a port which was notorious for disease. Lieutenant Newton Fowell, now on the Supply, described Batavia in a letter to his father. It was unhealthy, he said, because its many canals were not kept clean and the build-up of waste was 'very offensive'. None of the crew had been sick before they arrived, he wrote, but many became ill within days of anchoring in the city. Back in Sydney food had become so scarce that dinner invitations took on a new twist, as Tench described: If a lucky man who had knocked down a dinner with his gun, or caught a fish by angling off the rocks, invited a neighbour to dine with him, the invitation always ran 'bring your own bread'. Even at the governor's table, this custom was constant observed. Every man when he sat down pulled his bread out of his pocket, and laid it on his plate. Finally, at 3.30 in the afternoon on 3 June 1790, two and a half years after the arrival of the First Fleet, the signal flag was broken out on Port Jackson's South Head – a ship's sail had been sighted. Captain Watkin Tench had been alone and, hearing noise, rushed outside to see people running around in a state of excitement: I was sitting in my hut, musing on our fate, when a confused clamour in the street drew my attention. I opened my door and saw several women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness. I needed no more; but instantly started out and ran to a hill where, by the assistance of a pocket glass, my hopes were realised. My next-door neighbour, a brother officer was with me but we could not speak. We wrung each other by the hand, with our eyes and hearts overflowing. Despite the heavy rain that began to fall, Arthur Phillip and a number of his colleagues began to row down the harbour and out towards the incoming ship. Once he was satisfied that it was an English ship, Phillip returned to Sydney Cove in one of his fishing boats. Tench and Surgeon John White continued until they were alongside the ship, planning to direct it back up the harbour. It was the Lady Juliana. Because of the heavy weather it anchored that night inside the North Head and sailed into a jubilant Sydney Cove the next morning. From the Lady Juliana the settlers would receive not only food but their first direct news from England in more than three years. As Tench reported, 'Letters, letters, was the cry. They were produced and torn open in trembling and anticipation.' They were also to learn of the Guardian, which had been lying wrecked in Table Bay when the Lady Juliana had passed through the Cape of Good Hope three months before. The Lady Juliana was the first arrival of the Second Fleet; more convict ships would arrive over the next few weeks. There were five ships in the Second Fleet: the convict transports the Lady Juliana, the Surprize, the Neptune and the Scarborough, and the storeship the Justinian. They had left England with more than twelve hundred convicts and provisions. While food rationing would continue, the Second Fleet, with its stores and provisions, had averted almost certain disaster for the First Fleet settlers. Three months after the arrival of the Lady Juliana and the other ships of the Second Fleet the lookout at South Head signalled the arrival of the Supply, which had returned from Batavia with a cargo of food. They had been gone for six months and two days. Lieutenant Ball reported that he had experienced difficulty buying all the grain he wanted in Batavia so he had bought almost ninety tons, or ninety thousand kilograms, of rice instead. He had also managed to charter a small Dutch ship, the Waaksamheyd, that would arrive in Sydney with more food on 17 December. This additional food included items that were not on the Supply, including pork, beef and sugar. The arrival of the Second Fleet also brought relief to Norfolk Island, which also was struggling to find enough food. Having unloaded convicts and supplies in Sydney, the Surprize and the Justinian were sent with some of the convicts and relief supplies to the island. Jacob Nagle, still stranded there with the other crew members of the shipwrecked Sirius, described the arrival of the two ships: On one evening four of us was sitting in my hut. We were all messmates and considering the situation we were in at that present time. I think it was a Thursday evening. On the next Saturday our last provisions was to be served out, which was but one half-barrel of flour, to be served amongst seven hundred souls. The birds were destroyed, the cabbage tree likewise all gone, and as for the fish, it was very uncertain … We allowed ourselves to be in a wretched situation. The next morning at daylight … I walked out on the beach aback of my hut. I cast my eyes around on the ocean and then to the westward of the island, I discovered a ship close under the island. I hollered out 'sail ho! sail ho!' … By this time the whole town was alarmed. Nagle said that when they boarded the Surprize, 'the Captain, understanding our situation, treated us extremely well, gave us a hearty meal and some grog'. Nagle also said that despite the food shortages no one died of starvation or disease during the eleven months they were stranded on the island. He suggested that when the Supply finally came to take the Sirius crew back to Sydney some of the seamen would have preferred to stay: We now found ourselves comfortable, being on full allowance, and I know a great many seamen would rather have stayed on the island than to come away. It was rather singular, though the hardships and want of provisions, while on this island, eleven months and seven days, there was neither, woman or child died a natural death, excepting one old woman 70 or 80 years of age. Despite the relief brought by the Second Fleet and the arrival of more food on the Supply and the Waaksamheyd, the Sydney settlement would continue to experience shortage. Captain Watkin Tench recorded in his journal the return of hardship as the settlement entered its fourth year and the food ration was cut again: 'Notwithstanding the supplies which had recently arrived from Batavia, short allowance was again proclaimed … I every day see wretches pale with disease and wasted with famine, struggle against the horrors of their situation.' Nevertheless, the crisis that had threatened the survival of the entire settlement had passed. With the arrival of the Second Fleet, the British Government announced that in future two convict fleets a year would be sent to New South Wales and with them additional provisions. At the same time the farms that had been started in more fertile soil around Rose Hill began to yield good harvests of food, and with this success more and more farms were being started nearby around the Parramatta, Nepean and Hawkesbury Rivers.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

ARRIVAL OF THE SECOND FLEET

The landing of these people was truly affecting and shocking; great numbers were not able to walk, nor move a hand or foot, such were slung over the ship side in the same manner as they would sling a cask, a box or anything of that nature. While the arrival of the Lady Juliana and the other four ships of the Second Fleet in June 1790 would be the end of the crisis that had threatened the survival of the early convict settlement, it would also mark an infamous episode in the early history of Australia, one of the worst chapters in seafaring history. Of the one thousand and thirty-eight convicts who were loaded on board the Surprize, the Neptune and the Scarborough in England in 1789, nearly a quarter died before they reached Sydney. Of the remaining seven hundred and fifty-six who arrived alive in Sydney, four hundred and eighty-six were immediately hospitalised in hastily erected tents. A hundred and twenty-four would die during their first days in the colony. Less than six months after the First Fleet had sailed into Sydney Cove, and unbeknown to Arthur Phillip, the British Government had begun preparations for sending a second fleet. The London press carried reports that Home Secretary Lord Sydney had issued orders for another 'Botany Bay fleet' to be prepared, even though the government had not yet received any news from Sydney. The first ship commissioned for the Second Fleet was the four-hundred-ton Lady Juliana. In November 1788 the loading of convicts and supplies began. It was planned that if no good news came back from New South Wales, the ship would instead be sent to Nova Scotia, in what was referred to in the press as the Quebec Plan. In March 1789, nearly two years after the First Fleet had left England and more than a year after it had arrived in Sydney, the government received the first reports from Governor Phillip. These gave them sufficient confidence to send more convicts to New South Wales. The first ship of the Second Fleet, the Lady Juliana, with two hundred and twenty-six women convicts and supplies on board, took almost a year to reach Sydney. It left England six weeks before the Guardian, on 29 July 1789, but was still in Rio de Janeiro harbour – where it would spend a leisurely six and a half weeks – when the Guardian reached Cape Town. By the time the Lady Juliana finally reached Cape Town, the wreck of the Guardian was back in Table Bay, having struck the iceberg almost two months before. It has been suggested that part of the reason for the slow passage of the Lady Juliana was that the entire crew had partnered with the convict women aboard the ship and were in no hurry to reach the penal settlement. In the words of John Nicol, a steward on the ship: When we were fairly out to sea, every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath. The girl, with whom I lived, for I was as bad on this point as the others, was named Sarah Whitelam. She was a native of Lincoln, a girl of modest reserved turn, as kind and true a creature who ever lived. I courted her for a week and upwards and would have married her on the spot, had there been a clergyman on board … I had fixed my fancy upon her from the moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon my anvil and as firmly resolved to bring her back to England when her time was out, my lawful wife … She bore me a son on the voyage out. What is become of her, whether she is dead or alive, I know not. The settlers in Sydney were initially unimpressed by the arrival of another two hundred convicts, all of whom were women, when they were so desperate for additional provisions. As Judge Collins commented: In the distressed situation of the colony, it was not a little mortifying to find on board the first ship that arrived, a cargo so unnecessary and so unprofitable as two hundred and twenty two females, instead of a cargo of provisions; the supply of provisions on board her were so inconsiderable as to permit only the addition of one pound and a half of flour being made to the weekly ration. Arthur Phillip and his colleagues were to learn from the Lady Juliana that the other three ships would be bringing more than a thousand new convicts – and supplies. They were also told that the Second Fleet would bring a new force, the New South Wales Corps under the command of Major Francis Grose, to relieve and replace the entire Marine Corps. The marines who wished to stay in the colony would be allowed to sign up with the new corps or could accept land grants and stay on as farmer settlers. When the women convicts were unloaded from the Lady Juliana, many were found to be old, weak or ill and unlikely to be of much use in working for the new colony. Even so, the convicts were in relatively good shape compared with those who would arrive on the other three transports – the Surprize, the Neptune and the Scarborough – a few weeks later. The next ship to reach Sydney was the supply ship the Justinian on 20 June. The convict transport the Surprize followed five days later. Three weeks after the arrival of the Lady Juliana, on the morning of 23 June, a lookout at South Head reported seeing a sail that then disappeared from sight in the wild seas and high winds. Two days later the Surprize came through the heads and anchored at Sydney with two hundred and eighteen male convicts and a detachment of the New South Wales Corps on board. The settlers were in for a rude shock. Forty-two convicts had already died on the Surprize during the voyage, and more than half of the survivors were ill or dying. The Reverend Richard Johnson was the first to go down into the holds of the Surprize amid the stench of the dead and dying. He described what he saw in a private letter he sent to a friend, Mr Thornton, in England. Such honesty and anger would never have appeared in any official report: Was the first on board the Surprize. Went down among the convicts, where I beheld a sight so truly shocking to the feelings of humanity, a great number of them laying, some half and others nearly quite naked, without either bed or bedding, unable to turn or help them selves. Spoke to them as I passed along but the smell was so offensive that I could scarcely bear it. The following day the other two transports, the Neptune and the Scarborough, arrived, having anchored the night before off Garden Island in Port Jackson. On both ships the convicts were in an appalling condition: 'I then went aboard the Scarborough; proposed to go down amongst them, but was dissuaded from it by the captain. The Neptune was still more intolerable, and therefore never attempted it.' Johnson tried to help save some of the convicts but was warned of the danger of entering the transports, 'where the air must be always putrid from the breath of a crowd of passengers'. He then described the terrible scenes when it came to unloading the dreadful human cargo: The landing of these people was truly affecting and shocking; great numbers were not able to walk, nor move a hand or foot, such were slung over the ship side in the same manner as they would sling a cask, a box or anything of that nature. Upon their being brought up to the open air some fainted, some died upon the deck and others in the boat before they reached the shore. When come on shore many were not able to walk, to stand, or to sit themselves in the least, hence some were led by others. Some crept on their hands and knees and some were carried on the backs of others. The bodies of the dead continued to be thrown overboard until the Reverend Johnson complained to Phillip, after which point they were taken over to the north side of Port Jackson to be buried. Judge David Collins also recorded the scene, noting that even those who were not sick were close to death from starvation: The appearance of those who did not require medical attention was lean and emaciated. Several of those miserable people died in the boats as they were rowing on shore, or on the wharf as they lifted out of the boats; both the living and the dead exhibited more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed. Captain Tench, who was another who witnessed the arrival of the Second Fleet and its sorry cargo, was angry at the shipping contractors, who he believed were paid enough to deliver the convicts in reasonable condition but 'violated every principle of justice and rioted on the spoils of misery'. Arthur Phillip wrote a letter of complaint to London about the treatment of the convicts. He wrote that while he did not want to 'dwell on the scene of misery' that came with the Second Fleet, 'It would be a want of duty not to say that it was occasioned by the contractors having crowded too many on board those ships, and from their being too much confined during the passage.' In another letter Phillip pointed out that, in the month following the arrival of the Second Fleet, there were more patients receiving urgent medical treatment in Sydney (four hundred and thirteen) than those fit for work (three hundred and sixteen), and in the following six weeks a further eighty-nine would die. There were almost five hundred convicts too sick to stand and in need of hospitalisation, but John White's little hospital on the western side of Sydney Cove could only cater for fifty or sixty. It was totally inadequate to deal with a tragedy of this dimension. The situation was made even more desperate by the fact that most of the medical supplies that White had pleaded to be brought from England had been lost on the Guardian when it had hit the iceberg six months earlier. The recently arrived Justinian had aboard a large number of tents, and a hundred were pitched for the sick. Still, there were no beds or bedding, and it was the beginning of winter. As Reverend Johnson described it: At first they had nothing to lay upon but the damp ground, many scarcely a rag to cover them. Grass was got for them to lay upon, and a blanket given amongst four of them … The misery I saw among them is inexpressible; many were not able to turn, or even to stir themselves, and in this situation were covered over almost with their own nastiness; their heads, bodies, clothes, blanket, all full of filth and lice. The convicts soon described the conditions on the ships that had led to their terrible state. They were kept below deck where the ceilings were too low for them to stand and chained to each other for most of the voyage, even when the ships were leaking and they were sitting under water, often chained to the sick and the dying. The appalling story of the worst of all of the ships, the Neptune, was reported in the Dublin Chronicle on 12 January the following year. The article was based on the story of Thomas Evans, who described the convict quarters as being seventy-five feet long by thirty-five feet at the widest point (22.8 by 10.6 metres) and the height five feet seven inches (1.7 metres) at the lowest point. Within this space were the 'miserable apartments for confining, boarding and lodging' four hundred and twenty-four male convicts. Each cabin was six feet square, giving each man only thirty-seven cubic feet of airspace – about the size of two coffins. It appears that before leaving London the navy agent on board the Neptune, Lieutenant Shapcote, had ordered that all convicts 'except those of good character or ill health' be put in irons. Many died before the ship had even left the port, only to be 'thrown overboard unhammocked and unweighted'. During the voyage fifty or sixty convicts at a time were allowed up on deck for two hours but were never released from their chains. On all the ships the water and food rations were limited and soon 'a violent epidemic fever' and scurvy broke out. Sometimes deaths were concealed so the other convicts could draw on the extra food ration – until the stench of the corpse revealed its presence to the ship's surgeon. Some of the details of what happened on the Surprize were recorded in a letter written by Captain Hill, a second captain of the New South Wales Marine Corps, to his friend Samuel Wathen, a philanthropist, Gloucester county sheriff and friend of William Wilberforce, the antislavery campaigner. The long letter, sent after the ship arrived in Sydney Cove, gives an account of the 'villainy, oppression and shameful peculation' during the voyage: The bark I was on board of was indeed unfit for her make and size to be sent so great a distance. If it blew but the most trifling gale she was lost in the waters … the unhappy wretches, the convicts were considerably above their waists in water … In this situation they were obliged for the safety of the ship to be penned down but when the gales abated no means were used to purify the air by fumigations, no vinegar was applied to rectify the nauseous steams issuing from their miserable dungeon. Humanity shudders to think that of nine hundred male convicts embarked on this fleet, three hundred and seventy are already dead and four hundred and fifty are landed sick and so emaciated and helpless that very few if any of them can be saved. Hill said that the maltreatment had been made worse because of the tight chains with short bolts that pinned the convicts to the floor below the decks, which meant 'it was impossible for them to move but at the risk of both their legs being broken'. The Times newspaper pointed out that the Second Fleet shipowners were paid for each convict loaded, not landed, and the greater the number that died, the lower their costs in feeding and clothing them: It may be proper to observe, that the sum allowed by the government for each convict to Botany Bay is fully adequate – but it unfortunately happens, that the owners farm the benefit to the owners of the ship, and therefore the more that die on the passage, the greater his gain … As the matter now stands, the less of his cargo the Captain brings into port, the more profit he makes. The Second Fleet was the beginning of a program of transportation that would continue for another fifty years and involve the shipment of thousands more convicts. The government had written to Phillip in December 1789 to warn him that many more would be coming: From the current crowded state of the hulks and the increase which might be expected of the number of felons under sentence of transportation, not only in this kingdom but in Ireland, after the next Spring Assizes, it is intended that about one thousand men shall be sent abroad, and preparations must be made for their reception. There was a very big difference between the treatment of the convicts on the First Fleet and of those on the Second Fleet. On the First Fleet it was the responsibility of the officers to inspect the quality of food and ensure that the convicts received their rations from the contractors. On the Second Fleet the responsibility for the distribution of provisions rested entirely with the master of the contracted ship. Captain Tench contrasted the record of the First Fleet with that of the Second, where two hundred and seventy-three died before they reached Sydney and a further four hundred and eighty-six were sick on arrival: On our passage from England, which had lasted more than eight months and with nearly an equal number of persons, only twenty-four had died, and not thirty were landed sick. The difference can be accounted for, only by comparing the manner in which each fleet was fitted out and conducted. With us, the provisions served on board were laid in by a contractor, who sent a deputy to serve them out and it became a part of duty for the officers of the troops to inspect their quality, and to order that everyone received his just portion. Whereas the fleet now arrived, the distribution of provisions rested entirely with the masters of the merchantmen, and the officers were expressly forbidden to interfere in any shape farther about the convicts than to prevent their escape. Tench hoped that the government would intervene to stop it happening again: 'No doubt … a humane and liberal government will interpose its authority to prevent the repetition of such flagitious conduct.' The Neptune's captain, Donald Trail, and his chief mate, William Elerington, were charged when they returned to England with wilful murder. However, The Times was later to report that both men were ultimately acquitted: Yesterday the Admiralty sessions finished at the Old Bailey … Captain Donald Trail late commander of the Neptune Botany Bay ship and William Elerington the chief mate were indicted for the wilful murder of one of the convicts on the passage over, after a trial that lasted three hours they were both honourably acquitted. On a less troublesome note the Second Fleet was also to provide a solution to Arthur Phillip's strained relationship with the marines and their commander Robert Ross. Lord Grenville informed Phillip: The discontents which have prevailed in the marine detachments and the desire expressed by most of the officers and men to return home as soon as they have performed the tour of duty they have undertaken, have led to the making arrangements for relieving them. With that view his Majesty has ordered a corps to be raised for that particular purpose, consisting three hundred rank and file and a suitable number of officers under a major commandant. The new marine corps would be led by Captain Nicholas Nepean, the brother of the undersecretary of the Home Office, Evan Nepean, until the arrival of their commanding officer Major Francis Grose on the Pitt in February 1792. Also arriving with the Second Fleet was 23-year-old Lieutenant John Macarthur, who would play a major role in the military, commercial and political life of the colony over the next forty years. This would include the overthrow of Governor Bligh in 1808 in what would be Australia's only military coup. Macarthur was controversial from the start. Before leaving England on the Neptune, he fought a duel with the master of the ship and later had a disagreement with his successor, Donald Trail. He is said to have quarrelled so much with Trail on the voyage that he transferred with his wife Elizabeth and young son Edward to the Scarborough even before reaching the Cape of Good Hope. The Second Fleet also brought Phillip new instructions for the management of the colony from King George III that effectively changed its destiny from a penal colony to a permanent settlement: It is probable … that some of these people will be desirous of continuing there as settlers of that description will be of great utility, not only for the purposes of protecting and defence but for the cultivation of the land, it is thought advisable that every reasonable encouragement should be held out to them to remain there … It is therefore Our Royal Will and Pleasure that you do issue your warrant to … such non-commissioned officers and men as shall be disposed to become settlers within your Government … the proportion of land herein mentioned. The instructions specified that non-commissioned officers could take up to one hundred acres (about forty hectares) and the privates fifty acres (about twenty hectares). An extra four acres was given for each child. Those who enlisted in the new corps were given a bounty of three pounds and would receive double the land grant after five years. The new instructions also asked that land be granted to any settlers who emigrated from Britain, as 'every encouragement' was to be given to them to become farmers in the new colony. Phillip was told he could allocate convicts as labourers to the new farmers 'on condition of their maintaining, feeding and clothing such convicts'. After the return of the ships of the Second Fleet to England the colony would again begin to struggle, as the consumption of food outstripped what they could harvest or catch. Captain Watkin Tench was to complain that by late in the year 1790 there had been very little rain and 'all the showers of the last four months put together would not make twenty four hours rain'. Our farms, what with this poor soil, are in wretched condition. My winter crop of potatoes, which I planted in days of despair (March and April last), turned out very badly when I dug them about two months back. Wheat returned so poorly last harvest, that very little besides Indian corn had been sown this year. On 9 July the following year the first convict transport ship of the Third Fleet, the Mary Ann, arrived with one hundred and forty-one women convicts and six children on board. The Mary Ann had reached Sydney remarkably quickly, in only four months and twelve days, and the ship arrived with the convicts in near perfect health. Only three had died on the entire voyage. With the Mary Ann came the news that another ten ships were on their way with more than two thousand more convicts for the colony. Over the next three months the Matilda, the Atlantic, the Salamander, the William and Ann, the Gorgon, the Active, the Queen, the Albemarle, the Britannia and the Admiral Barrington arrived. The voyage of the Third Fleet had not been without incident. Before reaching the Canary Islands, some convicts on the Albemarle broke into open mutiny. The ship's captain managed to shoot one of the ringleaders, William Siney, in the shoulder as he was about to cut down the helmsman and take possession of the wheel of the ship. The ship's crew and the marine escort then managed to wound a number of the mutineers and force them down into the hold before locking them in the prisoners' deck. One of the mutineers, Thomas Pratt, confessed and gave evidence against his colleagues. The captain, Lieutenant Parry Young, had the two ringleaders, William Siney and Owen Lyons, hanged on the fore yardarm as an example and deterrent to the others. When the Albemarle arrived in Sydney and Phillip was told of the event, he was to write to the secretary of the navy board, Phillip Stephens, commending Lieutenant Young for his professional handling of the crisis. On the voyage of the Third Fleet a total of one hundred and ninety-four men, women and children had died, and hundreds more landed 'so emaciated, so worn away from want of food' that it would take many months for them to recover. Phillip thought some of them would never recover and would permanently be a 'dead weight' on the stores. In April 1791 the food ration was again reduced. Shortages of food would occur again and again and would be met with reduced rations, but the British Government's announcement to Phillip that a fleet of convicts would in future be sent twice a year guaranteed the arrival of at least some fresh supplies and was to finally remove the threat of starvation.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

ESCAPE

Several convicts got away from this settlement on board of the transports, which it will be impossible to prevent unless the masters of those ships … are prosecuted with severity … Attempted escapes from the New South Wales settlement were commonplace from the outset, despite the fact that the convicts had little idea of where they were. Perhaps the first to successfully escape upon arrival in the new colony was a French-born convict named Peter Parris. According to Surgeon White Parris escaped when he was hidden on one of the French ships, either the Astrolabe or the Boussole, by sympathetic French sailors. Many of those who initially escaped, however, were not successful in the long run. Some eventually returned to the settlement starving and emaciated, while others disappeared into the countryside never to be seen again. Other success stories were those who escaped on the convict transports after they had unloaded their cargoes and were released from government service to return to England. While all of the transports were thoroughly searched before being cleared to leave Sydney, it was extremely difficult to be sure that no one was hidden somewhere deep below the decks inside the ship. Thomas Gilbert, the captain of the Charlotte, one of the first transports to return to England, described how his ship was searched for convicts by Lieutenant William Bradley of the Sirius: Before I left England I had entered into the usual obligation, binding myself to the forfeiture of a very considerable sum not to suffer any of the convicts under my charge to escape, nor to bring any with me; it cannot therefore be supposed that with such a risk I should permit any of them to come aboard and being equally conscious of not having given any room for such a suspicion with regard the seamen, I immediately assembled the officers of the ship … and … requested that a thorough search be made. This being done and the lieutenant not being able to find any, departed. Bradley obviously wasn't convinced, because soon afterwards he returned 'accompanied by some of his own petty officers' to make another search but 'with no better success'. Several weeks after leaving Sydney, Gilbert recorded that two deserters from the Sirius were on the Charlotte and must have been there when the ship was searched before they left. Arthur Phillip believed some of the masters of the ships may have collaborated in some of the convict escapes and wrote to the British Government asking that action be taken against the offenders: Several convicts got away from this settlement on board of the transports, which it will be impossible to prevent unless the masters of those ships … are prosecuted with severity for the convicts can … be secreted on board in such a manner as to render any search ineffectual … Only a day after writing this, Phillip was able to give details of a case in which a convict had been discovered on the Neptune shortly before it set sail for home. The convict admitted he had been carried out from shore on one of the ship's boats and secreted by the quartermaster in a concealed section of the Neptune's hold: Since my letter yesterday was closed, several convicts being missing, a search was ordered to be made on board the Neptune … and one convict, Joseph Sutton was found concealed in the hold … Now, sir, if the master of the Neptune is not prosecuted … every ship that stops here on her way to China will carry off some of the best convicts, which it will be impossible for any force in this country to prevent. The convict who escaped more times than anyone else was almost certainly John Caesar. 'Black' Caesar, as he was known, was to become infamous in the first decade of the colony and is recognised as Australian's first bushranger. It is believed that he was born in Madagascar and came to England from the West Indies, where he had worked as a slave on a sugar plantation. He was 23 and working as a servant in Deptford when he was charged with having broken into a house owned by Robert Reed and stealing twelve pounds and four pence. He appeared in the Kent Assizes and was sentenced to seven years' transportation in 1786, being sent with the First Fleet on the Alexander early the following year. According to Judge David Collins: His frame was muscular and well calculated for hard labour; but in his intellects he did not widely differ from a brute; his appetite was ravenous, for he could in any one day devour the full rations for two days. To gratify this appetite he was compelled to steal from others, all of his thefts were directed to that purpose. Caesar's lust for food was to get him into endless trouble. He was first convicted in the colony in 1789 for stealing four pounds of bread from the tent of another convict, Richard Partridge. A few weeks later he made his first escape, taking with him some provisions and a cooking pot. However, unlike the Aboriginal people, Black Caesar had difficulty surviving in the Australian bush and for the next month lived on the outskirts of the settlement, periodically stealing any food he could find. In May 1789 he robbed the small brickmakers' village of Brickfield, which was about two kilometres upstream from the settlement of Sydney. Despite being pursued by a detachment of marines, he managed to get away and back into the cover of the bush. Two weeks later he was captured by another convict, William Saltmarsh, while trying to steal food from the shack of the assistant commissary for stores, Zachariah Clark. Caesar was to be executed, but Phillip spared him with a pardon and he was instead sent in chains to tend the vegetables on Garden Island in the middle of Port Jackson harbour. When he was released from his irons to work, however, Caesar again made his escape, this time by canoe, taking with him provisions along with 'an iron cooking pot and a musket, and some ammunition' he had stolen from a marine private, Abraham Hand. Bradley takes up the story in his journal: The account Caesar gives of his subsisting himself for so long a time was, that when he saw a party of natives with anything on, or about their fire, that he frightened them away by coming suddenly on them and swaggering with his musket, then helping himself to whatever they had left. In this way he made out very well without ammunition, sometimes robbing gardens. When he lost the musket he found it impossible to subsist himself. He was then attacked by the natives and wounded in several places and escaped from a party of them through very thick brush when he surrendered himself. At this time Governor Phillip was preparing to send more than two hundred convicts from Sydney to Norfolk Island, where Lieutenant King had found the soil more fertile. It may be that Phillip saw the Norfolk Island venture as an opportunity to be rid of the problem of Black Caesar, as he was included in the contingent. On Norfolk Island there was nowhere for him to escape to, and he was forced to live under the martial law that had been introduced by Major Robert Ross almost immediately after he landed on the island. Caesar was returned from Norfolk Island to Sydney three years later, at the end of 1793, and again resorted to his former practice of living on the outside of the settlement while plundering the farms and huts on the edge of town. When caught and severely flogged, Caesar remained defiant of authority and indifferent to punishment; he was reported by Judge Collins to have said of the whipping that 'all that would not make him better'. A little over a year later he fled the settlement again and this time teamed up with other escaped convicts to form a gang of bushrangers. By then Captain John Hunter had returned from England to replace Arthur Phillip as governor of the colony, and Caesar, now armed, had gained the reputation of being public-enemy number one. With practically every theft in the colony during 1795 being blamed on Black Caesar, Governor Hunter offered a reward of five gallons of rum – the currency of the day – to anyone who could stop him: The many robberies which have lately been committed render it necessary that some steps should be taken to put a stop to the practice so destructive of the happiness and comfort of the industrious. And it is well known that a fellow known as Black Caesar has absented himself for some time past from his work, and has carried with him a musket, notice is hereby given that whoever shall secure this man Black Caesar and bring him in with his arms shall receive as a reward five gallons of spirits. Only a fortnight after the reward was posted, on Monday 15 February 1796, Caesar was shot dead on the Liverpool Plains, near current-day Strathfield, by a bounty hunter named Wimbrow. As Judge David Collins was to recall: Information was received that Black Caesar had that morning been shot by one Wimbrow. This man and another, allured by the reward, had been for some days in quest of him. Finding his haunt, they concealed themselves that night at the edge of the brush, which they perceived him enter at dusk. In the morning he came out, when, looking around him and seeing his danger, he presented his musket but before he could pull the trigger Wimbrow fired and shot him. He was first taken to the hut of Rose, a settler at Liberty Plains, where he died in a few hours. Thus ended a man, which certainly, during his life, could never have been estimated at more than one remove above the brute, and who had given more trouble than any other convict in the settlement. There is only one known case where convicts of the First Fleet escaped the settlement and reached England, and that is the remarkable story of Mary Bryant. Mary, who was married to another convict on the First Fleet, William Bryant, escaped with her husband, two young children and seven other convicts early in 1791. Stealing a boat from the settlement, they successfully sailed more than five thousand kilometres in sixty-nine days along the Australian coast to Dutch Timor. Mary Bryant (née Broad, or Braund) was a 21-year-old who, in 1786, was convicted in the Devon court with two other women for highway robbery. She had stolen a silk bonnet and other goods valued at a little more than eleven pounds and twelve shillings. She was condemned to be hanged but the sentence was later commuted to seven years' transportation. William Bryant was an experienced fisherman from Cornwall who had been convicted in 1784 for forgery. Like his wife he had been sentenced to be hanged and the sentence was commuted to seven years' transportation. He was originally to go to America, but the War of Independence prevented him from being sent so he sat with many others in the increasingly overcrowded prisons and prison hulks until the decision was made to send convicts to New South Wales. Both Mary Braund and William Bryant were put on the Charlotte, which carried both men and women convicts. During the voyage to New South Wales Mary gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Charlotte after the ship. It is not clear who the father was. Since the baby was born in September, a few weeks before the fleet reached Cape Town, she probably became pregnant in early January 1787 before she was put aboard the Charlotte in Plymouth. Mary and William were married in Sydney, and Mary was to give birth in April 1790 to a second child, whom they named Emanuel. William Bryant became a trusted convict and, given his experience as a fisherman, was put in charge of the governor's fishing boats. Making the most of this opportunity, William was selling fish on the side – fish that should have been put with all the other public stores. When caught, he was given one hundred lashes. In 1791 William Bryant's term was almost completed, but he was one of a number of convicts whose records were not sent to Australia and therefore, according to Phillip, could not be released. It must have seemed to them they might never be free. Early that year there were only two ships in Sydney Harbour: the Supply, which had recently returned from Batavia carrying the much-needed food supplies, and the Waaksamheyd, which had been contracted in Batavia to carry additional supplies to the colony. After they unloaded their cargo, both ships left, the Waaksamheyd to return to Batavia and then on to England, and the Supply to Norfolk Island. The colony then had no ships in its harbour. This left William Bryant and the other escapees in a position to make an escape from Sydney in the governor's small, single-masted, six-oared fishing boat with no risk that they could be chased down and recaptured by a larger ship. On the night of 27 March, the same day the Waaksamheyd left, the Bryants made their escape. William and Mary, their children Emanuel and Charlotte and seven other convicts boarded the little cutter, which made off down Sydney Harbour and out into the ocean. Among the escapees were First Fleeters Samuel Bird and William Morton, who was an experienced navigator. The remaining five, Nathaniel Lilley, Samuel Broom (alias John Butcher), James Cox, James Martin and William Allen, had arrived on the Second Fleet in 1790. Of the eleven who escaped, six would die over the next year and only five would survive and eventually reach England. According to escapee James Martin the convicts took provisions, which included 'one hundredweight of flour, one hundredweight of rice, fourteen pounds of pork, eight gallons of water, a compass, quadrant and chart'. The details are obscure but it seems that Bryant was able to acquire the quadrant, the compass and a chart of the east coast of Australia and the Torres Strait from the captain of the Waaksamheyd, Ditmar Smith, before he left. According to marine sergeant James Scott a longboat was launched in pursuit of the escapees at six o'clock the following morning, but by that time the Bryants and their colleagues were long gone. After leaving Sydney they headed north on one of the most extraordinary voyages in seafaring history. The little boat was to travel five thousand kilometres along the eastern coast of Australia, past the Great Barrier Reef and through the Torres Strait to the Dutch-controlled port of Koepang on the island of Timor. Initially they kept fairly close to the coast, landing where it was possible and eating fish and edible palms. Two hundred miles north of Sydney and roughly off the coast from Port Stephens, the escapees' little boat was blown out to sea. For several weeks in heavy rain they were only rarely able to reach shore to light a fire. James Martin also described how on one occasion they were forced to hastily return to the open sea when confronted by hostile Aboriginal people: There came natives in vast numbers with spears and shields … we … made signs to pacify them … we fired a musket thinking to afright them but they took not the least notice. As they reached the Torres Strait, they were chased by hostile natives in canoes before they finally reached the open sea, sailing across the Gulf of Carpentaria and into the Timor Sea, a journey that took four and a half days, 'having aboard little fresh water and no wood to make a fire'. When they reached Koepang, they successfully masqueraded as shipwrecked travellers and were given clothes while they waited for the next passing ship that could take them back towards England. According to James Martin the convicts were treated well until two months later William Bryant revealed their true identity: We went on shore to the Governors house where he behaved extremely well to us … filled our bellies and clothed double … We were very happy … for two months before Will Bryant had words with his wife, went and informed against himself, wife and children and all of us, which was immediately taken prisoner and was put in the castle. The convicts were also unlucky that the next English officer to arrive at the port of Koepang was to be Captain Edward Edwards, the cruel master of the Pandora. The Pandora had been sent out from England in November 1790 following the arrival of the news of the mutiny on the Bounty, to hunt down the mutineers. The pursuers reached Tahiti in 1791 and captured fourteen of the mutineers, whom Edwards ordered to be caged in a box on the deck of the Pandora. He did not find the other mutineers, who had sailed with Fletcher Christian on to Pitcairn Island, where they sank the Bounty and remained undetected by the British. Returning to England with the captured mutineers, the Pandora smashed onto the northern end of the Barrier Reef in the Torres Strait. The ship was lost and thirty-one crew and four of the convicts drowned, although the others made it to shore. Edwards, pitiless even in a time of crisis, would not allow the mutineers to shelter in the tents, leaving them at the mercy of the sun. It was treatment such as this that fuelled his reputation for cruelty. Following the shipwreck Edwards and the surviving crew and convicts embarked on their own epic voyage in three small open boats for some three thousand kilometres, heading westward to Koepang. They arrived nearly three weeks later in September 1791, about three months after the Bryants and their fellow escapees, who had then been in custody for a month in the port's prison. Edwards 'clapped in irons' the convicts from New South Wales. He chartered a Dutch East Indiaman, the Rembang, to take them to Batavia, along with the captured mutineers and his surviving one hundred and twenty crew from the Pandora. They arrived there in December. The convict escapees were placed in prison while Edwards awaited a ship to take them on the final leg of the journey to face justice back in England. Shortly before Christmas William Bryant and his son, Emanuel, died of a fever in the disease-ridden prison. Edwards then took Mary Bryant, her daughter, Charlotte, and the other surviving convicts on to Cape Town, during which time another three died: James Cox, Samuel Bird and the navigator William Morton. At Cape Town Mary and Charlotte and the remaining four convicts – James Martin, William Allen, Samuel Broom and Nathaniel Lilley – were transferred to an English ship, the Gorgon. The Gorgon was on its way back to London with the First Fleet marine detachment from Sydney, having delivered a new marine corps to relieve them. According to James Martin, 'We was well known to all the marine officers on board which was all glad we had not perished at sea.' The marine captain Watkin Tench was also on his way home to England on the Gorgon and had been impressed by the escape the year before: Among them were a fisherman, a carpenter, and some competent navigators, so that little doubt was entertained that a scheme so admirably planned would be adequately executed … After the escape of Captain Bligh, which was well known to us, no length of passage or hazard of navigation seemed above human accomplishment. When Tench saw the six surviving escapees being brought aboard the Gorgon, he remembered Mary Bryant and one of the other convicts and was moved to express sympathy for their plight: I confess that I never looked at these people without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty and having combated every hardship and conquered every difficulty. The woman and one of the men had gone out to Port Jackson in the ship, which had transported me thither. They had both of them been always distinguished for good behaviour and I could not but reflect with admiration at the strange combination of circumstances which had again brought us together. On 5 May 1792, only a month before the Gorgon was to reach England, Mary Bryant's daughter, Charlotte, died and was buried at sea. Back in London the story of the escape captured the public imagination. There was considerable public sympathy, which led to the eventual pardon of Mary Bryant and the four others in May 1793, although by that time their original sentences had either been served or were nearly expired. The well-known London diarist James Boswell had taken up Mary Bryant's cause and campaigned for her release. There were rumours that Boswell and the ex-convict were lovers, perhaps not helped by the fact that he had agreed to pay her an annuity of £10. Whatever the truth of it, she went to live back with her family in Cornwall. Of the other pardoned convicts, Samuel Broom (alias John Butcher) immediately enlisted as a volunteer with the New South Wales Corps and returned to the colony the same year. Two years later, in 1795, he was granted twenty-five acres (about ten hectares) of farming land in Petersham, now one of Sydney's inner-western suburbs. One of the most bizarre escapes of the early settlement occurred in November 1791 when a large group of twenty convict men and a pregnant convict woman made their escape from Rose Hill taking with them food, clothing, bedding and some working tools. They planned to head overland for China! A detachment of troops was sent in pursuit but, after a difficult march, returned without having seen the party. Over the next few weeks a number of the escapees progressively returned to the settlement, desperate for food. Two had been killed and a number of others wounded by Aboriginal people. When questioned in the hospital by Captain Tench, the recovering survivors said they thought China was only a hundred miles away: I asked these men if they really supposed it possible to reach China. They answered that they were certainly made to believe (they knew not how) that a considerable distance to northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China and that when it should be crossed, (which was practicable) they would find themselves among copper coloured people, who would receive them and treat them kindly.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

THE DEPARTURE OF PHILLIP

I cannot conclude this letter without assuring you Arthur Phillip how much I lament that the ill state of your health deprives his Majesty of your further services in the Government of New South Wales … After three years in New South Wales many of the naval officers, sailors, marines and civil officials who had come out with the First Fleet began to return to England. At the end of their sentence, or if they were pardoned, the convicts were also legally free to go home. However, the practical realities of trying to secure a passage aboard a ship bound for England – bearing in mind they lacked both money and sailing experience – combined with official opposition, made it virtually impossible. Very few ex-convicts realised their dream of making it home again. By March 1791 the population of the colony had doubled to a little over two thousand people, with about two-thirds living in Sydney and the remainder on Norfolk Island. About three-quarters were convicts and one hundred and nine were children. The first group from the First Fleet to return to England included Captain John Hunter and many of the naval officers and crew of the sunken Sirius. Phillip extended the charter of the Dutch vessel the Waaksamheyd, which had followed the Supply back from Batavia with supplies, so the ship could be used to carry the crew of the Sirius back to England. A total of eighty-five officers and crew boarded the Waaksamheyd for the long journey home. On board, in addition to the captain and crew of the Sirius, were a number of people who had both shaped and recorded the story of the First Fleet, including Lieutenant William Bradley, Jacob Nagle and Captain Watkin Tench. Bradley, who had painted and drawn many features of the colony of Sydney and Norfolk Island, would also produce a range of drawings and charts of the voyage home. Under the charter arrangements the Waaksamheyd was to have an awkward line of command. The ship's captain was the Dutchman Ditmar Smith, but Captain John Hunter decided where they went, and it was the British officers aboard, rather than the Dutch, who possessed the navigation skills required for the course they were to take in the largely uncharted waters north of New Guinea. Further tension arose from the fact that the English officers regarded themselves as more refined than the uncouth Dutchmen. According to Jacob Nagle it had originally been planned to sail the Waaksamheyd south under Tasmania then west across the Great Southern Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, but after struggling into a headwind unsuccessfully for several weeks the plans were changed: We steered to the South and when we got off Van Diemans land we found the wind continued from the westward, and we beating for three weeks in vain, we bore up and steered to the north and east for the middle passage. Only two weeks out from Sydney Lieutenant George Maxwell, one of the marines, died and was buried at sea. Maxwell had been one of two original lieutenants on the Sirius, but he had displayed the first signs of insanity more than two years earlier and had been an invalid in the colony ever since. He died after lying in his cabin for several days 'in a dreadful condition, constantly delirious and insensible to anything whatsoever'. The longer route taken north of New Guinea allowed the Waaksamheyd to chart areas beyond those already mapped by earlier explorers, but it also meant the ship would take six months to reach Batavia. Running low on food, they stopped for fresh supplies near Balut Island south of the Philippines, where the crew narrowly avoided being massacred. A few hundred natives had brought food aboard and were trading with the Europeans when Captain Smith's Malaysian mistress overheard the outline of a plan to kill all the Europeans aboard and take the ship. Jacob Nagle described the incident: About this time there was between two and three hundred on board with a pretence of trade, the Dutch Captain had a Malay girl sitting on the quarter deck which he kept as a miss, and she was very fond of him. She, understanding the language heard … they were then determined to massacre all the whites on board … The girl informed the Captain and he sent the mates below for an armful of cutlasses … The king of the natives finding they were discovered made a spring on the gunnels of the vessel and from thence into his boat … Though the decks were full of Malays and all armed with dirks, and seeing the king and general fly, they all jumped overboard and swam to the canoes, which were numerous, laying off waiting for the massacre. In late August, five months after leaving Sydney, the ship passed below Makassar Strait, where they saw a number of local Malay boats before reaching Batavia on 27 September. The Waaksamheyd was in poor shape by this point and needed several weeks of repairs before it could embark on the next leg of the journey. While in Batavia, the British decided to buy the ship outright and discharged the Dutch captain. With the 'English colours and pennant hoisted', the vessel came under the full command of Captain John Hunter for the remainder of the journey back to England. They were in Batavia for nearly two months, and when they left there was evidence among the crew of the notorious fever for which that port was renowned. Lieutenant Bradley described the port as the 'grave of Europeans', and Jacob Nagle claimed that 'when we arrived we had not a sick man on board, and when we left it, we had not a well man on board'. After the Waaksamheyd left Batavia for the Cape of Good Hope, Hunter's log contains regular reports of crew who died from fevers caught in the Dutch provincial city. When they reached the Cape in December 1791, many of the crew were still ill and several died. A number of the seriously ill were laid in wagons and taken to the local hospital, while others were nursed back to health on the boat. Even by the time the Waaksamheyd was to leave Table Bay, a number of the crew were still too ill to travel and would be left behind, while many of those who sailed would still not have entirely recovered from the illnesses contracted in Batavia. While in Table Bay, the ship experienced the same hostile winds that earlier captains had complained of. On one occasion the Waaksamheyd was blown off its anchor and out to sea. It was to take two days to sail back into the port. One night when Captain Hunter was on shore, Lieutenant Bradley gave the crew a party, or 'frolic', to celebrate the fact that after nearly five years they would soon be back in England. There was much noise from the 'drink and carousing' on the quarterdeck, which led the captain of the English ship the Swan, also anchored in the bay, to fear a mutiny was in progress and send a boat with armed officers and men over to restore order. When Bradley assured them that everything was fine, 'they all drinked hearty and laughed till we sent them back nearly as well intoxicated as we were on board'. It was while the Waaksamheyd was in Cape Town that John Hunter met Captain William Bligh for the first and probably the only time. Bligh was in command of the HMS Providence and, with the HMS Assistant, was on his second attempt to collect tropical breadfruit from the south Pacific for replanting in the West Indies. His first attempt, two years prior, had ended in mutiny, when the crew of the Bounty had risen up against him in April 1789. On Captain Cook's voyage more than eighteen years earlier the English had observed the breadfruit growing on trees in Tahiti and other places, and how it formed a staple part of the native diet when simply roasted on a fire. The British were keen to collect a large number of the fruit plants for transplanting into the British-controlled West Indies, where it was hoped they would provide a cheap form of food for the slaves working on the sugar plantations. The sinking of the Bounty, which the mutineers subsequently scuttled at Pitcairn Island, and the loss of all of the breadfruits that were thrown overboard did not discourage the British. With Joseph Banks' prompting, Bligh was sent again on the same mission, this time with two ships. Bligh was unimpressed with Hunter, who was highly critical of the new colony he was now leaving. In a letter Bligh sent to his friend and patron Joseph Banks, he wrote that Hunter did not seem to have the leadership qualities necessary for his current position: 'I may pronounce with some certainty that the present second in command of New South Wales … is not blessed with a moderate share of good knowledge to give much stability to the new settlement.' Bligh, of course, had no idea that within four years Hunter would become the governor of New South Wales and that he himself would follow him into the office ten years later. The Waaksamheyd left the Cape on 18 January 1792 and sailed north-west with the prevailing winds to the island of St Helena, some sixteen hundred kilometres across the Atlantic. Two weeks later they sailed on and by April were off the English coast, where they sailed alongside a British frigate that was patrolling the English Channel. As they approached Portsmouth, they were told that Lieutenant Ball had passed up the Channel on the Supply just the day before and had asked about the Waaksamheyd. When told that the ship had not been seen, Ball, who had left Sydney seven months later than the Dutch ship, believed it must have been lost. Immediately after the arrival in Portsmouth a court martial was held on the Brunswick to try Captain John Hunter and his crew for the sinking of the Sirius. Such a trial was automatic following the loss of a navy ship, and the court martial found that 'every thing was done that could be done' to save the ship from being wrecked on the Norfolk Island reef. Hunter and his crew were all honourably acquitted. On reaching Portsmouth, too, the crew were paid off. For Jacob Nagle this meant an unexpected windfall: he received not only all the back pay owed to him but also the money due to his fellow American Terrence Byrne, who had died on the way home. Byrne and Nagle had signed on with the First Fleet at the same time and had been on the Sirius together for all of its adventures, including the original voyage to Australia, the circumnavigation of the globe to fetch food from the Cape and, finally, its sinking on Norfolk Island. The two men were single and had nominated each other as beneficiaries in their wills. Arthur Phillip had finally been able to release the Supply from the colony after being assured that regular convict convoys would be coming to Sydney. In addition to taking back official dispatches and letters, the Supply carried on board the first live kangaroo taken to England, as a gift for King George III. After leaving Sydney in November 1791, Lieutenant Ball headed south and east below New Zealand to return via Cape Horn. He was well aware of what to expect on the route, which Captain Hunter had taken on the Sirius to fetch food from Cape Town two years earlier. By Christmas Day they were almost fifty-eight degrees south, below Cape Horn, in squalls, hail and snow. They were out of fresh food and reduced to a diet of portable soup, essence of malt and 'sour krout', which was thought to be anti-scorbutic. By 6 January they were making good time, and after only six weeks' sailing they saw Cape Horn. At this time Hunter and the Waaksamheyd were still at the Cape of Good Hope, coming the other way. A month later, on 3 February, those aboard the Supply reached Santa Cruz, where they stayed for only four days to load up with fresh food and water before heading off to the north-east across the Atlantic. At about noon on 20 April they saw the Lizard peninsula on the Cornish coast, which had been the last sighting the First Fleet had had of England five years earlier. They arrived in Portsmouth a few days later. On reaching England, the now 36-year-old Ball returned to naval duty. He was promoted to captain in 1795 and served on a number of ships over the next twenty years before being appointed vice-admiral in the blue in 1814. Ball married Charlotte Foster in London in 1802. Sadly, she died the following year, and he was married again seven years later to Anne Johnston. When he died in 1818 aged 62, he was survived by his wife as well as a daughter, Anna Maria, in Sydney, whose mother was the convict Sarah Partridge. Despite being the smallest ship of the First Fleet, the Supply had achieved a great deal. It had been the first to reach Botany Bay; it had taken Philip Gidley King and his small party to colonise Norfolk Island; it had sailed to Batavia for vitally needed food for the starving settlers in Sydney; and it had brought back the shipwrecked crew of the Sirius. Until the arrival of the Second and subsequent convict fleets it was for a time the only ship available to the new colony and the only contact the settlers had with the outside world. However, the Supply was to have an inglorious ending. After it returned to England, the navy sold the ship. It was renamed the Thomas and Nancy and carried coal on the River Thames until 1806, after which it disappeared from the official records. The next group from the First Fleet to return home were the marines. They left Sydney on the Gorgon after almost four years in the colony, sailing out on 18 December 1791, nine months after the Waaksamheyd and less than two months after the Supply. Of nearly two hundred and fifty marines and their officers who had come with the First Fleet, sixty-three decided not to go home but to stay as farmer settlers on either Norfolk Island or Rose Hill. The British Government was disappointed that so few had chosen to stay on, having authorised Arthur Phillip to make land grants and cash bonuses to the marines to encourage them to stay when their term of duty expired. Captain Watkin Tench said that only some of them were sufficiently skilled to succeed as farmers and that most of those who stayed did so because they were attracted to female convicts, which would promise 'neither honour, nor tranquillity'. Others, he said, were comfortable enough to stay because they had recently been paid almost four years' dues, with money that had arrived in Sydney on later ships. The Gorgon had arrived in Sydney the previous September, bringing out convicts and supplies as one of the eleven ships of the Third Fleet and also carrying on board Lieutenant Philip Gidley King. King had been sent to London in 1790 by Arthur Phillip to report on the fortunes of the First Fleet; he returned to the colony with his new wife, whom he had married while in London. The captain of the Gorgon, John Parker, had also brought his wife, Ann, along. She would go on to write A Voyage Around the World in the Gorgon, an account of the trip, which was published in London four years later. Among the marines returning to England was their commander, Robert Ross. Apart from later being given command of a troop of marines at Chatham College and seeking to be paid a higher pension, Ross would all but disappear from the pages of history when he arrived back in England. He lived for only another two and a half years and died on 9 June 1794 at Brompton in Kent, aged 54. Also on board was William Dawes, the marine officer who had established an observatory on Dawes Point, now the site of the southern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Soon after he returned to England, Dawes went to Sierra Leone and was three times appointed governor there over the next ten years. Back in England in 1804 he helped to train missionaries for the Church Missionary Society. From 1812 he embraced the campaign against slavery and died in Antigua in 1836. He had first married in 1800 and had two sons, one of whom, William Rutter, became an astronomer like his father. In Antigua he had married again, this time a woman called Grace Gilbert, who survived him. When the Gorgon reached the Cape of Good Hope, it picked up the escaped convict Mary Bryant, her daughter, Charlotte, and the other four surviving escapees from Sydney who had been taken back into custody in Koepang several months earlier. The Gorgon also took aboard the ten surviving mutineers from the Bounty who had been recaptured by Captain Edwards of the Pandora so they could be taken back to England and put on trial. Captain Watkin Tench was also on the Gorgon. Shortly after arriving back in England, he was promoted to brevet-major and, with the outbreak of war with France, was soon at sea again. In November 1794 he was on the seventy-four-gun Alexander when it was captured by the French, and he would spend the next six months as a prisoner before being released as part of a prisoner exchange. He spent the remainder of the war in the Channel Fleet and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1798. From 1802 he served on shore depots and finally retired, by this stage a major-general, in 1816. However, he was active again in 1819 and retired again as lieutenant-general in July 1821. Tench married Anna Maria Sargent of Devonport after returning to England, and while they had no children of their own they adopted the four orphaned children of Tench's sister and her navy husband Captain Bedford. Watkin Tench died in 1833 in Devon, aged 75. Governor Arthur Phillip was one of the last officers of the First Fleet to leave New South Wales. On 11 December 1792 he sailed on the Atlantic with the last of the remaining First Fleet marines who did not wish to stay as settlers in the colony. Phillip had wanted to leave earlier, having first requested to be relieved on 15 April 1790. He had written a private letter to Lord Sydney with the request, not realising that Sydney was no longer the minister for the Home Office and that Lord Grenville had taken over nine months earlier. Phillip gave no sound reason for wanting to be relieved but acknowledged that even if his request was approved it would be at least another year before it could take effect. In a separate letter to Evan Nepean of the Home Office, Phillip made a very rare reference to his wife, saying that he thought she was dying and that other of his affairs needed attending to. Arthur Phillip had sent his request to go home at a time when the colony was suffering great hardship and was chronically short of food. However, he denied that he was trying to leave at the worst time. In a letter to Lord Sydney he insisted that the problems of the colony would be 'done away with before this letter reaches your Lordship'. Whatever the truth of the matter, Lord Grenville denied the request. In a short letter written almost a year after Phillip's letter to Lord Sydney, Grenville made it clear to Phillip that his private problems were less important than his public responsibilities to the colony: Lord Sydney has transmitted to me a private letter which his Lordship has received from you by Lieutenant King, wherein you have expressed a desire to be permitted to return to England. I am much concerned that this situation of your private affairs should have been such as to render this application necessary at a time when your services in New South Wales are so extremely important to the public. I cannot, therefore refrain from expressing my earnest hope that you might have it in your power so as to arrange your private concerns that you may be able, without material inconvenience, to continue in your Government for a short time longer. From the zeal which you have at all times manifested for the public service, I am inclined to believe that you will readily accede to this proposal, and I shall therefore only add, that as soon as your presence in the Colony can be dispensed with, you will be assured that everything on my part will be done to contribute to your accommodation. Phillip's permission to return home was not granted until Grenville had been succeeded by William Dundas. In a letter on behalf of the British Government Dundas referred to Phillip's health as a factor in the decision: I cannot conclude this letter without assuring you how much I lament that the ill state of your health deprives his Majesty of your further services in the Government of New South Wales and I have only to hope that, on quitting the settlement, you will have the satisfaction of leaving it in a thriving and prosperous situation. Judge David Collins was one of the few officials to stay longer than Phillip, and he would later return to Australia and become the governor of Tasmania. He recorded Phillip's departure: He was now about taking leave of his own government. The accommodations for his Excellency and the officers who were going home in the Atlantic being completed … at six o'clock in the evening of Monday the 10th Governor Phillip quitted the charge with which he had been entrusted by his Sovereign, and in the execution of which he had manifested a zeal and perseverance that alone could have enabled him to surmount the natural and artificial obstacles which the country and its inhabitants had thrown in his way. His Excellency, at embarking on board the Atlantic, was received near the wharf on the east-side (where his boat was lying) by Major Grose, at the head of the New South Wales corps, who paid him, as he passed, the honours due to his rank and situation in the colony … At daylight on the morning of the 11th, the Atlantic was got under way, and by eight o'clock was clear of the Heads, standing to the E.S.E. with a fresh breeze at south. By twelve o'clock she had gained a considerable offing. The Atlantic would take six months to reach England, arriving in May 1793. Phillip took with him two convicts he had pardoned and two Aboriginal people, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, who were to attract a lot of interest in London. Chief Surgeon John White was another of the few senior members of the First Fleet who returned to England after Phillip. After several years working under stressful and difficult circumstances tending the sick in the colony – not to mention the large numbers of sick convicts who came on the Second and Third Fleets – he had applied for leave in England in December 1792, when Phillip himself was returning. White had to wait more than a year for approval and finally sailed home on the Daedalus in December 1794. White married in 1800 and had three children. He had also had a son, Andrew, with a convict woman from the First Fleet, Rachel Turner. Andrew had been born in Sydney in 1793 and he later also went to England. He was to join the Royal Engineers and fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 before going back to Sydney in 1823 to reunite with his mother, whom he had not seen since he was an infant. John White finally resigned his post rather than have to return to Sydney after his leave finished. For three years he served as surgeon on a number of navy ships then on shore before retiring in 1820, aged 63. He spent his retirement years on the south coast of England and died at Worthing, aged 75, in 1832. White had kept a journal from the first month of his appointment to the First Fleet. Covering the voyage to New South Wales and the early years in the colony, it was published in London in 1790. In 1792 – two years before he went home – a recently arrived convict artist, Thomas Watling, had been assigned to White, and the two men went on to develop an effective creative partnership. A keen naturalist, White recorded the bird and animal life of the colony, with illustrations by Watling. It is widely believed that some of the drawings and paintings in White's published book were Watling's work. Watling was a 26-year-old Scottish coach painter when he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation in 1788 for forgery. He left England on the convict transport Pitt in July 1791 and escaped in Cape Town but was recaptured by the Dutch, imprisoned and subsequently handed back to the English. He was then put on the Royal Admiral and reached Sydney in October 1792, when he began working with White. Not a great deal is known about Watling's life after White went back to England. He was pardoned by Governor Hunter in 1797, and it is believed that in 1801 he went to live in Calcutta with his young son, thought to have been born to a convict woman in Sydney. In India he worked as a miniature portrait painter for some time before returning to Scotland. Once there, he was charged with forgeries committed in 1804 but discharged with the Scottish verdict of 'not proven'. He later moved to London, where he managed to obtain some financial support from the Royal Academy. It is not known how, when or where he died. Judge David Collins had also requested to return to England, citing 'very urgent private and family affairs'. His leave was approved, but successive governors kept him in the colony for another four years before he finally went back on the Britannia in August 1796. In 1802 Collins was chosen to establish a new colony north of Bass Strait near what was later to become Melbourne. However, a shortage of water and timber forced him to shift to Hobart in Tasmania, where he remained until he died in 1810, aged 54. After Phillip left Sydney in December 1792, there would be a period of almost three years before the appointment of the next governor of New South Wales. In the meantime the affairs of the colony were left in the hands of Lieutenant-Governor Major Francis Grose, and later, for a period of nine months, of Captain William Patterson. When he arrived in the colony in 1791, Grose was to express some surprise to see so many crops growing, because he had heard so much about famine and food shortages before he arrived. In a letter to a friend that was published in the Gentleman's Magazine in February 1793, Grose painted the colony as a land of milk and honey – although he had arrived in late summer when the local scene would have looked its best: Landed with my family at this place on 14th February and to my great comfort and astonishment, I find there is neither scarcity that was represented to me, nor the barren sands I was taught to imagine I would see. The whole place is a garden, on which fruit and vegetables of every description grow in the greatest luxuriance. Nothing is wanting here but oxen and black cattle, within five miles of my habitation there is food in abundance for thousand head of cattle … There is a good house as I desire. The 39-year-old Grose had come from a well-to-do family, and his grandfather had been a well-known antiquarian during the reign of King George II. Young Francis had been commissioned as an ensign in the army in 1775 and fought in the American War of Independence before being wounded and sent home in 1779. In his two years as acting governor of New South Wales he appointed a number of marines and former marines to important positions in the colony. He also granted land to serving marines and allocated convicts to work their farms. Grose believed the colony would develop more by encouraging private initiative rather than by relying on the public enterprise and encouraged the marine officers to engage in trade. It was under the watch of Grose that military control of the colony's economy began to be established. After two years Grose resigned, claiming his old wounds from the American wars were causing him much pain. At the end of 1794 he returned to England. For the next nine months he was replaced by Captain William Patterson, who had arrived with the New South Wales Corps of marines in 1791. Patterson was to be the colony's administrator until the arrival of the new governor, Captain John Hunter. Like his immediate predecessor, the 39-year-old Patterson had joined the army at an early age and had served in Cape Town in 1777, India in 1781, received his commission as a lieutenant in 1787 and was promoted to captain in 1789 when he volunteered to join the New South Wales Corps. During the nine months he was in charge, Patterson granted more land than Arthur Phillip had done in five years as governor, and, like Major Francis Grose, he did nothing to check or control the increased involvement of the military in the farming and commerce of the colony. This gradually became a major problem, one that would dog the colony's administration for many years, eventually coming to a head with the overthrow of Governor William Bligh more than ten years later, in 1808. While Grose and Patterson were administrating the colony in the absence of a new governor, Captain John Hunter was pressing his claim to the governorship. Hunter's reputation – and no doubt the feeling that he was governor material – had been further enhanced by the publication of his An Historic Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island in London in 1793. By 1795 Hunter had been back in England for three years, having arrived home in April 1792 to find England again at war with France. He immediately joined as a volunteer on the Queen Charlotte and met up with his old commander and mentor Sir Roger Curtis, whom he had sailed with in the north Atlantic and the West Indies during the 1780s. Also on the Queen Charlotte was his old patron Admiral Lord Howe, who along with Curtis was to support Hunter's claim to succeed Phillip as governor of New South Wales. The unmarried Hunter sailed back to New South Wales in September 1795, celebrating his 58th birthday a few weeks before reaching Sydney and assuming the office of governor on his arrival. While his first reports to London were favourable, he was soon to privately complain that he was facing a difficult time in the job. Hunter was to have the same problem as most of the other naval officers who were appointed governor. He was accustomed to the discipline of the quarterdeck, where the commander was the absolute and total master. Like Phillip before him and King and Bligh after him, he had no experience and little aptitude for dealing with the entrenched commercial interests and disobedience of the military. Hunter moved to reduce the influence of the military in the colony. Government control of wages, prices and hours of work had become ineffective, and the mark-up on imported supplies by the military merchants reached as high as seven hundred per cent. By 1798 and after three years of Hunter's government, more of the settlement's economic activity had shifted to the fertile soils around Parramatta. Here, most of the harvest came from private farms and not those cultivated by the government. In the absence of a large program of free settlers it had been the marines who had become the farmers. Many had also become merchants, building up an effective monopoly in the selling of supplies – especially grog – at the huge mark-ups already mentioned. One such successful former military officer was John Macarthur, who was to become one of the richest and most powerful men in the colony. Macarthur had been a captain in the New South Wales Corps, which arrived in 1791 to replace the original Marine Corps. Over the next few years he became a successful farmer before taking the appointment of inspector of public works. After four years as governor Hunter's reputation in London was being undermined by increasing complaints, many of which were being sent by his enemies in Sydney. His position was further weakened by the discovery that some of his own staff were corrupt, including his steward Nicholas Franklyn, who committed suicide after being accused of being at the centre of an illegal trading operation in rum. Eventually, and probably unfairly, Hunter was abruptly recalled. His former colleague and friend Philip Gidley King, who had successfully manoeuvred himself into the job while he had been back in England, carried the dispatches outlining Hunter's formal sacking from England to Sydney. A devastated Hunter left Sydney on the Buffalo and arrived back in England in May 1801, demanding an inquiry into his management of the colony. He was not only denied the chance to clear his name but was given the official cold shoulder and denied an audience with the secretary of state. He was, however, able to attract some sympathy and an element of vindication with the publication in London in 1802 of his account of the colony, Governor Hunters Remarks on the Causes of the Colonial Expense of the Establishment of New South Wales. Hints for the Reduction of Such Expense and for the Reforming the Prevailing Abuses. Hunter was subsequently granted a pension of £300 per annum and, in 1804, despite being nearly 67 years old, was given command of the Venerable, a seventy-four-gun warship in the Channel Fleet. In 1807 he was appointed rear-admiral and in 1810, when he was 73, vice-admiral. In his last years he lived alone in Hackney in London and died in 1821, aged 84. For Philip Gidley King the voyage to Sydney in 1800 to take up the position of governor was his third trip to New South Wales. After arriving originally with the First Fleet, King had spent almost all of his two years in the new colony establishing the little settlement on Norfolk Island before leaving for England in 1790. King was 32 years old when he arrived back in London for the first time, to discover that while he was sailing for England a letter confirming his promotion and pay increase had been sent to Sydney. Governor Phillip had recommended his promotion, but lack of seniority had been a problem until the British Government announced he was to be given the title of lieutenant-governor of Norfolk Island, on a salary of £250 a year. King spent only three months in England before his second trip to New South Wales. While in England, he was also promoted in the navy to the rank of commander. Only three days before his departure he married Anna Josepha at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, then sailed with his new wife and new commission back to New South Wales on the Gorgon in March 1791. When the ship stopped at Cape Town on its way to Sydney, King heard of continuing shortages of food in New South Wales and bought more livestock to take on to the colony. His unauthorised spending would result in protracted correspondence later, and many of the cattle died before reaching Sydney anyway. The Gorgon arrived in Sydney on 21 September 1791, and King and his wife spent five weeks there before sailing on to Norfolk Island. There, six weeks later, Anna would deliver the first of their three children, Phillip Parker. In the twenty months that King had been away from Norfolk Island, it had changed dramatically. The island now had a population of nearly a thousand people and, after a long period of martial law under Major Robert Ross, there was widespread disaffection among the settlers. During his second term on Norfolk Island King tried again to grow flax, which had been the original reason why the British Government had wanted to colonise an island that had no natural harbour. While he had been in London, King had persuaded the government to authorise bringing Maori flax-makers from New Zealand to Norfolk Island to help get the industry off the ground. Captain Vancouver on the Daedalus duly brought two Maoris to the island, but it was then discovered that they knew nothing about flax-making. King used the return of the Maoris to their homeland as an excuse to undertake an unauthorised visit to New Zealand and wrote up an account of his journey, which was first published in London in 1794. After nearly four years back on Norfolk Island King had developed a reputation for tempestuousness and heavy drinking. In 1796, suffering from gout and other illnesses, he was given permission by Governor John Hunter to return for the second time to England. King was not yet 40 and had been commander of Norfolk Island for a total of nearly six years. By this stage the little island colony was not only self-sufficient in grain but also able to export pigs and other produce to Sydney, which was still dependent on imported food for its survival. Back in London for the second time King found he still had supporters, including former governor Arthur Phillip, who was back in England and would actively promote King as the future governor of New South Wales. In a letter to the home secretary, William Dundas, Phillip said he wanted to render 'justice to an officer of merit' and that King was 'the most likely to answer the intentions of the Government in the present state of the colony'. King also had the support of Joseph Banks, to whom he had regularly sent botanical specimens. The representations on King's behalf were successful, and in 1798 he was given a dormant commission as governor of New South Wales in the event that John Hunter died or was absent from the colony. At the time of this appointment there was no question of John Hunter's not continuing as governor, however. King's departure from England for his third voyage to New South Wales was delayed for some months, and when he finally left Portsmouth on the Speedy in August 1799, the British Government had given him the dispatch recalling Hunter. King travelled with his wife, Anna, and youngest daughter, Elizabeth, while his two oldest children, Phillip and Maria, stayed with friends to be schooled in England. During the next six years Governor King encountered the same resistance from the military that Hunter had faced when trying to make them relinquish their control over all facets of the colony's economy. In 1806 King handed over the governorship to William Bligh and sailed home for the third and last time, sick and exhausted. He arrived in England in November 1807 and died less than a year later, aged only 50. When he returned to England, Arthur Phillip had been away for five years and seven months and was 55 years old. He did not go into retirement but, immediately on arrival, attended to a number of personal matters, including making a successful request to Home Secretary William Dundas that he keep being paid a salary even after retirement. He also sought medical treatment for the pain in his side that had troubled him for some years. In February 1794, a little more than a year after arriving back in England, he married Miss Isabella Whitehead, a 41-year-old from Preston in Lancashire. Phillip had returned to a turbulent Europe. While he was still sailing home aboard the Atlantic, there were massacres in Paris, and the Tuileries Palace was stormed. In the month he reached England, Louis XVI was executed, and soon England was again at war with France. In March 1796 Phillip was recalled to the navy as commander of the seventy-four-gun warship the Alexander and spent several months patrolling from Plymouth to Portsmouth. In July he was made commander of a fleet of nineteen British ships that were bound for the East Indies. He took the convoy as far as Tenerife, where he handed over to two other British warships. For the rest of the year he appears to have been on routine patrol work based at Cawsand Bay, near Plymouth. He then served for two years as commander of the Swiftsure but shortly after being transferred to the Blenheim was relieved as commander to make way for another captain. He was humiliated, saying that he had been forced ashore in the 'most mortifying circumstances'. The Blenheim was to be his last ship. For the next three years he was alternately on half-pay and not working or doing shore work with the navy, which included being commander of the Hampshire Sea Fencibles at Lymington, not far from his old home at Lyndhurst. The Sea Fencibles was made up of naval officers and volunteers and was established as an anti-invasion coastal force during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with France. In 1799 he was promoted to admiral in the blue and in 1804 was still inspecting the Fencibles' detachments along the Sussex coast, ensuring they were in readiness for an invasion from Napoleon's France. Later in 1804 he was promoted again to admiral of the white and in 1805 to rear-admiral of the red, after which he retired from the navy. At that time Phillip was 67 years old and had left New South Wales almost twelve years earlier. He would spend the next nine years living mostly in Bath, where he was regularly visited by many of his former colleagues from New South Wales, including his friend Philip Gidley King. Phillip died on 31 August 1814 and was buried at St Nicholas' Church in Bathampton. His wife Isabella died nine years later and was buried with him. There were just over four thousand two hundred people in the colony when Phillip left. A little more than three thousand one hundred were in Sydney or at Parramatta and Toongabbie west of Sydney, and just over one thousand one hundred were on Norfolk Island. Over three thousand were convicts, forty-seven were part of the civil establishment and five hundred and two were military. The balance of the population was made up of emancipated convicts, a few free settlers and children. There were now more than two hundred and fifty children, compared with the thirty-six that had landed with the First Fleet five years earlier. The great majority of the new offspring had been born to convict parents, and many were illegitimate. Phillip had been extremely sparing in the exercise of his powers to emancipate convicts. According to the commissary's report of December 1792 a little more than a month after Phillip left only twelve men and three women had been officially freed, although there would have been many more who had served their sentences by that time. Within the first five years, too, not many major buildings had been built in Sydney Cove. Apart from the two-storey, six-room, stone governor's residence, which was the only building in the colony with a set of stairs, there was the commissary's office and the more modest houses of Judge Advocate David Collins, Reverend Richard Johnson and his wife, and the surveyor-general, Augustus Alt. There was the dry store and a smaller house and some stores and sheds nearer the water's edge. Across the stream on the western side of Sydney Cove was the 'commodious' one-storey house of Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose, the military barracks, the spirit store and, further towards Dawes Point, the hospital and the residences of Surgeon John White and his assistants. Scattered over the slopes were a total of one hundred and sixty wattle-and-daub convict huts, which housed as many as ten convicts each. A little over a month before Phillip departed for England, in October 1792, an official survey revealed that only one thousand seven hundred acres (less than seven hundred hectares) of ground was under cultivation. Of this about a thousand acres was 'public farming' and the remaining seven hundred acres was split between a total of sixty-seven 'settlers and others', the 'others' being individual ex-convicts who had been given small grants of land. The survey also showed that almost all of the farming was now around Parramatta and nearby Toongabbie, about twenty-five kilometres west of Sydney, and that very little was taking place around Sydney itself. During his time as governor Phillip had relied on state-owned farms and done little to promote the development of private farming. The public farms, however, had only limited success and Phillip repeatedly complained that the convicts did not make good farm workers and he lacked the supervisors to make them work better. While he was governor, Phillip had the power to grant land to convicts who had served their sentences. However, he did so sparingly, and during his entire term only four thousand acres were given to individuals. At no stage had he ever seen the convicts as forming the foundations of the new country that was being established in Australia. From the earliest days of his appointment until he left to return to England, he only ever regarded them as a source of farm labour to free settlers for the duration of their incarceration. Within six months of arriving, he had pleaded for free settlers to develop the new colony, saying that fifty farmers would be more productive than a thousand convicts in 'rendering the colony independent of the mother country as to provisions'. Nearly two years later he was still arguing with the British Government that the colony's lack of progress on the agricultural front was due to the convicts, who he consistently complained were incapable of providing the foundation for viable food production in the colony: It has never been possible to direct the labour of more than a small part of the convicts to the principal object. A civil and military establishment forms a considerable part of our numbers, which is increased by women and children, all of whom are undoubtedly necessary, but are deadweight on those who have to render the colony independent for the necessities of life … Settlers will secure themselves and their provisions in a short time and everyone they feed will then be employed in cultivation. He had already proposed that the most fertile lands west of Sydney should be earmarked for free settlers, rather than being wasted as grants to incompetent convict farmers: The land … twenty miles to the westward of Rose Hill, that is, to the banks of the Nepean, is as fine land for tillage as most of England … I propose that tract of land for those settlers which may be sent out … I think each settler should not have less than twenty men on his farm, which I suppose to be from five hundred to one thousand acres; it will be necessary to give that number of convicts to those settlers who come out, and support them for two years from the public stores; in that time if they are in any ways industrious – and I do not think they will be able to do it in less time – at the expiration of two years they may return half the convicts they have been allowed and would want no further assistance from the Government. Before Phillip returned to England, he called together the convicts whose terms he had recognised as expired and outlined their options. First, they could accept a land grant and endeavour to make a success of farming on a small plot of land. Second, if they didn't want to take the chance on their own, they could continue to work as labourers and draw the normal rations. Third, they were at liberty to return home, which most still dreamt of doing. It was made clear, however, that the government would provide no assistance to them and they would have to arrange their own passage on one of the ships returning to England. As a result very few of the convicts ever reached home, which is as the government designed it. As Lord Grenville, the home secretary, had made clear to Phillip, as far as Britain was concerned the convicts were beyond correction, and even where they had served a seven-or fourteen-year sentence, they were expected to stay away until they died: The return of the convicts to this country cannot legally be prevented, provided they can engage the masters or owners of any vessels arriving in New South Wales to transport them from thence. But as there is little reason to hope that any persons of that description will apply themselves here to the habits or pursuits of honest industry, it will be extremely desirable that every reasonable indulgence should be held out to them with a view of inducing them to remain in New South Wales and that it should be distinctly understood that no steps are likely to be taken by Government for facilitating return. Contrary to Phillip's vision, then, it was the convicts and their offspring who would remain in Sydney and unwillingly form the backbone of what was to become the nation of Australia. When the idea of transportation to New South Wales had been conceived, the British Government had expressed little hope in the colony's becoming anything more than a dumping ground for its human refuse. The story of the First Fleet, however, turned out to be one of success against the odds. In an expedition remarkable for its courage, hardship, famine and misadventure, perhaps the most remarkable thing is that this new colony and its people survived at all.

1788 - The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

David Hill

CHRONOLOGY

1717 The British Parliament passes legislation for the overseas transportation of convicts to America. Over the next sixty or so years more than forty thousand British convicts are sent. 1760 George III ascends to the British throne and begins a fifty-year reign. He will authorise the colonisation of Australia before becoming insane and being replaced by the Prince Regent in 1811. [ 1770 ] April Captain James Cook charts the east coast of Australia and anchors in what he names Botany Bay. May After leaving Botany Bay, Cook sails north past another harbour, which he names Port Jackson. Eighteen years later this will become the settlement of Sydney. 1776 The American War of Independence means the British can no longer export their surplus convicts to the American colonies. The prison population grows rapidly in Britain, accelerated by an increase in convictions and a decrease in executions. 1777 The British Parliament passes the Hulk Act to allow the increasing number of convicts to be housed on decommissioned naval vessels on the Thames and in other ports. A Bill is also passed in the British Parliament authorising the resumption of overseas transportation of convicts, but no country of destination is prescribed in the legislation. 1779 A British House of Commons committee examines a number of possible overseas destinations for the transportation of convicts, including Gibraltar and the west coast of Africa. Eminent botanist Joseph Banks recommends Botany Bay as a site. 1781–2 A number of attempts to establish convict settlements on the west coast of Africa fail. [ 1783 ] August American James Matra proposes that the British Government establish a colony in New South Wales for American loyalists following the loss of the colonies in the American War of Independence. 1784 A further Bill is passed in the British Parliament calling on the government to resume overseas transportation of convicts. [ 1785 ] April Another House of Commons committee is established to examine where to transport convicts. The committee baulks at the high estimated costs of transporting convicts to New South Wales. August The navy sloop Nautilus is sent to survey the west African coast and later reports it unsuitable for the establishment of a convict colony. [ 1786 ] March The nation is shaken by the news of a prison riot on a hulk in Plymouth. Forty-four convicts are shot, eight of them fatally. 18 August Lord Sydney announces that King George III has authorised the establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales. 31 August Lord Sydney instructs the British Admiralty to arrange enough shipping to take seven hundred and fifty convicts plus marines, officers and some civilian officials to establish a settlement in Botany Bay. September The British Government announces that Captain Arthur Phillip has been appointed as leader of the expedition and first governor of New South Wales. October The Admiralty confirms it will assign two navy ships, the Sirius and the Supply, and will arrange the charter of other, privately owned, vessels to carry the First Fleeters and their supplies to Botany Bay. Other key personnel are appointed to the venture, including commander of the Marine Corps Major Robert Ross, the Reverend Richard Johnson, Chief Surgeon John White and Judge David Collins. November The Admiralty stipulates that only forty of the wives of the two hundred and fifty marines will be allowed to accompany their husbands to Botany Bay. December The first convicts are transferred from the hulks and prisons to the convict transport ships on the Thames prior to being ferried to Portsmouth, where the First Fleet is being marshalled. [ 1787 ] 11 January Arthur Phillip complains of overcrowding on the transports, and the ninth chartered ship is added to the fleet. The six convict transport ships are the Alexander, the Charlotte, the Scarborough, the Lady Penrhyn, the Friendship and the Prince of Wales. The three ships to carry food, equipment and supplies are the Fishburn, the Borrowdale and the Golden Grove. February While the fleet is being loaded in Portsmouth with convicts, equipment and two years' supplies, Phillip writes his 'vision' for the establishment of the penal colony. 18 March Convicts begin to die on the transports while the fleet is still at Portsmouth, and Phillip is given permission to temporarily unload them into barges while ships are smoked and fumigated. 2 April Arthur Phillip is issued with his commission and detailed instructions for the establishment of the colony. 5 May Phillip is authorised to buy a large quantity of rum en route to Botany Bay for the marines, who have previously been told they would not have a grog ration in the new colony. 13 May The First Fleet leaves Spithead, outside Portsmouth, for the voyage to New South Wales with almost fifteen hundred people crowded onto the eleven small ships. More than a thousand will be landed to establish the settlement in Sydney, and more than four hundred seamen are expected to eventually sail back with their ships. 20 May Arthur Phillip sends his first report back from the Sirius with the navy escort the Hyaena – which is returning to Portsmouth – saying that an attempted mutiny by convicts has been thwarted. 2 June The fleet arrives in the Spanish port of Santa Cruz, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands and stays for a week to take aboard fresh water and a limited amount of seasonal fruit and vegetables. 19 June The fleet reaches Port Praya in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. Phillip decides against trying to land because of adverse currents and winds, and leaves immediately to head across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro. 11 July The fleet crosses the equator, and water rationing is introduced. 6 August After two months' sailing the fleet reaches the Portuguese port of Rio de Janeiro and scurvy breaks out among the convicts. The officers find abundant fresh oranges and other fruit and load on board fresh food, sixty-five thousand litres of rum and a variety of plants for cultivation in the new colony. 4 September After a month in the port the fleet leaves Rio and heads east back across the Atlantic on the prevailing winds to Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope. 6 October A week out from the Cape a well-organised plot by convicts to seize the Alexander is uncovered. 13 October The fleet reaches the Dutch port of Table Bay after forty days' sailing. Initially the Dutch authorities are uncooperative, but over the next month fresh food and plants are purchased and loaded aboard the fleet, including more than five hundred cows, chickens, geese, pigs, horses, sheep and food for the animals for the next leg of the voyage. 13 November The fleet leaves Table Bay for the longest leg of the journey, to the south of Tasmania. 25 November Arthur Phillip transfers from the flagship Sirius to the smaller, faster Supply and takes it and the three other fast ships ahead in an attempt to reach Botany Bay well in advance of the bulk of the fleet, in order to lay the foundations of the colony before the others arrive. [ 1788 ] 18 January After the most difficult sailing of the whole voyage the Supply arrives in Botany Bay. 19 January The other fast ships, the Alexander, the Scarborough and the Friendship, also reach Botany Bay. 20 January To everyone's surprise Captain John Hunter arrives and anchors the seven slowest ships (the Borrowdale, the Prince of Wales, the Lady Penrhyn, the Charlotte, the Fishburn, the Golden Grove and the Sirius) in Botany Bay within forty hours of the Supply. 21 January After an examination Botany Bay is found to be unsuitable for settlement. Arthur Phillip takes John Hunter and other officers in small boats to explore alternative sites for the settlement in Port Jackson, twelve kilometres to the north. 23 January Phillip returns, having found fresh water and a sheltered harbour in what he is to name Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. The fleet is ordered to immediately abandon Botany Bay. 24 January As the fleet prepares to leave Botany Bay for Sydney Cove, it sees two ships trying to enter the heads. They are the French exploration ships the Astrolabe and the Boussole, commanded by Captain La Perouse, which left France three years earlier. 25 January Some of the ships of the First Fleet are damaged as they struggle against fierce headwinds to get out of Botany Bay. The French ships then struggle to get in. 26 January Arthur Phillip arrives in Sydney Cove on the Supply before the rest of the fleet and conducts a small ceremony on what will become Australia Day. The rest of the fleet arrive and anchor in Sydney Cove on the evening of the 26th. 27 January The unloading of the fleet, the clearing of land and the pitching of tents for more than a thousand settlers begin. For the next few years most of the settlers will live in tents or crude shacks with little or no furniture. February Unable to harvest sufficient local fresh food, the settlers are beset by scurvy and other illnesses. Chief Surgeon John White reports that by mid-year more than a hundred and fifty marines and convicts are infirm. 2 February Lieutenant Philip Gidley King returns to Botany Bay in a small boat and spends three days visiting La Perouse and the French. He is told some of the convicts have already walked overland to ask the French to help them escape. 6 February The bulk of the women convicts are finally unloaded from the ships and the sailors bring grog ashore, which leads to a night of wild debauchery. 14 February Philip Gidley King is sent on the Supply with a party of twenty-three settlers to establish a colony on Norfolk Island in the Pacific Ocean, about fifteen hundred kilometres to the north-east of Sydney. 27 February Thomas Barrett becomes the first convict hanged in the new colony, for stealing food from the public store. 10 March La Perouse and the French ships leave Botany Bay heading north. The ships are later lost and never heard from again. 13 March The first reduction is made to the food ration. 5–6 May The first three of the privately owned chartered ships of the fleet, the Charlotte, the Lady Penrhyn and the Scarborough, leave Sydney to return to England via China, where they will pick up a cargo of tea for the East India Company. A number of convicts are thought to have successfully escaped by hiding in the departing vessels with the support of sympathetic sailors. 15 May Arthur Phillip sends back his first report on the colony with the returning ships and hints at the problems that lie ahead when he admits that the clearing of land has been slow, very little grain has been sown and more supplies need to be sent from England. The foundation stone is laid for the two-storey governor's house, which was designed and built by convict brickmaker James Bloodsworth and finished in June 1789. 4 July Chief Surgeon John White appeals to Arthur Phillip for more fresh food in the diet of the settlers to offset widespread sickness. 5 July Arthur Phillip asks the British Government to send clothing to cover the naked Aboriginal people. 9 July Lieutenant Ball returns from the tiny Lord Howe Island without success at catching the huge turtles it was hoped would supplement the diet of the settlers. Arthur Phillip sends a more pessimistic report to London in which he says the colony's first harvest has totally failed, most of the livestock brought from the Cape has died or been lost in the bush and that the colony will remain dependent for much longer than planned on food and supplies sent from England. 13–14 July The next four privately chartered ships of the fleet – the Alexander, the Friendship, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale – leave on their ill-fated return to England. 28 September Phillip reports to London that the settlers' shoes have worn out and that many of the convicts are now in rags, as there is not enough thread to repair their clothing. 1 October Captain John Hunter is sent on the Sirius via Cape Horn to the Cape of Good Hope for food, although Phillip notes that the amount the ship will be able to hold will not sustain the colony for long. 19 November The last of the privately contracted ships, the Fishburn and the Golden Grove, depart for England, leaving the colony with only the two navy ships, the Sirius and the Supply. 31 December The settlers forcibly abduct a local Aboriginal man named Arabanoo (whom they rename Manly) in an attempt to bridge the language and cultural gap that exists between the newcomers and the locals. [ 1789 ] 1 January The Sirius reaches Robben Island off Table Bay with most of the crew stricken with scurvy and the following day anchors in Table Bay, where it will stay for forty-nine days. Four of the crew desert in the port. 20 February Hunter sails for Sydney on the Sirius with a shipload of food. March The government receives the first report of the colony from the returning ships the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale. The reports give them comfort enough to confirm New South Wales as the Second Fleet's destination. If the reports had been negative, the fleet would have been sent to Nova Scotia instead. An order is also given to the Admiralty to immediately send a ship to the colony with relief supplies of food. The Guardian is loaded with supplies in Portsmouth. April An outbreak of smallpox in New South Wales kills an estimated half of the local Aboriginal population but only one white man. It is a mystery how the disease was unleashed more than a year after the arrival of the First Fleet. Arabanoo, who has become liked and trusted by the settlers, dies while treating the sick among his people. 2 May The Sirius is first sighted in Port Jackson returning from the Cape of Good Hope with food. Different accounts are given in the journals as to when it anchored in Sydney Cove. (Collins says it was 6 May; Hunter says the evening of 9 May.) 29 July The Lady Juliana, the first ship of the Second Fleet, leaves Plymouth with two hundred and twenty-six convict women on what will be a year-long voyage to Sydney. 12 September The Guardian, under the command of Captain Edward Riou, finally leaves Portsmouth more than three months later than planned, with over nine hundred tons of urgent relief supplies for New South Wales. October The food ration is further reduced in the colony. 1 November Following an assessment of existing stores everyone is reduced to two-thirds of the established ration. 24 November The Guardian arrives at the Cape of Good Hope having taken the most direct route south along the African coast. The Lady Juliana, which left England a month earlier, is still in Rio de Janeiro with its cargo of women convicts. 24 December Thirteen days and more than a thousand kilometres out of the Cape of Good Hope, and having topped up with supplies, the Guardian crashes into an iceberg. Half the crew attempt to abandon ship and the rest stay on the submerged and stricken vessel. [ 1790 ] 4 January Survivors on only one of the Guardian's five lifeboats are picked up by a passing French ship four hundred kilometres east of Natal and taken back to Cape Town. 21 February Nearly two months after it began sinking, the Guardian is seen in the Indian Ocean south of Madagascar by a passing Dutch packet and towed back to Table Bay, where the ship is later destroyed and its remaining cargo salvaged. 28 February The Lady Juliana sights land approaching Cape Town. 5 March Arthur Phillip sends more than two hundred settlers on the Sirius and the Supply from Sydney to Norfolk Island, where their prospects for survival are thought to be better. He also sends the marine commander Major Robert Ross, who has become his nemesis. 19 March After unloading the settlers, the Sirius is caught and wrecked on the reef on Norfolk Island. 20 March Major Robert Ross declares martial law on Norfolk Island. Captain John Hunter and his crew from the Sirius are stranded on the island with the other settlers for the next eleven months. 9 April Back in Sydney the Reverend Richard Johnson complains that he and fellow settlers' 'hopes are almost vanished' and that they are being 'buried alive' in the colony. 11 April The standard food ration in Sydney is reduced to 'less than half'. Pork is expected to completely run out in July, rice by September and flour by November. Later in the month settlers begin to starve to death. Marine captain Watkin Tench records seeing a man fall dead from hunger before him. 15 April Arthur Phillip writes and asks London to be relieved of his post. 17 April The tiny Supply, now the only ship left in the colony, is sent north to Batavia for food. On board is Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who is being sent back to England by Arthur Phillip to report directly to the British Government on the colony. King will board a succession of ships after Batavia to reach England. Chief Surgeon John White writes to a friend in England angrily suggesting that the colony has been a failure and should be abandoned. May Arthur Phillip is seriously wounded by an Aboriginal man who throws a spear that pierces the governor's shoulder and comes out of his back. 3 June The Lady Juliana, with its cargo of female convicts, arrives after more than a year at sea. The ship also brings food for the starving colony. 20 June The terrible story of the Second Fleet arrives with the Justinian, followed by the Surprize, Neptune and Scarborough. More than a quarter of the convicts died in the appalling conditions aboard the ships and hundreds more are sick and dying when they arrive in Sydney. 19 September The Supply returns from Batavia with food. 17 December The Dutch ship Waaksamheyd arrives in Sydney with more food, having been chartered for the purpose several months earlier in Batavia by Lieutenant Ball of the Supply. [ 1791 ] 12 February The Supply finally brings Captain Hunter and the crew of the Sirius back to Sydney, after they have been stranded for nearly a year on Norfolk Island following the sinking of the Sirius. 27 March Captain John Hunter and most of the crew of the Sirius are the first group from the First Fleet to go home to England on the chartered Waaksamheyd, after more than three years in the colony. Late at night, after the Waaksamheyd has left Sydney, eleven convicts, including Mary Bryant and her two children, make a daring escape from the colony and embark on a remarkable journey in a small boat to Timor. Eventually Bryant and the other escapees are recaptured. Bryant and four other convicts reach England, but the others all perish. 9 July The Mary Ann, the first convict transport ship of the Third Fleet, arrives in Sydney with one hundred and forty-one women convicts and six children on board. 21 September Philip Gidley King arrives back in Sydney from England on the Gorgon and is immediately sent to Norfolk Island to replace marine commander Major Robert Ross, who is being recalled with the marines to England. 27 September After six months' sailing, and with many of the crew stricken with scurvy, the Waaksamheyd reaches Batavia, where Captain Hunter buys the ship for the rest of the journey back to England. They arrive in April the following year. November The last ship of the First Fleet, the Supply, finally leaves Sydney with its crew to return to England, carrying with it the first live kangaroo exported from Australia, as a gift for King George III. The ship reaches Portsmouth the day before the Waaksamheyd, which had left Sydney seven months earlier. 18 December Major Robert Ross and his Marine Corps, recalled after nearly four years in the colony, sail back to England on the Gorgon, which arrived as part of the Third Fleet. The soldiers are replaced by a new marine force, the New South Wales Corps. [ 1792 ] 11 December Arthur Phillip is one of the last officials of the First Fleet to leave, after nearly five years in the colony. He sails on the Atlantic back to England, taking with him two Aboriginal men, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, who are an attraction in London society and are taken to meet George III. [ 1795 ] 7 September Captain John Hunter returns to Sydney to take up his appointment as second governor of New South Wales. The governorship has been in the hands of caretakers Grose and Patterson since the departure of Arthur Phillip nearly three years earlier. [ 1796 ] October Suffering ill health, Philip Gidley King returns to England for the second time, after serving five years as lieutenant-governor of Norfolk Island. [ 1800 ] 22 September Philip Gidley King returns to Sydney on the Speedy to take over as governor from an embittered John Hunter, whom he has been sent to replace. King serves six years as governor before relinquishing the post to William Bligh. [ 1814 ] 31 August Arthur Phillip dies in England aged 75. After returning to England, Phillip had served again in the navy before retiring in 1805.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 1

Twenty thousand dollars. Click. Candee Contando licked her dry lips. She'd done it. She'd placed an online bid on a home-auction website for the Victorian mansion on Thompson Lane. Her dream home, her dollhouse. Her dilapidated project. Two years of savings. Gone. No matter. Under her guidance, she'd transform the mansion to its former majestic state, painted a mustard-yellow offset by ornamental burnt-sienna "gingerbread" trim. The sounds of children's giggling and music and barking beagles—yes, beagles—would echo across all five acres of the property. She surveyed her offer and beamed, savoring the moment. Now if she only could ensure that no one else bid on the property and drove up the price. She studied the ticking clock on the website. Stay optimistic, she told herself. Deteriorated by age and wear, the Victorian would scare off any prospective buyer. She pushed away from her desk and surveyed her real estate office. Although only one room, she prided herself on the cheery décor. One wall featured photos of North Carolina—the majestic peaks of the Blue Ridge parkway and scenic waterfalls. Below the photos hung a map of the area with local real estate listings highlighted by pushpins. She peered out the window into the street below. Since noon, a bright sun had been at odds with January's wind—a wind crazy in its intent to blow the streetlights off their wires. For the umpteenth time, she checked her nonringing cell phone for messages. Surely the real estate market in Roses, North Carolina, would improve. Didn't prospective home buyers begin looking in January? And wouldn't these buyers call her rather than her competitors? Candee prided herself on her professionalism and up-to-date listings. Then why hadn't she made a single sale since August? On the heel of that depressing assessment came a cheerful one. In two hours, she and her older sister, Desiree, planned to enjoy dinner at Desiree's country club. Candee stepped back to her desk and switched off the computer. Two single women in their late twenties, she mused, spending Friday night alone and dateless, four weeks before Valentine's Day. Her cell phone rang, most likely Desiree firming up dinner plans and reminding Candee not to be late. Regardless of what time Candee met her older sister anywhere, Desiree always arrived before her. Candee clicked on her phone. "1-800-Cupid," she said with a laugh. "Contando Realty?" a man asked. "Yes, yes …" So much for professionalism. Candee felt her cheeks color. She hurried to her desk, dropping into the chair and switching her phone to speaker. "Are you looking to buy a home today, sir?" "I am." The man hesitated. "Is this the correct number?" She powered on her computer. "Absolutely." "I'm new to the area and checked into the Roses Hotel last night," he said. Envisioning the rundown hotel, Candy raised her eyebrows. Although in all fairness, the hotel was the only lodging open in the winter. Roses, North Carolina, was a summer tourist town known for bubbling hot springs and cool mountain temperatures. Her fingers poised on the keyboard. "I'm more than happy to assist. Your name?" "Teddy. Teddy Winchester." He had a deep voice, a slight southern drawl. "What type of home are you searching for, Mr. Winchester?" "The worst home in the best neighborhood." Yup. It figured. No significant sales commission to pay the mortgage this month. Fortunately, her part-time job at the local hardware store was stable, although the pay was meager. She scrolled through the listings. "For yourself, sir?" "I'm an investor." "How many bedrooms and baths?" "Three bedrooms, two baths. Single family and one level." "Budget?" "Anything below $50,000." She rubbed the back of her neck. Who did he think she was, a miracle worker? "Mr. Winchester, the nicer neighborhoods in Roses are priced well above $100,000." "Nope. Too high." Certainly a man of few words. "Perhaps—" "I'll take another look on the Internet." He seemed to ignore her completely. "Thanks anyway." She wouldn't lose a potential sale. "Wait." She feigned checking a non-existent schedule. "I may have an opening this afternoon. I know the area well and I'll find properties to show you. Will three o'clock work?" "In a half hour? Fine. I admire a realtor who works fast. Should I meet you at your office? The address is listed on the Internet." Candee verified the street number and ended the phone call with a cheery, "See you at three." She clicked off and checked her watch. Thirty minutes wasn't enough time to drive to her apartment and change. Her worn jeans and blue flannel shirt would have to suffice. Immediately, she phoned Desiree. "I may be late for dinner." "I'm so glad it's you," Desiree said. "Scott, a new lawyer at the firm, asked me out tonight. Barring the fact the invitation was last minute, I said yes. Desperation, right?" She paused. "Can we plan for dinner together tomorrow night instead?" "Right, sure. The reason I called is because I have a client who's interested in seeing some properties." "You have a real live client?" Desiree cut immediately to the question. Candee envisioned her sister, thick blonde hair piled high, sitting behind a mahogany desk in her law firm. Proper, well-dressed, every inch the high-powered attorney. Desiree had proven that, with the right help, a disadvantaged childhood could lead to a successful adulthood. She worked late hours at her law firm advocating justice for low-income families and their children. "He's an investor," Candee said. "Maybe he's tall, dark, and handsome?" Desiree said with deceptive casualness. "And rich?" "Investors are usually short bald men." Candee adjusted her shirt's wrinkled collar, then surveyed the frayed hem of her jeans. She let out a frustrated groan and ran a hand through her unruly auburn waves. "You'll need a rich man if you plan to go through with your insane idea to purchase that Victorian," Desiree said. "The place will eat up all the money you hope to earn in a lifetime." "I'll handle most of the work myself. Remember, when we lived in foster care, I learned carpentry from the family who took us in." "How will you offer a quality after-school environment to disadvantaged kids if you're busy driving nails into crumbling walls?" "Watch me." Briefly, Candee squeezed her eyes shut. It was her turn to pay it forward. "Well, don't discount short men. They prefer tall, willowy red-heads with green eyes," Desiree said. "Who knows? He might be struck by Cupid's golden arrow when he meets you. This guy might be the one." Candee drew in a breath. "The one what, exactly?" "Your partner, your love, your support system. The one who can help pay off the mountainous amount of debt you'll incur if you actually buy the biggest dilapidated disaster in the state." "Someone supportive? For me? After what happened?" Desiree's voice grew quieter. "Not every guy pretends to be something he's not. A lump lodged in Candee's throat. No man was worth having her heart broken again, although she didn't vocalize her feelings. Desiree was an eternal romantic. With a promise to meet her sister on Saturday evening, Candee clicked off and bent to pick up a broken pencil lying on the floor. Not once since the ill-fated night two years ago when her long-time boyfriend had walked out had she broken the vow to herself and wept. Life went on, although a sadness she couldn't shake remained precariously close to the surface. Some lessons were more difficult than others. Her ex had taught her the hardest—she wasn't interesting enough, pretty enough or vivacious enough. Tears welled and she brushed them away. Standing, she tossed the pencil into a garbage can by the door. While she confirmed two house showings for Mr. Winchester, she cast a critical assessment of her reflection in the mirror by the office door. She pinched her pale cheeks and added a touch of rose lip balm to her lips. Then she gathered her hair into a ponytail, securing the thick curls with an elastic band. With a final glance in the mirror, she pulled on her cream-colored woolen jacket and wound an emerald-green paisley scarf around her neck. Her suede purse under her arm, she pushed open the exit doors and stepped outside. The sun had buried itself under a formless cloud, and a swirl of wind blew her paisley scarf across her face. She tucked it securely beneath the collar of her jacket. The day was typical January weather for Roses, undecided if it was warm or cold.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 2

Teddy Winchester pondered for the umpteenth time how he'd ended up in Roses, North Carolina. Certainly the town was charming, tucked along a backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He'd taken a ride around the region before he'd checked into the hotel. The shopping seemed adequate and the town center exuded storybook appeal, retaining a New England quaintness, complete with a bandstand. Rob, his not-so-silent business partner in Florida, had assured Teddy the North Carolina weather was always cooperative, even pleasant for mid-January. And the area teemed with real estate bargains because Roses, population five thousand, had never fully recovered from the recession. Rob was wrong on both counts. Relentless gusts battering under the drafty hotel's windows had sent a chill through Teddy all morning while he'd sat in his room, and the inventory of low-priced homes on real-estate websites proved nonexistent. Roses wasn't what he'd hoped for. He needed a quick turnaround investment to help pay for his nephew Joseph's physical therapy. A horrific car accident and the loss of his nephew's father had left Joseph traumatized and weak, and the extensive physical therapy included strength building and stretching. Teddy took a deep breath, still reeling from his older brother's death. Christian, we promised to never desert each other. And now you're gone. In an effort to keep busy, Teddy perused his email, then texted an abridged list of instructions to his secretary on how to proceed with the sale of his late brother's farm. He assumed Christian retained life insurance, which would help pay for the mountain of medical bills steadily piling up, as well as lawyers' fees. The papers declaring Teddy Joseph's legal guard weren't finalized yet. The courts took their time, although the will guided the court's decision. With a sigh, he tapped in Rob's business number. Rob's gruff voice answered on the fifth ring. "Rob's Marvelous Muffins." "Hi Rob. Is Joseph around?" Teddy asked. "He's up to his elbows in Valentine muffin ingredients. A four-year-old's favorite activity is making a mess with a cupful of flour, right?" Rob chuckled. "I'll put him on speaker." "Hi Uncle Teddy!" Joseph's high-pitched voice vibrated through the phone. "Mr. Rob and I are putting a surprise in our muffins and writing something special on each one. Wanna know what's inside?" Teddy laughed. "Then it wouldn't be a surprise, right?" The boy hesitated. "Right." "Is there anything we can do about that?" "I can save a muffin for you, Uncle Teddy." "Great idea, buddy. I'll fly to Miami in a couple weeks, and we'll eat muffins together at Mr. Rob's bakery. Okay?" Joseph giggled. "Okay." Teddy swallowed. It was the first time he'd heard the boy laugh since his father had died. "I love you, Joseph," he said softly. "Love you, too, Uncle Teddy." Rob got back on the phone. "He's a good kid. You should see how he's mixing the butter and sugar together." "Maybe he's a born baker like you, Rob." "Or a farmer like you." "I was never good at farming." Which was true. It wasn't until he'd met Rob and gone into real estate that he'd discovered his forte. "Maybe you haven't discovered the right crop. Try tomatoes. Those plants grow regardless of—Hang on a sec." Rob turned away from the phone, but Teddy could still hear him directing one of his employees to be careful attaching the food grinder to the heavy-duty electric mixer he'd recently purchased. His voice returned to normal strength as he inquired how the house hunting was going. "I'm meeting a local realtor this afternoon." "Shouldn't take long. It's a buyer's market." He barked another order to one of his employees, then goaded, "You miss slaving over a hot oven?" Teddy could easily visualize the twinkle in Rob's crystal-blue eyes. "I haven't baked so much as a boxed cake in years," he said, chuckling. He and Rob had met years earlier at a cooking class for men. Teddy had soon discovered his speciality would never include burning another muffin, but Rob had gone on to build a successful chain of bakeries in the greater Miami area. Teddy could practically inhale the delectable, sugary aromas coming from Rob's spotless commercial kitchen. "And I'll take Joseph to his equestrian session this weekend," Rob was saying. "The kid has really formed a connection with horses." "Exactly the reason his therapist advised it," Teddy replied. "She said horseback riding would reduce Joseph's anxiety after the trauma of the accident." "She's right," Rob said. "And she's such a pretty thing, isn't she?" "Rob, she's Joseph's therapist." "Yeah, yeah, I know. And she's a few years younger than me, anyway." Rob gave an exaggerated whistle. "Remember to keep me in the real estate loop." "Do I have a choice?" Teddy grinned. He was impatient with lawyers and their endless legal jargon and talk of probate court. However, with the man and mentor he owed his real-estate start-up business to, Teddy's patience was limitless. "Hey, thanks for watching Joseph for me," he added. "What are oddball friends for? Your job is to snag the best buy in Roses." The usually brash Rob tempered his tone. "And Joseph's no bother, you know. When someone's down and out they need help, right?" "These past few months … Thank you. For everything." Teddy clicked off and stared at the phone. Sometimes, he didn't know what he would've done if Rob hadn't been there to pick up the pieces after Christian's death. He checked his watch, then pulled on a gray T-shirt. He was still half-wet from his shower and the T-shirt stuck to his body. He shook his damp hair, threw on a Florida State baseball cap, stuck his wallet in his jeans pocket, and zipped up an olive-green vest. Out in the parking lot, he fired up the engine of his red truck, and at exactly three o'clock arrived at Candee Contando Realty. He needed someone experienced to help him get just the right property, and from the Internet reviews he'd read, Mrs. Contando had been in business over thirty years. He walked to the entrance of an older brick building housing various offices and stopped midstep, admiring the beautiful young woman waiting in the doorway. The collar of a cream-colored jacket framed her oval face, along with an absurdly colorful green scarf. A pair of tiny gold cross earrings dangled from her ears. Her features were all high cheekbones and generous lips. He tipped his baseball hat. "Hello. I'm supposed to meet Mrs. Contando here." "I'm Miss Contando, although please call me Candee." Her smile enhanced her fascinating emerald eyes. His heartbeat slowed and he had to prompt himself to swallow. "This is your realty?" "Actually, it was said to be my mother's company for a while." She pushed back a stray wisp of auburn hair, handed him a business card, and then extended her hand. "Are you Mr. Winchester?" "Teddy." Tight jeans emphasized her shapely legs and rounded hips. This woman's stunning good looks could stop traffic. "I expected someone older," he managed to say. She let go of his hand, swept her gaze up his six-foot frame, and grinned. "I expected someone shorter." He met her grin, debating where he should look next. Her lovely face enhanced by a sprinkle of freckles? Nope, not at all professional to stare. Instead, he gazed at the weathered door behind her and cleared his throat. "Did you find any listings?" Her mouth curved into a polite smile. "Yes. Ready to see your future house?" Unexpectedly, he felt drawn to her. She wasn't at all what he'd expected, although his good sense warned him away. He was completely satisfied with being single, having made peace with that reality ever since his one serious relationship with a woman had ended badly. He'd lost his self-reliance once, and once was enough. He gestured toward his truck. "Should we use my vehicle or yours?" "Mine." She pointed to a rusted Honda Civic. "I'll drive. I know these roads well." He opened the car door for her, then came around and settled in the passenger seat. She buckled her seatbelt. He buckled his, then took in a quick breath. A faint whiff of her scent lingered in the air. Roses. He grinned. Why not? "So, Candee, have you lived in Roses all your life?" She glanced at him. "I've lived here and there." She returned her attention to the road, and an overlong moment passed in silence. He waited for her to continue. When she didn't elaborate, he asked if he could turn on the radio. The station was set to Classic Rock and "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers came on, the heartfelt lyrics about "Oh, my love, my darling," filling the little car. Teddy was about to suggest they try for more upbeat music when she gushed, "I love this song." Okay, he thought. She must be a romantic. "How many showings did you schedule?" he asked. "Two, both in Glenhaven." Flicking on her signal, she turned onto another road. "You want three bedrooms and two baths, correct?" "The perfect flip house." "You don't intend to live in the property?" "Nope. I want an easy fixer-upper that won't take longer than six weeks to renovate. I'm working with another investor, and we intend to make a quick and substantial profit." "Don't we all," she murmured. Their gazes met and they shared a grin. Soon, they were driving past neatly manicured lawns and one-story homes. She stopped in front of a beige bungalow, parking on the street. "The previous owners relocated, and this house has been on the market over sixty days." They got out and walked toward the house. As you can see—" she gestured to the tidy neighborhood and matching mailboxes—"Glenhaven is lovely." "The neighborhood is too cookie cutter." He stood on the front porch and studied mismatched shingle patches nailed to the roof. "Needs some work." "Inside, the home is beautifully decorated." "The bigger the mess, the bigger the profit." Automatically, he provided the investor's mantra. "What's the asking price?" "One hundred thousand dollars, although the owners are willing to negotiate." He shook his head. "Too expensive." Why did realtors try to sell homes over the buyer's stated limit? Noting Candee's downcast expression, he lightened his tone. "Are there any other homes in this town under fifty thousand?" "There is … one." She paused and pressed a finger to her lips, seeming to search for a reason not to answer. He overlooked her lack of enthusiasm. "Price?" "That particular house is listed on an internet auction site and meets none of your criteria." She paused. "It's a rambling Victorian and—" "Where is this house?" "On Thompson Lane at the edge of town. It's unoccupied." "How much land comes with the property?" "Five acres." "Can the land be sold off in parcels? Is it zoned commercial or residential?" "You can get on the website and download the report." She slid into the driver's seat and shut the door. Had he heard a grunt of disapproval? "Sorry I can't help you, Teddy," she continued, when he got into the passenger seat. "I'll drive you back to my office to get your truck, and I'll phone if anything in your price range becomes available." Now he had to beg her to view a property? She might be gorgeous, but she was certainly the world's worst realtor. "Do you have the lockbox code to this Victorian, Candee?" She raised her delicate brows. "Yes, but—" "I assume an appointment isn't necessary if no one lives there." She inserted the key into the ignition. "My pleasure." He didn't know why, although he'd bet she was being sarcastic. A few minutes later she turned onto Thompson Lane. As they passed an elderly man with gray hair and glasses perched on his nose, she waved, explaining he was Mr. Dunworthy, a widower who owned a Queen-Anne-style home two doors away. He'd lived in the neighborhood forever and refused to give up his large home, although it was becoming more and more difficult for him to maintain. She drove to the end of the road, sped up a circular driveway and parked in front of an imposing three-story house. An octagonal tower soared from the steep multigabled roof. Century-old trees flanked both sides of the property. On one corner of the overgrown front lawn, an oak tree boasted a tire swing. Teddy imagined himself pushing Joseph on that swing. Joseph needed to play more, needed fresh air. He'd been so pale since his father's death. No, Teddy told himself. Quick and easy sale. Of course, he could purchase the property for the land and build five new homes, more than tripling his profit. Or build low-income housing. Rob would agree with that decision. He rounded the car to open the door for her, but she'd already gotten out. They stood side by side and stared at the house. For the first time in many years, he drank in the stillness of a cool winter afternoon, admiring a home he'd only imagined in his dreams—and was well aware of the insane impulse to hold Candee's hand as they walked to the front door. He extended his hand to her. She stared at him in surprise, but then she took his hand. "The home is beautiful, isn't it?" she said as they walked to the front porch together. It was, although the Victorian sat beneath layers of peeling yellow paint that marred its exterior and several of the windows were boarded up. A covered front porch curved around to the side, and there was also a side entrance. Teddy imagined white wooden rocking chairs, a row of lush Boston ferns, and ceiling fans spinning lazily on a warm summer afternoon. The land, the land, he reminded himself. Candee dropped her hand and tapped in the code for the lockbox. She tipped her head toward the purple front door. "In its former glory days, this home reflected the wealth of the owners—the Langrone family. They owned a prosperous knitting mill in Roses." "And then?" "And then the mill went out of business. Too much foreign competition. The Langrones declared bankruptcy and moved out shortly afterward. All the owners since then moved in with high expectations until they discovered they weren't able to maintain the upkeep." What a waste of a beautiful home. As if she'd read his thoughts she lingered on the porch, a wistfulness in her gaze. "This Victorian was built in 1889 and definitely requires TLC." An absolute understatement, Teddy decided, when they walked in. The outside needed extensive work, and the hardwood floor of the grand foyer was badly gouged and scratched. Candee flicked on a light switch. Nothing happened, and she offered an apologetic shrug. With lights not working, they were left in semidarkness. And although the odor in the entrance hall stopped him cold, she didn't miss a beat and continued walking. "This is the kitchen," she was saying. "The cabinets are an olive color …" "What's left of them." He eyed the traditional arched raised panel doors and a lone cabinet left on the floor. So much beauty amidst so much neglect. He stepped onto rusty linoleum. Luxury vinyl it was not because the floor felt soft and spongy beneath his work boots. Water damage, and hopefully not too extensive and requiring a floor joist. Candee caught the focus of his gaze. "Avocado was a popular color in the 70's when the owners updated the kitchen." "Avocado is back in style," he replied. Hadn't Rob uttered the same words when he'd designed his showy corporate office in Miami? Teddy opened and closed a cabinet door and examined the hinges. "With lots of elbow grease and white paint, these cabinets might work. Better than tossing them in a landfill." Candee shook her head. "Nothing in this kitchen is salvageable." She opened the oven door. With a shriek, she slammed it shut. He inspected the grease-encrusted stove burners. "I'd install stainless steel appliances. The stove can stay. Six burners are a good selling feature, and the microwave can be mounted above the stove. Granite countertops, travertine flooring, a dishwasher, disposal …" He swung around. "If I open this wall, there'd be an expansive view of the yard, which would be great for kids." He didn't miss her speculative glance at his ring finger when he mentioned children. "I'm not married," he said. "It's just me and my four-year-old nephew, Joseph." She hesitated. "Where is he?" "He's in Miami spending the next few weeks with my business partner, Rob. Rob's the one who got me started in real estate." He'd said too much. How could he put into words the way his gut split every time he pondered Christian's death, or the pain Joseph had endured because of his numerous operations, or how Teddy had recently debated selling everything and starting over—somewhere quiet and peaceful—away from the high-pressure lifestyle of fast-paced Miami? "Every home I take on, I treat as my own," he whispered. Although this home wouldn't be here, because every bone in his practical body insisted it should be demolished. He ran the faucet, and rusty water spewed into the chipped porcelain sink. "City water and sewers," Candee said. "Good. No septic issues or a dry well save money. What's this house going for?" "No one knows the final price with an auction." "Square footage?" "Over 5500 square feet." "This house is bigger than I thought." He pressed his lips together. "What's the current bid?" She paused for a long while. "Twenty thousand dollars. You know you'll pour money into a house this size in order to get it back into shape." "Did you know you're the exact opposite of a saleswoman, Candee?" With a grin, he stepped forward into what he presumed was the formal living room, appreciatively remarking on the marble fireplace with its updated gas fireplace and the twelve-foot ceilings. "No use in traipsing through a ramshackle house—" Candee began. "I noticed there's a dining room and parlor," he interrupted. "Yes. And an adjacent library. And a music room." That same wistfulness in her voice again. He struggled to find the right words, debating whether to ask if she was upset about something. Hesitating, he changed direction. "Is the music room next?" "You're the buyer." Had she silently inserted the adjective foolish? He assessed the lengthening shadows signaling early nightfall. With no electricity, the house was growing darker by the minute. As they headed into the music room, the toe of his boot caught on a torn piece of shag carpeting. He heard Candee call out a warning as he lost his footing and fell through the floor.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 3

Candee peered through the hole in the floor into the shadowy basement. Although she heard Teddy's footsteps, she couldn't see him. "Are you all right?" she called. "Sure. I wanted to examine the basement, anyway. It appears to be a walk-out." She leaned over, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. "What's it like down there?" "I'll let you know in a minute." He switched on his cell phone's flashlight and peeked up at her, waggling his dark eyebrows. "Care to join me?" He couldn't possibly be flirting. "Uh no. I'll wait here, thanks." Teddy pulled himself back up into the music room. "Maybe next time?" With one hand in his worn jeans pocket, the other wielding a tape measure, he was rugged and impossibly good-looking, his muscled arms straining against a thin gray T shirt. He brushed dirt from his vest and yanked off his baseball cap. His wealth of black hair was mussed, and the late afternoon sun gilded thin strips of golden highlights to the tips. Perhaps he'd stepped right off the cover of the latest men's home improvement magazine without telling her. Although she'd walked through this house many times, she hadn't ventured into the basement. Desiree often called Candee the opposite of a realist, although what would the world be like, Candee rationalized, without dreamers? Teddy carried the broken kitchen cabinet from the kitchen and placed it over the hole in the floor. As they continued through the house, he snapped photos with his cell phone. "After I see the upstairs, I'll send these pictures to my partner Rob," he said. She gestured to the sweeping spindle staircase. "This home has five bedrooms, five baths, and five fireplaces. It's the opposite of a perfect flip house." "Nevertheless, lead the way. There're two more floors to check out." After he'd inspected the upstairs bathrooms and admired the worn brass hardware on the master suite's mahogany double doors, they made their way downstairs. When they reached the foyer, he glanced up from his cell phone and said, "I want to make an offer." She shuffled back two steps. "You're joking … right?" Her gaze shifted to the entrance. She'd made a serious mistake in mentioning this house to him. "I never joke about real estate." "This home"—she swept out her hands—"is a money pit." "Which is why Rob and I will buy the property for the land." Candee's heart stopped beating. "We'll demolish the house," he added. Her house, she wanted to shout. Her land for disadvantaged children. She'd envisioned beagle puppies cavorting across the lawn, perhaps an acre set aside for a working farm. Children needed to connect with nature. It was time to get them away from technology and back to values that really mattered. And music. The music room off the kitchen would reverberate with glorious sounds again. Teddy faced her. "Anything the matter?" There was kindness in his gaze, interest on his handsome features. Should she share her ideas with a man she'd known for less than two hours—a man who was bent on destroying those very same ideas? A man who'd held her hand in his strong grip and gazed at the Victorian with the same wonder and appreciation as she had? Struggling to hold onto her composure, she reminded herself she was a professional. Besides, this house was nothing like what he was looking for. She lifted her chin. "Not a thing." Lightly, he touched her cheek, his gesture completely unexpected. "I understand how you feel about a house like this. It's very beautiful, but beyond repair." Turning away, she quickly dabbed at her eyes. She settled into the tune she'd known the past two years: no matter how sincere, how charming, men couldn't be trusted. Better to hold him at a polite distance and keep her plans to herself. He'd soon be gone back to Miami. "Are you sure you're okay?" he asked. She feigned her brightest smile. "Of course." He waited a beat, then silently followed her, standing on the porch while she locked the front door. "Any idea what the current bid is? You mentioned under fifty thousand." Candee rubbed her temples. A quick search on the Internet would spew all the information he'd need to place a bid. "Twenty thousand dollars," she finally said. "And bidding ends in three weeks." So many mistakes today, beginning by answering the phone. 1-800-CUPID. Hah! "Then I'll offer thirty thousand dollars," he said. An uneasy quiet descended. A cold breeze brushed across her cheeks. "The auction accepts bids in twenty-thousand dollar-increments," she said. "Then I'll bid forty thousand, which is still under my fifty-thousand-dollar budget." "The bank may not accept a lowball offer." Her remark was nonsensical, since she was hoping the bank would accept her offer, because twenty thousand dollars was all she had. She glanced at Teddy's determined stance. Surely there was a way to convince him not to bid. However, thirty years of proper Southern behavior stopped her from saying more. "I can offer all cash," he said. "Plus, my partner and I can close immediately. On a foreclosure, the bank will take everything into consideration." "Don't you want to walk the property? If you're interested in the land, there are building requirements and permits—" He reached into his pocket and handed her a business card. "I do this for a living, Candee. I know all about due diligence." He gave a lazy grin. "And there's another clause, which can either make or break the deal." She fisted one hand on her hip. "The bank should just hand over the house to you?" "A definite bonus." He laughed, rich and full. "I'm hoping my lovely realtor will grant me the pleasure of her company at dinner." "I can't." Her refusal was quick, a knee-jerk reaction. She hadn't dated in two years and wouldn't start now, especially with a tycoon investor who assumed that by flaunting the cash in his pocket, he could take her castle in the air away from her. "Not even for a slice of pizza? I don't know my way around Roses yet." She retreated a step. "Tony's Pizza on Main Street is always open. You can spot the red and green awning a mile away." "Are you saying no, Candee?" "Is my refusal a deal breaker, Teddy?" "Not if I can get this property for under fifty thousand dollars." "If you decide to bid, you'll have to wait three weeks to find out if you've won." His gaze lingered on her face. "Some things are worth waiting for."

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 4

Teddy's cell phone buzzed on the nightstand in his hotel room. Awake anyway, he answered it and heard a recognizable woman's voice. "Teddy?" "Yvonne?" He peered at the clock on the nightstand. "You realize it's three a.m.?" "Are you awake?" He pushed a hand through his hair. "Should I be?" "It's nine in the morning here in Madrid." "I'm not in Spain," he countered. "Such a shame you aren't with me." A long feminine sigh. "I'll never get used to the time difference. Look, my network in the States wants me in Madrid another few weeks to cover the recent drought. Water levels in the reservoirs are abnormally low, and they're aiming for a human-interest story to boost ratings and land a prime-time slot." Teddy had met Yvonne—an attractive woman with honeyed skin, her thinly arched black brows offset by a pixie cut of platinum-blonde hair—when he'd been offered a weekly television segment featuring tidbits on flipping homes. His fifteen minutes of fame had lasted, well, fifteen minutes. His relationship with Yvonne was going on five months, although he hardly ever saw her. Her job involved a great deal of travel, and he wasn't diligent about keeping in touch with her. He wasn't adaptable to the ever-changing elasticity of dating a woman he saw only twice a month. He extended the expected congratulatory remarks. Compliments were a prerequisite when dating Yvonne Evette. She was a career woman bent on reaching the top, although what 'the top' was had yet to be determined. Currently, it meant an anchor position on a major American network. After good-byes, he clicked off his phone and shifted restlessly on his narrow bed. The previous morning when he'd arrived at the Roses Hotel and realized the four-star rating wasn't accurate, he'd debated about sitting on the bed, much less lying on it. Still, he'd pulled back the bedspread, flopped down, and peered at a stain on the ceiling, trying not to ponder how it got there, for it certainly wasn't a water stain. Now, in the darkened room, he punched a pillow and rolled onto his side. Night after night since his brother's death, sleep had been elusive. That's what happened when two brothers grew up together facing the shared futility of scarcity and endless beatings from their drug-addled father. Nothing was left of the Winchester heritage except the old Florida farm, the rundown homestead sitting on two acres of land at the end of a county road. And no matter how wealthy Teddy became, his roots were fixed in poverty. Fortunately, his brother Christian had held onto the farm after Christian's wife died a year earlier, refurbishing the place and attempting to grow citrus fruit. The crops hadn't produced one grapefruit, as far as Teddy knew. Neither he nor Christian had the knack for farming, and Christian had always struggled when it came to financial success. Lately, Teddy found himself talking to his late brother: Christian, should I do this, should I do that? I'm a bachelor. Am I the best choice as Joseph's legal guardian? Christian had been an exemplary father. How was Teddy expected to fill those impressive shoes? Perhaps he should marry, he pondered, providing a stable home for Joseph as his brother had done. Turning onto his back and linking his hands behind his head he thought about Yvonne—her suggestive words, her open invitations, her sultry voice. However, he didn't want Yvonne. His mind traveled instead to Miss Candee Contando, the beautiful realtor with the creamy complexion, a mass of red hair framing her face and long legs that went on forever. Her realty skills were non-existent. When he'd pressed her for details about any property under fifty thousand, she'd hesitated for a lengthy spell before answering. When they'd stood together and stared at the Victorian, he'd had to fight down the impulse to kiss her while holding her hand. She was gorgeous and witty, with a cool no-nonsense façade. And somehow, he knew she'd require a sizeable amount of convincing to date him. He didn't know the reason for his next decision. He only knew he wanted to see her again. He'd visit her office first thing Monday morning with some excuse, and then invite her to lunch. Perhaps he'd bid on the property with her assistance. Envisioning Candee's beautiful face, he drifted off to sleep. "Pizza?" Desiree repeated. "The guy's taking you out for pizza?" Candee smoothed the collar of her royal-blue silk blouse. She wore an outfit appropriate for dinner at the fancy country club her sister belonged to—the silk blouse and a black pencil skirt, and black stilettos. "If you recall," she said, "I'm not going." "Was he bald?" Candee sipped her water. "No. His hair is dark and wavy." "Short?" "Wrong again. He's at least six feet tall. If anything, he's exceptionally handsome." Her heart gave a peculiar little pitch as she remembered his outrageous smile when he'd asked if she wanted to join him in the basement. "Married?" "No, although he talked about his nephew." Desiree reached for her crystal wineglass filled with a local red wine. "Rich?" "I checked his business listing on the Internet. R and T Realty in Miami is legit." A teasing smile tilted Desiree's lips. "Then why would you refuse his offer to go out for pizza?" Because all her energies were focused on the Victorian house, Candee wanted to say. Because she wasn't ready for a relationship. "Because he's placing a bid on the Langrone mansion so he can tear it down," she responded aloud. Desiree beckoned to a waiter who immediately splashed more water into the women's glasses. "Has he lost his mind like you have?" Candee assessed her perfectly coiffed sister. Desiree was her usual stunning self, her blonde hair caught at the crown of her head with a glittering rhinestone fastener. Forking a piece of lettuce, she replied, "Perhaps that's how these high-roller investor types go about flips." "Once the house is torn down, what's he going to do with a vacant five-acre lot?" "He didn't explain." Candee pushed her half-eaten meal of salad, grilled salmon and roasted red potatoes aside. "Who spends thousands of dollars to tear down a beautiful piece of property which should be preserved, not destroyed?" Desiree finished her wine and set her glass to the side. "His reasons might be good ones." "Well, he won't have the opportunity to tell me. I won't be seeing him again." "Give him a chance. He sounds utterly gorgeous. Call him." Candee leaned back and crossed her arms. "I've never called a guy in my life." "Your life, your decision." Desiree's gaze traveled through the expansive dining room. "Did I mention the club is having a Valentine's Day silent auction and dinner dance? I remember how beautifully you helped me decorate the dining room two years ago. We filled champagne glasses with candy hearts—and the chocolate fondue was fabulous!" Candee faked a glibness she didn't feel. "You're referring to the night my ex walked out on me for another woman." "You'll be happier if you don't dwell on the past," Desiree said. "Besides, you'd discussed ending your relationship with George two months before the actual breakup. Focus on what's ahead and let the past stay where it belongs." Before Candee could answer, Desiree trilled a giggle and waved. "Scott's here, the man who took me out last night." Candee peered over her shoulder. "The guy with the blond crewcut sitting alone at a table near the bar?" "Yes. I mentioned we were eating here tonight, and he said he might join us for dessert, and then we discussed he might bring a friend … umm … for you. The friend's name is Allen Allen." "You planned to set me up on a blind date?" Candee half-stood. "Thanks, but no thanks." "What's wrong with meeting a man for coffee and dessert? Maybe we can double date for the Valentine dance." "The dance I'm not attending," Candee reminded. Desiree peered in Scott's direction. "I don't see anyone with him." She frowned, then pulled her vibrating cell phone from her handbag. She flashed Scott a smile and read his text aloud. "Allen heard the weather might take a turn for the worse, so he decided not to come." "The guy's name really is Allen Allen?" "He practices law in a neighboring town. He and Scott went to school together." Candee was no longer listening. She was peering out the nearest window, assessing the weather. The earlier light drizzle was turning to sleet, and she thought it prudent to leave sooner rather than later. Within a few minutes she was pulling on her jacket, a faux fur capelet, and Desiree was sharing Scott's table with him. As Candee prepared to exit, she walked straight into a tall attractive man wearing navy pants, a striped polo shirt, and a gray sport coat. "Candee? What are you doing here?" Teddy's gaze slid slowly up her, from her stilettos and slim-fitting skirt to her silk blouse, finally stopping at her face. She fingered her gold cross earrings. "May I ask you the same question?" "My partner has a reciprocal agreement with private clubs around the country. Since you refused my pizza offer last night …" He gave an appreciative male smile. "You know, you're a knockout when you're all dressed up." Heat flushed her cheeks. "Thanks for the … compliment?" "I mean, you're a beautiful woman whether you're wearing jeans or—" Now the flush warmed her ears. "Well, thanks again. I was just leaving." "Me too. I ordered takeout food and forgot forks." He flourished a bag with the country club's logo as proof, then glanced out the window by the front door. "Roses certainly has unpredictable weather." "It's not usually like this." She attempted to brush past him. "Whereas Florida's weather is predictably hot and sunny." "Especially Miami." He grinned. "Where are you parked?" "I came with my sister, Desiree, who's ditched me. She prefers to drink coffee with her latest conquest, a new lawyer at her firm." Candee glanced over her shoulder at the bar area. Desiree was watching her, and she grinned and offered a thumbs-up. Candee didn't respond, turning back to Teddy. "She and her newest conquest had planned a blind date for me, although Allen Allen, another lawyer, decided I wasn't worth the effort of driving in bad weather." Teddy's dark eyebrows quirked. "This guy's first and last name are the same?" "Yes." She surprised herself by adding, "It would have been my first date in two years, although I would've refused." "His loss is my gain. I'll take you home." Absolutely not. "No, no." Candee shook her head while securing her capelet. "I planned to call a taxi." Teddy gestured toward his pickup truck. "I'm parked at the curb. And your vocabulary might improve if you substituted yes for no once in a while." "I can't. Really—" "Say yes." No use in arguing with him. His references had checked out and he wasn't a total stranger. She smiled. "All right. I don't live far from here." "Much better." With his hand on her elbow, he guided her outside to his truck, opening the passenger door and helping her up and in. Her tight skirt didn't allow for much climbing, and she shifted into the seat, hoping her skirt wouldn't ride up her thighs. It did, judging from his appreciative smile, he noticed. "My address is 121 Juniper Street," she said, after she'd adjusted her skirt to a more proper length. "I'll plug it into my cell phone." She glanced at his profile as he slid into the driver's seat. Way too attractive, she thought, in a roguish way. "What about your silverware for the takeout?" she asked. He flashed a boyish grin, displaying even white teeth. "The club's signature hamburger can be eaten with human fingers, and there's a supply of paper napkins in my truck's glove compartment." "You're well-equipped." For a fleeting second, his gaze turned somber. "I try, although sometimes life throws some unexpected curves." At close range, she noted a scar below his right eye. It certainly didn't affect his good looks, but she wondered if it indicated some of those unexpected curves life had thrown at him.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 5

The sleet came faster, making visibility difficult. Still, Teddy seemed to recognize where they were as they neared the turn-off for Thompson Lane. "You know the code for the lockbox, right?" Teddy asked. "Yes, I have it memorized," she said. "Mind if we stop there first? I'd meant to check the water heater yesterday. In the excitement of falling through the floor, I forgot." She caught her lower lip with her teeth to stop from blurting out. He wanted to see her Victorian again? "The weather—" She gestured theatrically to the icy roads. "I have 4-wheel drive." "Did you offer me a ride tonight in order to get into the house again?" He slowed the truck, studying her for a couple heartbeats, and she attributed his silence to his interest in the Victorian. "I had no idea you were dining at the country club this evening," he said. There was enough truth in his statement to make her cheeks burn. Still, she persisted. "But when you did, you seized the opportunity." He offered a disarming chuckle. "Perhaps that was my second thought." She couldn't help a reciprocal grin. Truly, the guy was impossible. "And what was your first thought?" He glanced at her, and for a moment, she was caught in the spell of his irresistible dark eyes. "How lucky I was to see you twice in two days," he said softly. A faint smile touched her mouth. She stared out the windshield at the falling sleet, trying to decide if he was harmlessly flirting with her or telling the truth. "There's no electricity at the house, Teddy. It will be freezing and dark." "There's a gas fireplace in the living room. I called the gas company this morning. The meter is running as the gas was never switched off." The truck slid on the slick road. He reduced his speed again, gripping the steering wheel and focusing on the taillights ahead of them. "And I keep extra flashlights and candles in my truck." "Are you always prepared, regardless of the circumstances?" His lips twitched. "I try to think of everything." When they reached the circular driveway, he inched his truck along it and slid to a stop. At night, the Victorian loomed majestic and mammoth, set against the stormy winter sky. She imagined smoke curling from all five chimneys, the welcoming fireplaces blazing in the enormous hearths. "This house is a proverbial jewel in the rough," she murmured. "Yes, it is." Teddy's expression softened. He got out of the truck, hoisted a knapsack over his shoulders, and then opened the passenger door for her. "I could get used to this," she said. He assisted her out of the truck and took her hand. "Used to what?" "Being treated like a lady." He blinked. "Is there any other way to treat a woman?" Unfortunately, yes, there were plenty of other ways. She drew in a sharp breath, remembering the verbal abuse she'd suffered with George. How he'd yell to silence her when she didn't agree with him; his chiding, "Come on, can't you take a joke, Candee?" after he'd made fun of her cooking, or her clothes, or her mannerisms. Their relationship had sent her into a tailspin of self-doubt and self-preservation. Teddy interrupted her musings. "Shall I carry you up the stairs and over the threshold?" "I can walk perfectly fine on my own." She took one step and skated forward. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. "Just in case, I'll keep you steady." "Stilettos weren't made for walking," she joked, accepting his embrace and leaning into his solid chest as her heels crunched along the crusty ice. He chuckled. "I'm not complaining." They walked to the house under an onslaught of bone-chilling, wind-blown sleet. Teddy was proving to be a gentleman, she mused, holding her securely and concerned about her welfare, in a fast-paced era where common courtesies were oftentimes forgotten. Gratefully, she smiled up at him. When they reached the porch, she punched the code into the lockbox, extracted the key and unlocked the door. He flicked on his phone flashlight and steered them to the living room. "I'll get the gas fireplace running and then we'll have dinner." He pulled a blanket from his knapsack and set it on the floor, gesturing her to sit. Then he placed his gray sport coat beside her. "You can't light the fireplace and you shouldn't eat in here. The bank owns the house—we don't." She removed her capelet and installed herself on the blanket with her legs straight out, her tight black skirt tucked securely around them. "There are laws, Teddy …" "If anyone asks, you're my realtor and I'm the man buying the house." "And as your realtor, may I remind you that you're making a mistake by even thinking about purchasing a home in such poor shape? This isn't a wise investment for a house-flipper." "I'm tearing it down, remember?" He walked to the fireplace held the pilot button down for a couple minutes. A flame flickered, and the fire soon glowed, warming the room. She sighed. "What else is in your knapsack?" "Soy candles." He brought out a tidy boxed candle set along with a book of matches. He lit the candles and placed them on the fireplace mantel. "The box described these candles as part of the 'jasmine and cedar wood atmosphere collection.'" "Well then, they're perfect," she said, amused. He sat beside her, opened his takeout box and held up a massive hamburger. "Ah, dinner by candlelight." "No dessert? I love caramels coated in chocolate." "I'll bring caramels next time. Dark or milk chocolate?" "Dark." She chortled. "Bring those, and how could I refuse?" "Hopefully, you can't refuse anything I offer." His teasing laugh was potent, and his affectionate appraisal made her heartrate rise. Along with the aroma of the cedar candles, she inhaled Teddy's clean scent, all male, and the air around them heated. They fell into companionable silence, as she shared his crispy fries and had a bite of his hamburger. On top of the dinner she'd already eaten, she was consuming more calories than she normally ate in two days. When they were finished, Teddy picked up the napkins strewn beside them. "What do you do when you're not selling real estate?" he asked. "I volunteer at the Roses no-kill animal shelter every Sunday." She wiped her fingers on a napkin. "And I work part-time at the hardware store in town, since I like making things out of wood. My foster family's business was working with wood." His hands stilled. "Your foster family?" "When we were teenagers, my sister and I were removed from our home and placed into the state welfare system as foster children." Once she blurted out the words, Candee chided herself. What had compelled her to divulge so much information? If she'd blinked, she would have missed the kind interest clouding Teddy's face before he replaced his expression with a teasing grin. "And what do you make out of wood? Should I book you a spot on the home improvement channel?" he asked. "I'd wait about fifty years if I were you. I'm not ready for my own television show." She fixed her stare on the burning gas logs in the fireplace. "I made a detailed dollhouse once with my foster father, complete with a rocking chair measuring three inches." She paused as tears threatened. "I still have that chair." He kept his gaze on her face. "Care to tell me about your foster family?" "Which one?" "There was more than one?" "We were shuffled to five different families." Her throat tightened as the memories washed over her. "The agency urged each foster family to keep us, and then the family would decide not to adopt." Two teenage girls with no parents hadn't been worthy of love or a stable home. Teddy was watching her closely. "Go on," he said quietly. She swallowed. "The last family Desiree and I were placed with ended up being our 'forever' family." Candee commended herself on her steady tone. "We attended church together, and in the evening we often sang hymns around their old upright piano while I attempted to plunk out the tunes." "I'm impressed." He considered her with open admiration. "You make dollhouses and play the piano and volunteer at a no-kill animal shelter. That is, when you're not selling real estate." He'd turned the conversation away from her past, and she was appreciative. Most days, she secured her childhood memories in a protected compartment in her mind. Sitting with Teddy, who seemed so attuned to her, she felt comfortable and safe. She half smiled. "I don't do any of those things remarkably well, except volunteering at the animal shelter. Animals love you no matter who you are or your background." He shook his head. "I've never had time for animals." "Doesn't your four-year-old nephew live with you?" "Yes, although it's only been for the past few months, and we're still getting used to each other. Rob's watching him now while I'm away. Joseph rides horses on weekends at an equestrian center near Miami, and now he wants a horse." "He'll probably beg for a dog at some point, too." Teddy chuckled. "He already has asked." Get him a rescue dog, preferably a beagle, she wanted to encourage. Although, seeing the closed expression on Teddy's face, she didn't pursue the subject. "Do you read music?" she asked. "I'm no Beethoven, although I can keep a steady beat on a timpani drum." He stood and gathered their trash in the carryout bag. "I'd like to go with you to the animal shelter—if I'm properly invited. You volunteer every Sunday?" "Immediately after church." He paused, then winked. "I'm waiting for an invite." She couldn't help laughing. "The shelter needs all the help it can get, although volunteers must first attend an orientation, give references and then commit to a certain length of time." "Can you vouch for me? I'll be living in Roses for the next few weeks." "All right." "Flexible hours?" he asked with amusement. She grinned. "Absolutely." "Then I'll assist in any way I can." He pulled a battery-operated transistor radio out of his knapsack. Turning it on, he fiddled with the dial until he found a crackly station playing 80's music. "Would you like to dance, Candee?" "You want to dance—now?" "You're still shivering a little." He offered a playful smile. "It's better to move around when you're cold." "I'm not shivering," she informed him. "And I haven't danced with a man in forever." Any further protest died on her lips as he pulled her to her feet. "I can't remember the last time I danced with a woman, either." He placed his arm around her back. "Although I remember I liked it." Candee silenced another protest. Why not dance? The entire evening had a one-of-a-kind, storybook quality to it. "Unchained Melody" came on. "I love the Righteous Brothers," she announced. Teddy smoothed his fingers across her shoulders and pulled her closer. "I noticed when we were riding in your car yesterday." They swayed in step to the enchanting words of the ballad about lonely rivers flowing and sighing. The glow of the fireplace, dancing slowly with this strikingly handsome man, made her forget the previous two years of heartache and aloneness and dateless evenings. "This music is in twelve eight time," she said. He kept his fingers joined with hers. "It's beautiful." With a quiet sigh, she submerged herself in the melody of the timeless song. The minutes passed and she lost track of the following medley of classic songs. She simply relaxed against Teddy's chest and allowed herself to experience the reassuring presence of his solid body against hers. His heart thudded in a steady meter and her own heart felt strange, beating oh-so-fast. "Candee?" He lifted her chin. "If I was that guy with the same first and last names, I'd have rented a snowplow to meet you at the country club tonight." His deep brown eyes darkened. Her body warmed with anticipation as his hands drifted down her shoulders, pressing her nearer. It was there, an invisible thread drawing them together. Her mind warned: It couldn't be, not after knowing him for a day. But it was. She knew he was going to kiss her, and she met his insistent lips with an eagerness she'd never known. He kissed her slowly, thoroughly. The strength of his powerful body molded intimately to hers, bringing her to life. The longer the kiss went on, the more she responded, straining to be nearer him. The doorbell rang. Teddy broke the kiss. "Are you expecting dinner guests?" He tipped up her chin. Affection and desire smoldered in his gaze as his thumbs stroked her heated cheeks. Her hands flattened against his polo shirt and she rested her head on his chest. "Not unless they brought chocolate." He laughed. "It must be the wind." The odd chime of the doorbell ringing a second time prompted her to pull from his arms. A moment afterward, the front door opened sending a blast of cold air into the living room. "Anyone home?" a gruff voice called out. A pair of heavy footsteps tromped down the hallway, and an elderly man with gray hair appeared in the living room doorway. With one hand, he pushed up a pair of thick glasses. With the other, he raised a sizeable wooden baseball bat. "Who are you two?" he demanded. Candee retreated a step. "Mr. Dunworthy?" "Candee Contando? What are you doing here?" The aging man hobbled into the room, using the baseball bat as a cane. "I saw candles flickering and smoke coming from a chimney. I figured it was teenagers up to mischief and decided to walk down here to see for myself." "Mr. Dunworthy." Teddy came forward. "Candee was showing me the house." "At this hour?" Up close, the dark age spots on the man's face showed prominently. He squinted and stared at Teddy. "You live around here?" "No. I'm from Florida actually. My name is Teddy Winchester. I live in Miami and I'm an investor." Teddy extended his hand. Mr. Dunworthy placed the baseball bat on the floor and the men shook hands. "I'm Charles Dunworthy. I live two doors down and I'm your basic nosy neighbor.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 6

The following day, Candee attended church services. Upon returning to her apartment for a quick lunch, she checked her cell phone. Teddy had texted her. Happy Sunday, his text read. Planning to volunteer at the animal shelter this afternoon? She glanced at her watch—half past noon. Yes, she texted back. On my way now. Can I join u? Teddy was persistent and apparently interested in her. He was so good-looking and not at all arrogant. His manner was compelling, gentle, yet with an aura of control. She so regretted that Mr. Dunworthy had interrupted their one kiss. She suppressed a grin and texted back. All hands are welcome. She sent him the address and then changed into a plaid flannel shirt, old faded jeans, black leather boots, and a light navy jacket. After pulling her hair into a casual pony tail, she tied the green paisley scarf around her neck. Despite the freezing weather the previous evening, the sky was a brilliant Carolina blue, the sun efficiently melting any sleet left on the ground. Candee recognized Teddy's pickup as soon as she drove into the shelter's parking lot. Lounging against his truck, he displayed an easy charm, looking exceedingly handsome wearing dark jeans, his olive-green vest zipped over a black T-shirt. He was ruggedly fit, his arm muscles taut and hard. He strode to her car, his boots crunching on the graveled parking lot, and had her door open before she'd taken her key out of the ignition. "Did you attend services this morning?" His slow, lazy smile made her shamelessly wonder how it would feel to kiss him again. As she got out of the car, she drew a long breath to steady her fluttering pulse and focused on the simple wood-sided entrance door. "Yes, and the sermon was amazing. The pastor spoke about how grace is the way to heaven and faith is the route we choose to take. Do you attend a church?" His nodded. "A contemporary church in Florida. They stream their services online and I watched on my computer early this morning before I called my nephew." "How is he?" "He sounded happy. I'll fly to Miami next weekend to see him. He's having a good time with Rob." He peered past her at the modern concrete and brick building. "How long is our shift?" "Four hours. And an application is required." "Done," he said. "I attended the orientation already and used your name as a reference. Was that okay?" "Of course." She paused. "When you texted me, were you already at the shelter?" He shifted. "I guess I was." "You guess? You blithely did nothing while I texted directions?" He raised a hand. "Guilty as charged. Last night you invited me to join you, remember?" Grinning, he took her hand. "Shall we go inside?" She liked his easy-going sense of humor. In the spirt of friendly bantering, she teased, "Do you want to clean the crates, walk the dogs or stuff envelopes?" "I have a choice?" She chuckled. "It depends on whether you want to sit or stand. I prefer walking the dogs and love being outside." He gazed down at her and squeezed her hand. "I'll go wherever you go." His words hung significantly in the crisp January breeze. The next four hours passed amidst amiable sparring and chatter, with Candee teasing Teddy that he was supposed to be walking the dogs—the dogs weren't supposed to be walking him. Dusk had fallen by the time Teddy was placing the last dog back in its enclosure as Candee explained the shelter's protocol and safety procedures to help limit the transfer of disease. For the next fifteen minutes they assisted last-minute customers with animal visitations. As they got ready to leave, Candee called out a jovial good-bye to Agnes, another volunteer. "Will you and your boyfriend be back here next week?" Agnes asked. Candee blinked. She was coming to value Teddy's friendship … but boyfriend? No, no, no. She wasn't ready to open her heart to another relationship—because Teddy would leave, like her parents, like the foster families, like George. Absolutely, she wanted to build a social life for herself again, but not at the expense of another heartbreak. She took a steadying breath, resolve firmly in control. "Teddy and I met three days ago, Agnes. I'm his … realtor." "Oh." The woman studied them. "You two just look like you're together. I assumed you were a couple." From the corner of her eye, Candee noted Teddy's quirked eyebrow, although he said nothing. She glanced at her hand in the crook of his arm. It felt natural, although she didn't remember placing her hand there. As they walked away, Teddy whispered in her ear. "Well, that opens up a landslide of potential for us, doesn't it? Now will you join me for dinner?" Leaning over, he opened her car door. "I'm at my realty office by eight o' clock on Monday morning." She bit her lip, debating his invitation. "In the afternoon, I work at the hardware store." "I promise to get you home early." His grin was wide, his gaze glinted with merriment. "Say yes, because we're a couple now. Just ask Agnes." "I never said—" Lightly, he kissed her forehead. "We've been on our feet for hours. Don't you need nourishment? Eating a few slices of pizza won't take long." Her hand hovered uncertainly above her car keys before she agreed. "I'm starved, actually." The sun was descending as they arrived at Tony's pizzeria on Main Street. They parked their cars near the entrance, and Teddy came around to open her car door. She smiled as he complimented her, citing how magnificent she was with animals and how much he prized her nurturing manner. He gestured to the entrance of the pizzeria. "I made reservations. I didn't want us to sit around waiting for a pager to go off. Especially since you go to work early in the morning." The soft tenderness in his deep voice took her breath away. Was it wrong for her to enjoy being well-treated? she questioned herself. Teddy made her feel special—listening attentively while she spoke, sensitive to her moods and attuned to her emotions. He obviously cared, showing initiative and planning ahead so she'd have a decent night's rest. He took her hand as they walked into the pizzeria. Mouth-watering scents of freshly cooked pasta, pizza, garlic, and oregano drifted through the darkly-lit restaurant. A portly woman, looking just like an Italian grandmother, escorted them to a table near a cheery fireplace. The woman was dressed in pressed black slacks and a turtleneck sweater, with "Tony's" stitched in red on the collar. A spiked-haired pizza maker stood in front of an open brick oven tossing pizza dough in the air and then covering the circle of dough with tomato sauce, pepperoni, and cheese. Candee took in a deep breath. "Italian is my favorite food in all the world." "Mine, too," Teddy agreed. As he pulled out a chair for Candee, he took in Tony's traditional decor—red and white checkered tablecloths, Italian statues and grapevines, the muted atmospheric lighting enhanced by votive candles at each table. He took a seat, and they accepted menus from the waitress, a sandy-haired teen who seemed far more interested in the pizza tosser than in her customers. Teddy perused the menu. "I love anything with the word pizza." "Tossed salad is a nutritious alternative," she said. After they were both served, Candee tucked into her salad while Teddy loaded up his plate with three slices of Margherita pizza. "Do you have a favorite dog?" He stopped in midchew to consider her unexpected question. "I came across many breeds today and it's hard to say. You?" She smiled, but there was a hint of sadness to it. "I love beagles." He was about to ask why when the waitress appeared. "More water? Coffee?" "Black coffee for me," Candee said. "Two cups, please," Teddy said. A few minutes later the waitress set steaming cups of coffee on the table, cleared their empty plates, and encouraged them to order dessert. "You haven't eaten any pizza yet," Teddy said. "There are two slices left." "Box up what's left," Candee said to the waitress. "Teddy, you can have the leftovers for a midnight snack." He laughed. "Since I professed my love for pizza earlier, I therefore have a good excuse for eating most of it." He gazed at Candee, who was twirling the ends of her thick red hair. He knew he was monopolizing her weekend, but she had been utterly enchanting while she'd handled the animals, treating every dog with respect and compassion, sensitive to the different breeds. She'd walked the dogs alongside him, hips swaying, her tall willowy figure provocative, laughing out loud at his knock-knock jokes. Finally, he'd met someone who appreciated his sense of humor. He loathed giving her up quite yet, and he planned to ask for a coffee refill when the waitress came back. As the waitress went around the corner to box up the pizza and flirt with the pizza tosser, Teddy leaned forward. "Why do you love beagles, Candee?" She broke eye contact and shrugged. "Long story." "I'm a good listener." He scuffed his chair closer to the table. "Last night you mentioned your 'forever' family. I'm assuming the two stories go together. Care to elaborate?" She cupped her hands around her coffee cup as the waitress set the boxed pizza by Teddy. He waited while Candee sipped coffee and fixed her gaze on the crackling fire in the fireplace. Setting the cup down, she said, "The Johnsons encouraged Desiree and me to attend college." "They sound like good people. Are you still in touch with them?" "Six years ago, they moved to Chicago. I haven't seen them since I graduated from college. We still email, and I hope to visit them someday." "What about your other foster families?" he asked gently. "You mentioned there were five families altogether." She waved a hand dismissively. "Why would you be interested in hearing the sad story of my childhood?" "Because I'm interested in you and everything about you." She blushed and slowly exhaled. "Desiree and I encouraged each other every time we moved, assuring each other everything was fine, but it wasn't, you know? Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, we'd lived in four foster homes. New parents were complete strangers to us, and every house had its own set of rules—where to sleep, how to dress, what to eat, chores that had to be done." Reaching out, he traced his finger along the curve of her cheek. "Those must have been very hard and scary years for two teenage girls." The smile she offered quickly faded. "I always felt like a misfit. We didn't do anything normal teenagers did. No sleepovers, no driver's licenses—only a continuous series of knowing we were outsiders wherever we went." She paused and stared down at her coffee. She'd hardly drunk any. He took her silence as consent that she'd continue, and waited. She gazed out the window at a cluster of clouds sitting low in the sky, then shifted her gaze to his. "Looking back, the hardest part was the beginning. I can still visualize my sister and me packing all our belongings into green trash bags the day we were taken from our home. I was twelve at the time. Desiree was fourteen." "May I ask why you were put in foster care?" She stared past him. "Our parents were declared unfit, and the state deemed it necessary for my sister and me to live in a safer place." She fidgeted with her gold earrings. "Although I didn't understand at the time, in hindsight I see there was no other choice. Our parents died soon after we were removed, and the doctors blamed their deaths on substance abuse." "I'm sorry." He took her cold, fidgeting hands in his. "And now you've grown into a beautiful young woman. From my brief glimpse of your sister, she seems to be doing well. She's a lawyer?" "And a good one, advocating for children's rights," Candee responded brightly. "I'm committed to making a difference in children's lives too. I have a plan that includes a rambling property with five acres, where children can safely go after school and learn music and play with dogs and finish their homework and eat healthy snacks …" Her voice trailed off. "I applaud you." He grinned approvingly and glided his thumbs over her hands. "What's your plan?" It was just like her to want to help others, he thought. He imagined her as a kind and caring mother—a perfect mother for Joseph. Perfect for Joseph and perfect for him. He scowled at himself, surprised the idea had drifted into his mind of its own accord. With a long sigh, he acknowledged the truth. Candee was an extraordinary woman, compassionate and warm-hearted. At thirty-two years old, he'd never felt such an instant attraction to a woman. After knowing her for only a few days, he was already half in love with her. Perhaps fate had brought them together. "You might as well know all the facts, Teddy," she was saying. His thumbs froze on her hands in midstroke. He made himself resume, collecting his thoughts before asking, "What facts?" She pulled her hands from his. "I should have addressed the situation and told you everything on Friday." Her voice was so low, he strained to hear her. "Tell me what?" He leaned in closer, promising himself that whatever these facts were, it didn't matter. For a fleeting moment, she closed her eyes, but then she pushed her shoulders back and squarely met his gaze. "The twenty-thousand dollar bid on the Victorian? It's my bid. I'm planning to live there and renovate the downstairs space, making it an after-school day care for disadvantaged children." Her voice caught. She paused before her words rushed out. "Therefore, I'd appreciate if you took your money elsewhere, preferably Miami, because the Victorian is taken."

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 7

Taken? The Victorian was taken? Teddy jerked off his vest and threw it on the worn oak chair in his hotel room. He approached the window and gazed out at a thick black sky. In the distance, the twinkling lights of shops in the town square beckoned. Somewhere near, a church bell tolled the hour. He tapped his hands together and spoke softly to his brother. "Really, Christian? Candee bid on the irreparable property in Roses that I'm interested in?" With a heavy sigh, Teddy shoved his hands into his jean pockets. There were few moments in his life when he recalled being at a loss for words, but he definitely hadn't known what to say when Candee announced her plans. He'd mumbled something about having no idea she'd wanted the property, paid the restaurant bill while acknowledging her 'thank you,' then matched her swift steps as he walked her to her car. At first, he'd been angry. Why hadn't she simply told him? True, he'd been insistent about seeing the property. However, if the Victorian meant that much to her—which it apparently did—she should have never taken him to see it. His anger had evaporated on his drive back to the hotel. In retrospect, her intentions explained her hesitancy, her efforts to talk him out of buying it himself. And if he hadn't been so intent on purchasing a bargain, he would have spotted what was clear in hindsight—she loved the house. He'd clearly seen her wistful gaze when she'd held his hand and stared at the property with him. He shook his head, berating himself. Here he thought she was the world's worst realtor. Instead, she was trying to protect her investment, and perhaps her heart. Her life had been filled with trauma and transience, yet in what he recognized already as true Candee style, her aspiration was to transform the house into a safe environment for disadvantaged children. His head-strong, courageous Candee. He recalled the night before, the candlelight living room and her amused, "You want to dance—now?" After the music started, she'd snuggled close, her soft curves pressed against him. She'd felt warm and responsive, and the mere touch of her hands on his shoulders had heated his pulse. Just thinking about the tumultuous highs of the past three days made the short time they'd spent together all the more significant. He sensed she was beginning to care for him too. Nonetheless, common sense warned that love had no place in his life. He owned a thriving real estate business in Florida and had a nephew who needed him there. There was no reason he couldn't continue seeing her, though, his heart encouraged. All that stood between them was the house and a distance of over seven hundred miles. Both easily remedied, he assured himself, between phone calls and Skype, although his conscience nagged about how he didn't do well in long-distance relationships. With a low exhale, he turned away from the window. Before they'd departed, he'd pressed a kiss to her forehead and informed her he intended to talk further in the morning. She hadn't agreed, although she hadn't disagreed either. Nonetheless, he'd seen the resistance in her green eyes. It had taken the last grain of his self-control not to bring her to his chest and placate that resistance with soft assurances and numerous kisses. First thing in the morning, he'd arrive at her realty office and check off the first part of what was keeping them apart. He had decided to visit her office on Monday anyway, although now his reasons were different. He glanced at the clock, dreading the lengthy night awaiting him. At least there were leftovers, he mused. He uttered a soft curse as he looked around his room. In their quick departure, he'd forgotten the leftover pizza at the restaurant. More importantly, he'd forgotten to ask Candee why she loved beagles. Tomorrow. There was always tomorrow. For her sake and for his, he intended to straighten out everything. Tomorrow. After calling his nephew and speaking briefly to Rob, Teddy arrived promptly at Candee's realty office at nine a.m. His arms were laden with four boxes of chocolate-covered caramels he'd bought at a local supermarket and a carryout bag from the trendy coffee house in town: two espressos topped with steamed milk, a dusting of cinnamon, and dark chocolate curls. A peace offering. He rapped on Candee's realty door and walked in, smiling his approval at the tastefully decorated sun-lit office. Candee sat behind an uncluttered desk with her laptop open, clicking rapidly on the keys. It appeared she'd taken extra care with her appearance, wearing a light-pink blouse and tailored black slacks. Her luxurious red hair was pulled back from her face and fastened with a floral-colored barrette, the rest of it falling to curl naturally around her shoulders. His heart stopped. She was so beautiful. She didn't seem quite as enraptured to see him. Her greeting consisted of a curt nod. He held the candy toward her. "These are for you. I realize it's a little early in the morning for chocolate." "It's never too early for chocolate." A slow smile came across her face as she stood. She accepted the candy and placed the boxes beside her laptop. "Thank you, although I can't eat all this candy." "I can help you." Encouraged by his success, he pulled up a chair and set the coffees on her desk. "I assume you expected me, and I have four reasons for coming." She sat back down in her chair. "Teddy, I … The Victorian …If you knew how much the home means to me." "That's the main reason I'm here." An odd lump formed in his throat at her vulnerable yet unwavering expression. "I have no intention of bidding on the property anymore." She pressed a palm to her heart. "You don't?" "Absolutely not. Prompted by the right incentive, of course." He paused. When she didn't respond, he continued, "Besides, I certainly wouldn't want to go against you in a bidding war." A determined glint shone in her gaze. "Considering you know I'd do anything to win?" "Considering that fact and everything else, I won't even try. When you're bent on a course of action, I believe nothing can stop you." "You've come to know me well in four days." She leaned back in her chair and grinned. "Besides, my twenty-thousand-dollar bid is all the money to my name, and I wouldn't have the funds to bid against you." Without warning, her grin turned into a sob. He went around her desk and knelt, sliding his arms around her. Turning into his embrace she cried harder, murmuring between sobs about how relieved she was, and how she knew the house could be salvaged with hard work and diligence, and she planned to use the acreage for a small working farm. When her tears waned, she stayed where she was, her head resting against his chest. He offered a napkin from the coffee bag. "Everything better?" Self-consciously, she dabbed at her eyes and composed her features. "I haven't allowed myself to cry in years." "I haven't cried in a long time either," he admitted. Rising, he skimmed a kiss across her temple. She offered a rueful grin. "What are the other reasons you're here?' "Well, the first was to bring you coffee and chocolates, and the second was to inform you I won't be bidding on the Victorian." "But you mentioned a 'right' incentive. What might that be?" "I'd like a thank-you kiss in return for preferring to be your ally, not your adversary." She smiled. He lifted her from her chair and pulled her into his arms. Gently, he brushed his lips over hers. Her tongue swept across his lips, and he welcomed her, his body shamelessly hungry in its response. His fingers tightened possessively to draw her closer, and an eternity passed before he lifted his mouth. "The reason you came to Roses was to find a property and now you're giving it up," she murmured. "You would do this for me?" He gazed into her glistening eyes, brimming with happiness. "I would do anything for you," he answered thickly, surprised he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. "Although I truly believe the Victorian is beyond renovation." She pulled out of his arms. "I'm a fairly good carpenter." His gaze narrowed, although he didn't want to spoil the moment by informing her the house needed at least a dozen carpenters working around the clock—not to mention plumbers, electricians and roofers. The silence lengthened. His heart gave a lurch at the resolve in her gaze. "And do you know what I've learned from being a carpenter?" she asked. "Good old-fashioned perseverance and staying power. Even my simple three-inch rocking chair demanded endless hours and a lot of care." "Making a rocking chair for a dollhouse is a lot different from tackling a five thousand square foot house that's been abandoned for years," he said. "I'm not impatient. I'll focus on the process and—" "I'll support you." His quiet tone stopped her from continuing. "However, from my knowledge as a contractor, sometimes you need to move on. Bringing the house up to par with city and code requirements will take a lot of capital." Adamantly, she shook her head. "I'll never give up my dream." He noted the guarded hope in her voice and carefully chose his words. "I have an offer for you. Your plan for after-school care is a good one, and I'd like to invest in it. Make me part of your equation." He lifted the coffees from the bag and handed her a cup. "Will you consent to viewing other properties in Roses that might also suit you dream?" She opened her mouth, presumably to argue. "Keep an open mind," he reminded. "I can't accept any money from you, Teddy." "Consider it a loan, then. I'll even throw in my free expert advice." She managed a wan smile before sinking into her chair and thoughtfully savoring her coffee. He glanced around the room. "Your mother owned this business?" He congratulated himself on changing their conversation's direction. "Those were the days when my mother wasn't drinking. By the time I graduated from college, this office had been boarded up, so I earned my real estate license and opened using her name." "Which is the reason I called you and not your competitors," he said. "I assumed you'd been in business for many years and knew the area well." Fate again, he thought. "I wanted to continue my mother's legacy in some way. She wasn't a terrible parent, just terribly misguided." Candee absently touched her gold earrings. "And of course, the drinking and the drugs …" "I've noticed you wear those earrings every day. Are they from your mother?" Sadness flickered across her beautiful face. "It's all I have left as a remembrance. She bought them at a consignment shop for my twelfth birthday. It wasn't long afterward that Desiree and I were moved to our first foster home." A hint of a smile wavered. "Now you've given me three reasons." He grinned. She didn't miss a thing. "I'm flying to Miami in a couple weeks to consult with Rob and see Joseph," he explained. "Joseph's a wonderful kid. I think I mentioned that on weekends, he goes to a horse training therapy facility." "Do you have custody of your nephew?" "Hopefully soon." Teddy exhaled a deep breath. "My brother was killed in an automobile accident a few months ago, and I should be granted guardianship of Joseph fairly soon. It's so hard for him right now … For us …" Teddy glanced out the window and knuckled an unexpected tear. She waited in silence while he cleared his throat before turning back to her. "I'd like you to fly down to Florida with me to meet Rob and Joseph. You alluded to a working farm for disadvantaged children and you might want to expand the concept and include animals as therapy." "It sounds like a wonderful idea, although I can't go. I have too many commitments in Roses." "We'll be gone from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening and you'd have almost two weeks to prepare for the trip." "What about my real estate business?" "Your one client is sitting across from you." She hesitated. "I've never seen Miami." "Bring shorts and flip-flops. You can stay at one of Rob's places. He owns apartments above several of his businesses, and one is a five-minute walk from my condo." "I'd never impose." "Believe me, Rob owns more properties than he knows what to do with. And didn't you advise me last evening to fly back to Miami? Well, I'm following your advice, except that I want you to join me."

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 8

The next two weeks flew by in a pleasant flurry for Candee, as she and Teddy viewed prospective houses and stopped daily at the Victorian house. He'd offered advice on cost-effective strategies to modernize, while staying true to the house's character. Though they'd viewed numerous modest properties more in sync with her nonexistent budget, none came close to matching the Victorian's architectural design, aesthetics, or sheer grandeur. Together, she and Teddy researched adding a horse farm to the property; and she'd discovered that horses, with their unique nature, were considered mirrors of a person and an excellent choice for therapy. Furthermore, being around horses bolstered a person's self-confidence, as horses were believed to relieve stress. "You have the acreage," Teddy had encouraged her after they'd exhausted her property search. On the last afternoon before their departure to Miami, they volunteered at the shelter. When they were about to leave, a pregnant whimpering beagle was brought in. After the veterinarian examination, it was determined the dog was approximately fifty days pregnant and due to give birth to six puppies within the week. "Where was the dog found?" Teddy asked. "This poor beagle was left on the side of the road." Candee gazed at the hound-dog look the beagle gave her, and her heart melted. "I may not be able to travel to Miami with you, Teddy, considering how large the beagle's stomach is. I want to be here with her when she gives birth." He'd assured her they'd technically be gone for one day—traveling to Miami on Friday and returning to Roses on Sunday. As he knelt beside her, she whispered, "After the beagle has her puppies, I want to keep her." He raised his eyebrows. "Do you mean her or the puppies?" "Both. A dog with puppies is costly for a shelter." Lightly, she caressed the dog's black and tan coat, and the dog didn't try to bite. "I'll be a foster mom until the pups can be adopted. All they need is a warm home." "And food and nursing and a loving caregiver," he murmured, recovering admirably from his shock. He carefully carried the compact hound dog to her own enclosure with food and water, and Candee placed a worn blanket beneath the dog. "Try to eat, girl." She offered the beagle a piece of fruit. The dog sniffed and slowly inched toward Candee's outstretched hand. "Beagles are known to be loving, gentle, and extremely sociable," Candee told Teddy. Seeing his expression as he brushed a sprinkling of dog hair, which resembled black pepper, from his vest, she assured, "And beagles don't shed, except in the spring when they're ridding themselves of their winter coats." "You know a lot about these dogs." At the sound of Teddy's deep voice, the dog keenly watched him and wagged her tail. "Why do you love beagles so much?" "We owned a dog once, a sweet beagle, and Desiree and I were forced to leave her behind." She hesitated, not trusting her voice to continue. "We called her 'Kisses.' The pregnant dog stared up at them with wide-set pleading hazel eyes. "'Kisses.' Your dog's name was Kisses." Apparently weighing his words, Teddy carefully replied, "You're taking on a tremendous amount of work with a monstrous house filled with rubble and weeds and all these dogs." "I cannot abandon her. And in eight weeks her pups will be adoptable. And yes, I'm naming the beagle Kisses." She'd been ready to puff up with indignation if he'd tried to discourage her. He didn't. Instead, he smiled and offered his assistance, agreeing that Kisses was a perfect name for a beagle. Stating he wanted to "seal the Kisses decision," he pulled her close, his arms cradling her body as his lips passionately explored hers. Hours later, Desiree joined them for a festive dinner at a new farm-to-table restaurant in downtown Roses. Although their table had ample room to accommodate the threesome comfortably, his muscled leg had touched Candee's throughout the meal. It seemed like he always made a point to keep her close to him. Teddy had laughingly concurred with Desiree as she waved a forkful of miniature crab cake and declared, "No one in their right mind places a bid on a property that looks like a tumbledown haunted house. And now my sister is stepping up to take on a pregnant beagle about to give birth to a bunch of puppies?" "'Kisses needs a home," Candee said staunchly. "And the children at the daycare can teach her and the puppies how to sit and stay and fetch." "And you'll need to hire a full-time staff," Teddy said while aiming a subtle nod at Desiree. "Although knowing you, Candee, you'll attempt to juggle everything yourself." "You've offered to help, right?" He studied her face and replied, "Yes, and I never go back on my word." She stared up at him, his smiling features, the firm line of his jaw, enveloped by his commanding presence. His gaze locked with hers. Both of them completely disregarded her sister's presence as he lowered his head, his lips hovering close before he kissed her lightly. Her breath caught as his bracing outdoor scent tingled her senses. When she returned to her apartment that night, she fell into bed, pleasantly exhausted. As she did every night before retiring, she checked the bidding on the Victorian, relieved her twenty-thousand-dollar offer remained the highest. She courted sleep, although it didn't come. She was too excited, her thoughts humming with elated expectation. Soon she would own her dream house, and she'd be building that dream with Teddy. Yes, he lived in Miami and she lived in Roses, but with internet and phone calls and airplane travel, their relationship could continue to grow. Her mood had lightened with each hour she'd spent with him, and life was definitely taking a turn she'd never expected. Perhaps Desiree was right and Cupid's arrow had been aimed directly at Candee and Teddy. Sighing contentedly, she rolled onto her stomach and drifted to sleep.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 9

The following afternoon, Candee made sure every employee at the shelter knew to call her if Kisses went into labor. Then she and Teddy boarded the plane from Asheville, North Carolina, to Miami, Florida. The trip to the airport took less than an hour, and Teddy did the driving. Their flight was under two hours, and sudden air pockets and strong winds prompted gasps from the passengers in the cabin. Candee was still recovering from the rough flight when an impish boy, echoing Teddy's good looks, raced to greet her and Teddy while they were retrieving their luggage at baggage claim. "Uncle Teddy!" the boy called. "Hey, Joseph!" Teddy squatted, fiercely hugging the boy. As he stood, he hoisted his nephew onto his shoulders. Pivoting, he motioned to Candee. "Joseph, meet my new friend, Miss Candee Contando." She extended her hand. "I've heard a lot about you, Joseph." "Hi." The boy leaned over Teddy's head. "Mr. Rob said Uncle Teddy mentions you every time he calls." "And I'm Mr. Rob." A short, heavy-set, balding man bent at the waist in an exaggerated bow. Along with a good-natured smile, his blue-eyed gaze was welcoming. He stole Candee's luggage from her and thoughtfully cocked his head. "You're too ravishing to be anyone else. Welcome to Miami, Candee." Teddy swung Joseph back down to the floor as he offered introductions. He kept one hand possessively around her waist, and as she glanced up at him, he was staring down at her with heartfelt pride. "No wonder she was one of your main topics when we spoke," Rob said, clapping Teddy on the back. "Everything's certainly coming up Roses, eh?" The group dissolved into good-natured chuckling. As they stepped out of the airport, the air of the Miami evening was balmy and inviting. Candee pulled off her paisley scarf and tucked it into her carry-on bag. Teddy walked between her and Joseph, holding their hands. As they walked to Rob's car, they passed an outdoor kiosk brimming with Valentine candy. "No candy for me," Rob said. "I'm on a diet." "Again?" Teddy teased. "I haven't cheated in twenty-four hours. I'm on a roll." He kept his gaze fixed on the sidewalk and whistled an out-of-tune melody. "We're not dieting." Teddy turned to Candee. "Carmel dark chocolate sound good?" "I can't. My stomach is reeling from the turbulent airplane ride." "Dark chocolate helps." He picked up two decorative gold boxes filled with candy, along with a red-foil rose and a jumbo heart swirl lollipop for Joseph. "Chocolate and more chocolate?" she joked as he handed her the rose and boxed candy. "Sugar and chocolate is the cure for most maladies." "Yeah," Rob interjected. "That's been my bakery mantra for years." She chuckled and eyed the lollipop. "You realize, Teddy, that your nephew will be on a sugar high tonight and you'll only have yourself to blame?" "Guilty as charged." Teddy held up a hand, then swept a kiss on her lips. "I'll pick you up at Rob's apartment tomorrow at eleven." He was so wonderfully generous, and when he kissed her, she heartily kissed him back. At least until Rob's raucous throat-clearing broke her and Teddy apart. Following a leisurely shower in Rob's high-end penthouse Saturday morning, Candee checked her appearance in the bedroom's full-length mirror. The weather was a comfortable seventy degrees, and she was pleased she'd brought a soft royal-blue crepe dress accented by gathered cropped sleeves. She rubbed a drop of her favorite rose fragrance to her wrists, and pulled on black leather ballet flats for walking ease. She had just knotted the gold tie belt around her waist when she heard a light rap on the penthouse door. Teddy had arrived exactly at eleven a.m. She smiled as she opened the door. Yes, he was devastatingly handsome, standing in the doorway wearing cotton khaki pants and a slim-fitting gray polo shirt that accented his strong physique. However, it was the little things that drew her to him—his kind actions, how he was true to his word, and the way his eyes lit with boyish enthusiasm whenever he described the Victorian's renovations. "Good morning." He took her hands in his and gazed at her with bold dark eyes. "Your beauty lights up this place." Self-consciously, she laughed. "You must be focusing on the view behind me. You know, the sixteen-foot floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Miami beach and 'millionaire's row.'" He drew her to him. "No, it's you," he whispered. "Only you." His mouth came down on hers for a long passionate kiss, and her heart thumped hard in her chest. She placed her cell phone in her handbag and slung the bag over her shoulder. Down in the lobby, they encountered a pacing Rob and an exuberant Joseph demonstrating a cartwheel across the marbled floor. "About time, you two." Rob pointedly stared at his watch. "What normally takes me five minutes took you ten." "We were detained," Teddy said, reclaiming Candee's hand. "Shall we all walk to your bakery?" "Absolutely." Rob patted his round stomach. "Some of us can use the exercise." In the glittering daylight of the promising morning, Candee tucked her fingers in the crook of Teddy's strong arm. A welcoming breeze lifted her loose hair from her shoulders like a whirlpool. As the foursome approached Sixty-Fifth Street, Rob's body language punctuated his proud tone. "What's not to like about America's favorite vacation city?" He gestured to the glass skyscrapers on both sides of the street. "Miami boasts a trendy nightlife, boat shows, auto racing, golf, tennis, cruises and deep-sea fishing." "And we've never done any of those activities," Teddy said dryly. "We had a lively time on the two-night party cruise a few years back, remember?" "Lively time?" A knowing grin crossed Teddy's face. "You were seasick the entire forty-eight hours." They crossed an intersection, and the enticing scent from Rob's bakery beckoned them into the store like a warm embrace. Glazed donuts, masterfully iced rainbow-colored cupcakes, and towering, three-tiered layer cakes masterfully frosted with buttercream sat proudly in a row of glass cases. "I saved your Valentine cupcake for you, Uncle Teddy," Joseph said. And I made one for Miss Candee too. We froze them, and Mr. Rob took them out of the freezer yesterday." Joseph tugged on Teddy's hand. "They're in the kitchen. Come on, I'll show you." "Save us a table," Teddy said to Candee. "We'll be back shortly." When half of their group had disbanded, Rob examined a display case for fingerprints while a white-aproned employee boxed an order of cinnamon buns. Candee hung back, standing behind a parade of customers. When Rob returned carrying two mugs of coffee and a bag of donuts, he guided her to an inviting seating area adjoining the bakery. "Freshly baked donuts!" He exclaimed. "Twenty-four hours on a diet is long enough." He set a white bakery bag emblazoned with his Rob's Marvelous Muffins logo and the two mugs on the small round table. "Black coffee, right?" "Thank you." She inhaled the mouth-watering scent of chocolate iced donuts rolled in sprinkles and the aroma of rich dark coffee. "Your hospitality is generous, and both your places—the penthouse and this bakery—are amazing." "I don't have any complaints about flattery." He took a large swallow of his coffee. "Keep it coming." "I'd gain ten pounds in a week if I worked here." She grinned. "A bakery like yours in my hometown would be well-received." He flashed a smile. "I own a half dozen bakeries in Miami. I haven't considered opening out-of-state, although you never know." Rob went on to describe the process of running a bakery, embroidering his account of the time he'd changed a hit recipe and used confectioners' sugar instead of granulated, which had resulted in a string of complaints. Her turquoise and silver bracelets cheerfully clinked against her coffee mug as she drank and listened. He was such a genial man and so talkative, she could imagine him having a conversation without her, chatting non-stop to an empty chair. "Enough about me." His telescope gaze gave her a measured look. "Let's talk about your grand plans for the Victorian, Candee." "Hasn't Teddy told you?" He nodded confirmation. "Now I want to hear it from you." She blew out an audible breath. "To begin with, every bathroom requires a complete gut job, and the carpeting in each room needs to be pulled up." She paused. "The wood floors are trashed, and Teddy recommended restoring them using four-inch red-oak planks." "Do you have funds to pay for all these renovations?" Rob flatly asked. His tone didn't intimidate her in the least. "No. I'll take out loans." "And how do you intend to pay back these loans? All these restorations will take endless capital." She let the reality of his words hang in the air between them. She'd learned to stay quiet when she wasn't certain how to answer, and she needed to think before replying. Her foster background, dealing with different people's expectations, had taught her that. "I'll work extra hours at the hardware store," she said. "And I can wield tools and ladders. There's nothing like carpentry to test a person's patience." Mentally, she thanked her "forever" foster father for permitting her to work with him in his woodshop. She met Rob's piercing blue gaze and waved a dismissive hand at herself. "Who knows? Maybe I'll even sell a house or two in the meantime." "Teddy said your perseverance and goals are admirable." "I'm going to be the type of caregiver who attends every child's basketball game, every concert …" She forced herself to keep her tone calm and unemotional. "These disadvantaged kids need support." "I've invested in Teddy's ventures for years, and he's never let me down. He approves of your project and he oversees numerous home-improvement crews." "We'll give it our best shot." "The hallmark of a successful baker is self-discipline, and the same goes for real estate." Rob gave a big throaty laugh. "At first, Teddy wanted to raze the house and build low-income housing on the five-acre lot. Our business ethos is to give to those less fortunate." In the space of seconds, Teddy's ideas collided with hers, and she could see the merit in his plans for the property. "He never told me," she softly replied. "You're the best thing that's happened to him in a long time. Has he mentioned his childhood to you?" She swallowed a deep drink of the exquisitely brewed coffee. "Hardly anything." "I encouraged him to show you his old homestead," Rob said. "He said he's too embarrassed." "It can't be any worse than my childhood homes." Instantly, she was ambushed by scenes from her adolescence. Whenever her birthday had come around, she had waited, hoping for a birthday cake. The cake never came. Neither did the candles, or the balloons, or the birthday gifts. "Teddy came from nothing," Rob said, "and he and his brother were constantly beaten by his drunken father. When life gets punched out of you, only the outstanding persevere. Unfortunately, after a hard childhood, a person's trust no longer comes easy." She confirmed his words with a sad smile. Despite his outward bravado, Rob had an astute understanding of people. "And what about your foster families?" he asked. She shrugged. "Nothing to say." He propped his elbows on the table, the gleam in his eyes matching his shiny round face. "Up until now, Teddy's been a confirmed bachelor like me. I'm the furthest a person can get from being a wedding expert, but he genuinely cares about you. He can't stop looking at you whenever you're together." She stifled a denial as a giggling four-year-old boy raced to the table with Teddy close behind. "We're back, Miss Candee," Joseph announced. "And we brought your Valentine surprise cupcake." He held up a basket, revealing a red muffin set on a red doily. Piped white icing gel on the muffin read, "Life is butter with you." Her lips twitched with a grin. Impulsively, she hugged the adorable boy. "Thank you." She turned to Rob. "Clever sentiment, Rob." Rob laughed. "They're all different. Took me weeks to come up with appropriate Valentine adages that wouldn't offend any customers." "Taste the muffin and tell me what the surprise is, Miss Candee," Joseph said. "I'll give you a hint. It has something do with kisses." "Joseph, you're not supposed to give any hints to Candee, remember?" Teddy hooked his hands in his front pockets. His slow, devastating smile eclipsed all the busyness of the bustling bakery. "It's a taste test and she's supposed to discover the surprise by herself." Candee bit into the muffin and briefly closed her eyes. The combination of strawberries and butter was delicious. She washed down the muffin with coffee, then took another bite. "There's chocolate inside. Wait …" she continued around a mouthful of cupcake. "A candy kiss is in the middle?" "You guessed the surprise!" Teddy jumped up and down. "Like it?" She laughed. "I love it." "Me too." Teddy kissed her forehead, then pulled up a wing chair and sat facing her. "Where's your Valentine muffin?" she teased. "Gone in three bites." "What was on yours?" "The Browning quote." He kept his gaze on hers. "'Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.'" Positively emanating good cheer, Rob said, "And they all lived long and happily ever after. Long because it was for forty years, and happy for … two months." Teddy grinned, glanced at his watch, then back at Candee. "Later today I want to take you to Joseph's horse ranch so you can see him ride his pony." "I'm looking forward to it." The cell phone in her purse rang. She pulled out her phone and checked the caller ID. "Please excuse me." She held up an index finger and answered the call. When she clicked off, she took several quick breaths. Her gaze flitted to the threesome staring at her before settling on Teddy. "It was one of the volunteers at the shelter. My beagle has gone into labor." "Kisses?" Teddy's eyebrows drew together. "Don't labors take a long time?" "For a beagle, anywhere from six to eighteen hours." She matched his stare with a firm one of her own. "I'm sorry. I have to leave this afternoon." Teddy pressed his lips together and offered a weak smile. "I know how much this beagle means to you." He took his phone from his pocket and began checking the internet. "There's a direct fight to Asheville leaving at four o'clock and one seat is available." "Will you book it for me? I'll text Desiree and ask her if she can pick me up at the airport." After the reservation was made, Teddy set his phone on the table. "Done. I'll keep my return flight to Roses on Sunday night so I can spend more time with Joseph." "Yes, of course." Looking at the boy, she said, "I'm sorry I can't see you ride your pony." "That's okay, Miss Candee," Joseph replied. "I ride him every weekend. I love horses! I love every animal in the world!" She laughed. "Animals and children are very special." Teddy stroked the auburn curls falling about her shoulders. "You're not even gone yet, and I miss you." "Okay you two flames, save it for later." Rob cut his gaze to Teddy. Giving him a meaningful look, he lowered his tone. "Your lawyer called this morning. He couldn't reach you and left a message with me. It's about a court date to finalize your guardianship." Rob raised his tone, apparently for Joseph's benefit, who'd been intently watching them. "Hey Teddy, can I talk to you in the back?" "Sure." Teddy quickly stood. "I wanted to behold the new commercial mixer you purchased for the kitchen, anyway." "The heavy-duty one? It broke. The grinder lasted a week." Teddy gave a sharp laugh. "Aren't you glad you came to Miami to meet the special people in my life?" he asked Candee. She smiled. "Very glad." He glided his knuckles down her cheek. "Is it all right if I leave Joseph with you for a few minutes?" "My absolute pleasure." Teddy grabbed an activity sheet and crayons at the counter and placed them on the table for his nephew. "How about sketching me a horse, buddy?" "I want to draw the pony I ride at the ranch. His name is Blackjack because he's black." Candee swallowed a chuckle as the men headed to the kitchen. "What an excellent name for a pony," she said to Joseph. "I'm sure Blackjack is a beauty." She sat back in her chair, sipping her coffee and watching Joseph color. When Teddy's phone vibrated, she automatically picked it up and scanned the displayed number. "You can answer it," Joseph said. "Uncle Teddy doesn't mind. I answer his phone all the time." She debated. The phone number was identified by two initials—YE. A business call, she wondered? Assuming the call might be important, she answered. "Hello?" "Who's this?" a woman asked. Candee frowned into the phone. "Candee Contando. And you?" "Yvonne Evette. Is this Teddy's phone?" "Yes. May I take a message?" "Put Teddy on the line," the woman said. "He's not here." "Tell him I'll be in Madrid another week and to phone me as soon as he gets this message. That means immediately." The woman hung up. Candee stared at his phone as she set it on the table. "Who's Yvonne Evette?" she asked aloud, not expecting an answer. "You mean Miss Yvonne?" Joseph made a face. "She's Uncle Teddy's other girlfriend and she's famous. We watch her on TV." The shock of Teddy's betrayal knocked the air from Candee's lungs. She swallowed hard. Unfortunately, Teddy and Rob chose that moment to emerge from the kitchen. They were obviously enjoying themselves, laughing and talking. Rob veered off to speak with an employee. Teddy was still grinning when he approached Candee's table. He stopped, his probing gaze fixing on her. "What's wrong? You've gone pale." She pushed back her chair. "Your cell phone rang and I answered it. I shouldn't have—I thought it might be important." "Who was it?" "A call from Spain." Teddy stiffened. "Yvonne?" "Yes, and she said to call her immediately." Unnoticed, Rob strolled to the table. "Anything wrong?" Heartsick from sadness and fury and defeat, Candee shivered and rubbed her arms. "Rob, where's the restroom?" He pointed to a sign, and she shot past him. "Candee, wait." Teddy strode purposefully after her. "I can explain." She inhaled a tortured breath. She'd heard enough explanations from her ex to last a lifetime. And she'd never allow Teddy to see how much his duplicity had hurt her. "It's not what it seems." He caught her wrist, and she snapped around. "Look," he said, "I've been seeing Yvonne for several months. She travels a lot and I … I don't do long-distance relationships well." Tears sprang to Candee's eyes. Firmly, determinedly, she held them back. "You don't do any relationship well." "Please let me explain." She deliberately stared down at his hand until he released her. "I'll walk back to the penthouse and call a taxi to the airport," she said. "Please don't follow me. And tell Rob thank you for everything. Kiss Joseph good-bye for me and tell him I love animals too." She pivoted and entered the restroom. Inside, she splashed cold water on her face and peered at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Her pallid complexion emphasized her emerald-green eyes, giving her a much-too-vulnerable appearance. Again she was a fool, and she only had herself to blame. How could she have believed it was possible to fall in love with a man after knowing him a few short weeks? Love. Love happened to other people, not to her. The sooner she came to grips with reality, the simpler her life would become. No more broken hearts, she vowed. Not ever again. Two hours later she stood alone in the Miami airport, waiting for the boarding to begin. To pass the time while waiting in line, she checked the foreclosure website. She gasped, almost dropping her phone when the house came on the screen. Her bid was no longer the highest. She refreshed her phone. Surely, there must be a mistake. No. The new bid was $40,000, driving the next bid to $60,000—money she didn't have. This couldn't be happening. Her stomach felt heavy, her heartbeat raced. Quickly, she texted Desiree. I logged online at the airport, and the Victorian is now at 40K. Who bid on MY house? Online means the Internet, came Desiree's reply. So that means anyone on the world-wide web. No use worrying. Whatever happened, we'll sort it when u get home. Have a safe flight and see u in Asheville. Candee attempted to pull her mind away from one looming fear. She might lose the house. Another text floated across her screen, this one from Teddy. Have u boarded the plane? He'd texted numerous times since she'd abruptly left Rob's bakery, and she'd ignored him. However, he'd made and paid for her plane reservation and she knew she should text him. Soon, she replied. Can I call you tomorrow? She hesitated. Her cold, clammy hands clutched the phone tighter. Something prompted her to ask, although surely his answer would be no. Did you place a bid on the Victorian house? she texted. Air stopped entering her lungs as she waited for his response. Time seemed to be slowing down until a single word appeared on her phone. Yes.

1-800-CUPID

Josie Riviera

Chapter 10

As usual, Desiree had arrived at the country club before Candee. Candee hung her fur capelet by the door and greeted her sister with a hug. Desiree looked gorgeous in a red velvet figure-hugging pant suit. She went back to arranging a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries on a silver serving tray. The club was empty, save for black-suited waiters setting glass vases of red tulips and rose peonies on every table. Candee appraised her own outfit—a sleeveless petal-pink lace dress. Unlined along the hem, the dress allowed a peekaboo of her long legs. She'd parted her hair on the side and let the thick curls flow down the opposite shoulder. Satisfied with the strawberry arrangement, Desiree turned to her. "Finally, I was able to talk you into attending the dinner dance. You can leave those puppies alone for a few hours. Valentine's Day is one of the biggest events at the club. Thanks for coming early to help me finish decorating." "You insisted you needed help, although there's so much to admire." Candee looked around the room. "The lace ribbons and pom-pom wreaths are glittery and sophisticated, and those smooch balloons are gorgeous." "White balloons with a stamp of my red lipstick." Desiree puckered her glistening red lips. Candee smiled and fingered an arrow-toting Cupid on the banquet table. "No use in me sitting in my apartment with Kisses and her six puppies, watching television and hoping that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks will get me through the evening." "Her puppies are adorable. So firm and plump." "And active," Candee replied. "Plus, they've doubled their weight in less than two weeks. Kisses is the best mom in the world. I supply high-quality puppy food and a vitamin mineral tablet, and she does the rest." Desiree popped a chocolate-covered strawberry into her mouth and smiled. "All is well then." Was it? The lump in Candee's throat threatened to choke her, and tears burned her eyelids. She swallowed and poured herself a glass of water. She wouldn't cry. She was strong and had made a vow to herself. Desiree was watching her closely. "Have you heard from Teddy?" "He's texted me every day and apologized numerous times about Yvonne, although it doesn't matter anymore." Candee forced herself to sound calm and detached. "As far as I know, he hasn't returned to Roses. He said something about being tied up in Miami court because of Joseph's guardianship." "Did you text him back?" "Only to tell him I landed safely." She missed him intensely, especially on a night like tonight, Valentine's Day. She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the feel of his strong calloused hand around her waist while they'd danced, his lips capturing hers. "If I was that guy with the same first and last names," he'd said. "I'd have rented a snowplow to meet you at the country club tonight." How could he have become so important to her in the short time they'd known each other? Each day that passed, she felt more and more empty without him. She'd even been tempted to answer his texts with an invitation to join her for dinner at Tony's. That night they'd gone there, he'd said that, like her, Italian food was his favorite in all the world. But Teddy lived in Miami with Yvonne, and Candee lived in Roses with Kisses and her puppies. Once she allowed them in, her tormenting memories took over. She'd loved listening to his remodeling ideas, the quiet decisiveness in his voice when they'd agreed that horse therapy suited her project perfectly. And then there'd been the comforting reassurance of knowing they were venturing into these daunting tasks side by side. Hah! Had he played her for a fool the entire time, planning to take her house right out from under her? The auction had just closed, and most likely demolition would begin any day. Candee promised herself she'd never drive down Thompson Lane again. Idly, she wondered if Teddy would manage the project himself, or send one of his many home-improvement crews to demolish the house. Desiree had advised her to set her sights elsewhere. Perhaps a five-hundred-foot Cape Cod made more sense, considering her budget. Smaller dreams were more realistic. She opened her eyes. Her sister's gaze clouded with concern and she clasped Candee's hands. "You know, we tried to raise the funds, but neither Scott nor I had an extra $40,000 hidden under our pillowcases." "Thank you." Not only was Desiree her sister, but she was also a true friend. After that, Desiree adeptly changed the subject, resulting in a half hour of setting red candles around the room. But Candee's fragile composure began to slip. Other guests would be arriving soon, and she wasn't sure she could make conversation with anyone. She attempted to bolster herself by remembering she'd agreed to attend the event for only two hours. She eyed an ornate grandfather clock on the opposite wall. An hour and a half left. Desiree jumped to her feet as two men entered the room. "Scott is here, and he brought … Allen Allen?" she shrieked. Desiree turned so pale, Candee feared the many chocolate-covered strawberries Desiree had eaten had made her ill. "You're joking, right?" Candee said to her sister. "You invited him?" Desiree seemed rooted to the floor. "No, actually, I didn't." Candee threw up her hands. "I'm leaving by seven o'clock," she reminded Desiree. "Dinner is served at six, leaving you plenty of time." Desiree's gaze narrowed on Scott. Then she grabbed Candee's hand and started toward the two well-dressed men for introductions. Dusk was streaking pomegranate colors in the darkening sky when Allen seated Candee to his right for dinner. A waiter set glasses of sparkling apple and pear cider at each place setting. Teddy preferred coffee, she thought, reminding herself that she should be indifferent to his choice of beverage. She frowned. She didn't feel indifferent to anything about him. She missed the bantering they'd shared, the warm strength of his strong muscled body close to hers. "The first course is a cheese and hazelnut green salad," Desiree declared to the others at the table, rousing Candee from her thoughts of Teddy. "For the entrée, the club is serving chicken in champagne sauce." "I'm certain the meal will be delicious," Candee replied graciously. She took a long swallow of cider and lapsed into a reflective silence. Holding his nephew's hand, Teddy strode into the Roses country club exactly at six o'clock. The flight from Miami to Asheville had been bumpy, and getting his truck from the long-term rental parking lot had taken longer than he'd planned. The Valentine's Day festivities were well underway. A quick assessment of his worn jeans, polo shirt, and vest assured him he was underdressed for the formal occasion. "Uncle Teddy, where is Miss Candee?" Joseph hopped on one foot. "Look—they have candy hearts in those little glasses by the window. Can I get some?" Before Teddy could reply, the boy had scurried off. He gazed at him—a bundle of boundless energy and perfection, his dark eyes framed by thick black lashes. His adorable nephew, now his son to raise to the best of his ability. I can do this, Christian, Teddy thought. Two weeks of endless paperwork had resulted in Teddy being awarded legal guardianship of Joseph. It had been a difficult two weeks. After Candee had left Miami so abruptly, Teddy had tasted a painful defeat. No matter how much he plunged into his work, or cared for Joseph, or signed papers in the courtroom, he couldn't fully concentrate. And then he'd made his decision. His mind told him to stay in Miami. His heart told him otherwise. "Are you expecting dinner guests?" he'd asked her that night when they'd danced. Her beautiful green eyes had stared into his. "Not unless they're bringing chocolate," she'd quipped. She possessed such enthusiasm, such spirit. And he'd hurt her by not being upfront about his relationship with Yvonne. Although in all fairness, he hadn't considered Yvonne a part of his life after he'd met Candee. "Uncle Teddy! There she is!" Joseph shouted around a mouthful of pink candy hearts. Teddy's gaze riveted on Candee. She sat at an elegantly decorated table with Desiree and two men. Teddy recognized Scott from the night he'd seen him at the country club. But the other man? He'd better not be that guy with two first names. He grabbed Joseph's hand and stalked past a group of waiters serving champagne in fluted glasses to the guests. He stopped Joseph from grabbing a white balloon, and he let a waiter show Joseph where the balloons were stored in an adjoining room. When he looked at Candee again, she was out of her chair walking toward him. "Teddy?" She was exquisite, a glamorous, stunning goddess. Her glossy auburn hair hung to the side, a rosy tint creeping up her flawless cheeks. Her lacy pink dress displayed her alluring figure to full advantage. He was so relieved. Desiree had responded to his texts and told him that she'd finally persuaded Candee to attend this dinner. He took her hands in his. "You are gorgeous." She grinned shyly. "Thank you." His gaze wandered across the crowded dining room, and he was annoyed at their lack of privacy, for all he wanted to do was kiss her inviting lips. Already, the hum of conversation was fading, and several diners were staring at them. He slipped his arm around her shoulders and guided her into the hallway. "Why are you here?" she asked. "Because I missed you." Her green eyes were soft and tender. "I missed you too." "Can you leave?" He gestured impatiently around the corner, indicating the threesome at Candee's table. "Yes, of course. I'll get my capelet." "Hi, Miss Candee!" Joseph skipped over to them holding three white balloons. "Did you know Uncle Teddy and I flew all the way from Miami today?" "Joseph, I'm thrilled you're here." Candee affectionately embraced the little boy. "Uncle Teddy said today is Valentine's Day. I like balloons," Joseph said. "We've noticed." Chuckling, Teddy put an arm around Candee's waist and held Joseph's hand in the other. He glanced toward the dining room, grinning when he noted Desiree's thumbs-up and conspiratorial smile. "Where are we going?" Candee asked as they exited the club. Teddy buckled Joseph into the child car seat, then came around and opened the door with her. "I want to show you the Valentine's gift I bought you." He started the car, and they covered the miles to Thompson Lane in under fifteen minutes. "I'm still eating the chocolate from two weeks ago," Candee said. She tackled a white balloon that had floated into the front seat and turned to give it back to Joseph. When she turned to face front again, she paled, "Please, Teddy, don't drive down this road." "How else can you see your Valentine's gift?" He parked in front of the Victorian, then went around to unbuckle Joseph. The boy raced to the tire swing, leaving three forgotten white balloons in the car. Coming swiftly to the passenger side, Teddy opened Candee's door. In the deepening dusk, she followed his gaze to the large red SOLD sign posted on the front door. "Congratulations," she said softly. "The Victorian isn't mine. It's yours." She flashed him a dubious look, then gazed blindly ahead. "I don't understand." "Some men buy roses for Valentine's Day, some buy candy. I prefer to buy houses." He paused, continuing in a solemn voice. "And this particular house is for you." "Me?" She sucked in a breath and her eyes widened. She stared at the house with the same wistfulness he'd seen on her face the first day they'd met. "Teddy—I …I can't possibly accept such a gift." "Yes, you can, under one condition." "And that is?" "You allow me to help you renovate." "How? You're in Miami." He heard the pain in her voice, and his heart squeezed. "Not anymore. I'm selling my apartment and moving to Roses, although my realty business will require that I fly to Miami a couple of times a month." He framed her lovely face between his hands and gazed into her shining green eyes. "I'm assuming you'll let Joseph and me adopt one of the beagle pups." "You can adopt all six," she gladly agreed. Leaning back, she stared lovingly at him. "Will you please tell me the reason you bid against me?" "I'd intended to bid all along, and your sister knew my plan. Somehow along the way, I managed to mess things up. I never meant to hurt you, and I'm sorry." She glided her fingers through his hair. "You texted your apology a great many times and you're forgiven." She paused, glancing at the tumbledown Victorian and Joseph skipping up and down the porch steps. "Where will you and your nephew live?" "I didn't want to stop at one house when I could buy two." Chuckling, Teddy gestured to Mr. Dunworthy's home. "He was more than happy to sell, and he'll be moving into a retirement community so he can be closer to his son." "You're doing all this for me? Why?" He hugged her close, breathing in her shiny hair, the scent of sweet and spicy roses. "Because building a new life often begins with tearing down a few walls." He smiled at the stunning woman nestled in his arms. "Candee Contando, I love you." "I love you too," she whispered. And then he kissed her, sealing the most important deal of his life. ⁂ Recipe: Rob's Surprise Muffins Makes: 12 muffins Ingredients:  6 tablespoons butter  3/4 cup sugar  2 eggs  1/2 cup milk  14 strawberries, fresh or defrosted frozen  red food coloring  2 cups all-purpose flour  1/4 teaspoon salt  1 tablespoon baking powder  Hershey's Kisses, Hugs or strawberry jam Directions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit In large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Mix eggs one at a time and add milk. Rinse strawberries and mash. Stir berries into the butter and milk mixture, adding a few drops of red liquid food coloring. In separate bowl, sift flour, salt and baking powder, and stir. Add flour mixture to the berry mixture and stir with a wooden spoon to stir until the white disappears. Line muffin tins with paper liners. Drop the batter from a tablespoon to fill the cups halfway. If you are adding the "surprise", place an unwrapped Kiss, Hug or 1/2 teaspoon of jam in the middle of each muffin. Then spoon batter to fill almost to the top. Bake until muffins begin to brown and a toothpick inserted near the center (but not in the Kiss) comes out clean, approximately 20 to 25 minutes. Remove muffins from tin. Cool. Serve warm in a basket lined with red doilies.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended. Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered. Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible. The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:  WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty. The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons. Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine. Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover. For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do. But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession. The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984. He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin. Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops: April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out I dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never— Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today. It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen. It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably--since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner--she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him. The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming--in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief--or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope--that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind. The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself. Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice. Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it. In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization. It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:  WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer. At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of 'B-B!...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened--if, indeed, it did happen. Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he KNEW!--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's. That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all--perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live. Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach. His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals--  DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER over and over again, filling half a page. He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether. He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed--would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word. For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl: theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother— He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door. Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 2

As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet. He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside. 'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and—' It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party--you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade'--but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years. 'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely. The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen. 'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course—' She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly. 'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.' Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone. 'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint. 'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children—' There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room. 'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice. A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game. 'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!' Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought. Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face. 'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.' 'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice. 'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little girl, still capering round. Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult. 'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face. Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero' was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police. The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again. Years ago--how long was it? Seven years it must be--he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually--a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark. Winston had never been able to feel sure--even after this morning's flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true. The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly: 'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash—' Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty. Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling. The telescreen--perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate--crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he was invisible. 'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present. Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet--everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed--no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past--for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive? The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty. Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote: To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings! He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote: Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death. Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose. He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 3

Winston was dreaming of his mother. He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties. At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place--the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave--but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things. He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking. Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees. The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips. The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed--naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600--and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching. 'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!' Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared. 'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. ONE, two, three, four! ONE, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! ONE, two, three four! ONE two, three, four!...' The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London. Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister--or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station. There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved--a little granddaughter, perhaps--had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating: 'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.' But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember. Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles)--the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED--that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. 'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially. Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink. The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. ONE-two! ONE-two!...' Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form--'English Socialism', that is to say--it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion— 'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! THAT'S better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.' A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and--one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency--bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes. 'THERE, comrades! THAT'S how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see MY knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what THEY have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 4

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk. In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building. Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran: times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures. Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of 'The Times', which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of 'The Times' and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of 'The Times' which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy. But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain. Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston's direction. Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence. And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels--with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak--engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at. Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the morning. Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem--delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of 'The Times' leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran: times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered: The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in 'The Times' of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing. Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother's Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class. Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen. That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another. Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth. Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps--what was likeliest of all--the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in the words 'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers, however, was already an UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speech. It was better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with its original subject. He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence. Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lesson--which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc--that,' etc., etc.), easy to imitate. At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six--a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules--he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally. Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail. Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself. There was no way of knowing whose job would finally be adopted, but he felt a profound conviction that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 5

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip. 'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back. He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you. 'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said. 'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer.' Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market. 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully. The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter. 'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme. 'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.' 'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme. His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes. 'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue--a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.' 'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle. Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet. 'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.' The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room. 'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise. 'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.' He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting. 'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape--the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words--scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.' He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy. 'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought. A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm. 'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?' Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on: 'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?' 'Except—' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say. 'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By 2050--earlier, probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.' One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face. Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din. 'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.' Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness. Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said. Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room--a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers. 'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's that sub you forgot to give me.' 'Which sub is that?' said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them. 'For Hate Week. You know--the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort--going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.' Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate. 'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.' 'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston. 'Ah, well--what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.' 'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly: 'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent--might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes--said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?' 'What happened to the man?' said Winston. 'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if—' Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion. 'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper. 'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Winston dutifully. 'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons. As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. 'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs—' The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too--in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory? The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient--nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different? He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party. The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth. 'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?' 'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks myself.' 'Ah, well--just thought I'd ask you, old boy.' 'Sorry,' said Winston. The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department--she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say. At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again. The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough. His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called. The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again. 'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays--better than in my day, even. What d'you think's the latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night--tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh?' At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 6

Winston was writing in his diary: It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I— For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window--to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a briefcase. They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see. He drew his breath and went on writing: I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She— His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married--had been married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication. When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members. But--though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to--it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening. The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and--though the principle was never clearly stated--permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (ARTSEM, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful. He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten--nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children. Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided--though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people--that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. 'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing--sex. As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but SUBMITTING. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted. Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote: She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I— He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife. But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote: I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light— After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do—! It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was OLD. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all. He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting: When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same. He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 7

'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.' If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet—! He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices--had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered? He wrote: Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.' Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary: In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and— But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories. How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe. He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations--that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300--and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat. Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed--AFTER the event: that was what counted--concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been--at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier. The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject articles in 'The Times', analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends. Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave. There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes--slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats--even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it--but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing: Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree. The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses. A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of 'The Times' of about ten years earlier--the top half of the page, so that it included the date--and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom. The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies. Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known. He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen. He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident--a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance--would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes. That was ten--eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer HAD ONCE existed? But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes--two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY. He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong. He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then? But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O'Brien--TO O'Brien: it was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person and took its colour from that fact. The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 8

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee--real coffee, not Victory Coffee--came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound. He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going. 'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached. '"Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says. "But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done. It's easy to criticize," I says, "but you ain't got the same problems as what I got."' 'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is.' The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?'--and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it. Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky. 'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down quick!' 'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window. He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast. He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs', they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows. 'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!' 'Yes, it 'as, then!' 'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in seven—' 'Yes, a seven 'AS won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February--second week in February.' 'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An' I tell you, no number—' 'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man. They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange. But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink. He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?' Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene. 'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?' 'And what in hell's name IS a pint?' said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter. "Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.' 'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half litre--that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.' 'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.' 'When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other customers. There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's white-stubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently by the arm. 'May I offer you a drink?' he said. 'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.' The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in. ''E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.' 'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively. The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred. 'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer--wallop we used to call it--was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.' 'Which war was that?' said Winston. 'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. ''Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!' In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre. 'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You must have been a grown man before I was born. You can remember what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People of my age don't really know anything about those times. We can only read about them in books, and what it says in the books may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn't even boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousands--the capitalists, they were called--who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats—' The old man brightened suddenly. 'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law's funeral. And that was--well, I couldn't give you the date, but it must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only 'ired for the occasion, you understand.' 'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston patiently. 'The point is, these capitalists--they and a few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them--were the lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit. You--the ordinary people, the workers--were their slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if they chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who—' The old man brightened again. 'Lackeys!' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard since ever so long. Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that does. I recollect--oh, donkey's years ago--I used to sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to 'ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians--all sorts there was. And there was one bloke--well, I couldn't give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was. 'E didn't 'alf give it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e says, "lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!" Parasites--that was another of them. And 'yenas--'e definitely called 'em 'yenas. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.' Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes. 'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the top—' 'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently. 'The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and take off your cap when you passed them?' The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his beer before answering. 'Yes,' he said. 'They liked you to touch your cap to 'em. It showed respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.' 'And was it usual--I'm only quoting what I've read in history books--was it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?' 'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I recollect it as if it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night--terribly rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night--and I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent, 'e was--dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E was kind of zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im accidental-like. 'E says, "Why can't you look where you're going?" 'e says. I say, "Ju think you've bought the bleeding pavement?" 'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get fresh with me." I says, "You're drunk. I'll give you in charge in 'alf a minute," I says. An' if you'll believe me, 'e puts 'is 'and on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only—' A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information. The party histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last attempt. 'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you were already grown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or now?' The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had mellowed him. 'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect me to say as I'd sooner be young again. Most people'd say they'd sooner be young, if you arst 'em. You got your 'ealth and strength when you're young. When you get to my time of life you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet, and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it 'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there's great advantages in being a old man. You ain't got the same worries. No truck with women, and that's a great thing. I ain't 'ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you'd credit it. Nor wanted to, what's more.' Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The extra half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?' would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified--when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary. A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades. The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles. 'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately. 'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, it used to be called. There's been no paper like that made for--oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at Winston over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special I can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?' 'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in. I don't want anything in particular.' 'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't suppose I could have satisfied you.' He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand. 'You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade's just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either. Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't seen a brass candlestick in years.' The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might include something interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table his eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked it up. It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone. 'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated. 'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.' 'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston. 'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively. 'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed. 'Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that'd cost you four dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was--well, I can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays--even the few that's left?' Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four dollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three or even two. 'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,' he said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few pieces. We'll do with a light if we're going upstairs.' He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it. 'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half apologetically. 'I'm selling the furniture off by little and little. Now that's a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.' He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston's mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock. 'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring. 'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you'd have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.' There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed. 'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all—' he began delicately. Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue. 'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.' 'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin now. It's in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.' 'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in--oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes, its name was.' He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added: 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!' 'What's that?' said Winston. 'Oh--"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's." That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don't remember, but I do know it ended up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head." It was a kind of a dance. They held out their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head" they brought their arms down and caught you. It was just names of churches. All the London churches were in it--all the principal ones, that is.' Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets--anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered. 'I never knew it had been a church,' he said. 'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the old man, 'though they've been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I've got it! "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's—"there, now, that's as far as I can get. A farthing, that was a small copper coin, looked something like a cent.' 'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston. 'St Martin's? That's still standing. It's in Victory Square, alongside the picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.' Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda displays of various kinds--scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like. 'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,' supplemented the old man, 'though I don't recollect any fields anywhere in those parts.' Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks--as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop-front--but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing. He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of the door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval--a month, say--he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place, after buying the diary and without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop could be trusted. However—! Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scraps of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it home concealed under the jacket of his overalls. He would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. He had even started humming to an improvised tune Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the— Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him. For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well. It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon. But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind. The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her. He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of making any physical effort was unbearable. He could not run, he could not strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty and would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet. It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. The lights would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer. But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness. It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass. He tried to think of O'Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair. Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time? He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien. Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 9

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop. As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls. Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'. It was a common accident in the Fiction Department. They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain. A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body. 'You're hurt?' he said. 'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.' She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had certainly turned very pale. 'You haven't broken anything?' 'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.' She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much better. 'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!' And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square. While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously. He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. 'Five minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at the very least!' His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention. Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death--still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite. He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I LOVE YOU. For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure that the words were really there. For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's troop of Spies. The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again. The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside. It consisted in falsifying a series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think this new development out. Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group', played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to chess'. His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his evening at the Centre. At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed--in the darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent--that he was able to think continuously. It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table. Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Records Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going there. If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case he did not know the girl's name, let alone her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round--if these conditions endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few words. For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having already blown. Presumably she had been changed on to a later shift. They passed each other without a glance. On the day after that she was in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately under a telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch the diary during those days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him. The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had not received his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table. He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called, 'Smith!' He pretended not to hear. 'Smith!' repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not safe to refuse. After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. The girl's table filled up a few minutes later. But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the little man's appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table. He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since she had first approached him. She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless voices. 'What time do you leave work?' 'Eighteen-thirty.' 'Where can we meet?' 'Victory Square, near the monument.' 'It's full of telescreens.' 'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.' 'Any signal?' 'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.' 'What time?' 'Nineteen hours.' 'All right.' Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another. The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a cigarette. Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she had changed her mind! He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.' Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing. Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them. A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with submachine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen. She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks. 'Can you hear me?' 'Yes.' 'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?' 'Yes.' 'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station—' With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along the road; a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her head. 'Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally. 'Yes.' 'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate's got no top bar.' 'Yes. What time?' 'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by another way. Are you sure you remember everything?' 'Yes.' 'Then get away from me as quick as you can.' She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze. It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 10

Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one's skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring-doves. He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he would normally have been. Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place. In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from the station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed. The train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little black-market butter. The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was impossible not to tread on them. He knelt down and began picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they met. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs. He went on picking bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl, or he might have been followed after all. To look round was to show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head, evidently as a warning that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quickly led the way along the narrow track into the wood. Obviously she had been that way before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston followed, still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite likely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back after all. The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him. Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and forced apart the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an opening. When Winston followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely. The girl stopped and turned. 'Here we are,' she said. He was facing her at several paces' distance. As yet he did not dare move nearer to her. 'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on, 'in case there's a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is, but there could be. There's always the chance of one of those swine recognizing your voice. We're all right here.' He still had not the courage to approach her. 'We're all right here?' he repeated stupidly. 'Yes. Look at the trees.' They were small ashes, which at some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of them thicker than one's wrist. 'There's nothing big enough to hide a mike in. Besides, I've been here before.' They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer to her now. She stood before him very upright, with a smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slow to act. The bluebells had cascaded on to the ground. They seemed to have fallen of their own accord. He took her hand. 'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this moment I didn't know what colour your eyes were?' They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes. 'Now that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to look at me?' 'Yes, easily.' 'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.' 'I couldn't care less,' said the girl. The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women--he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist. 'Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole afternoon. Isn't this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.' 'What is your name?' said Winston. 'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston--Winston Smith.' 'How did you find that out?' 'I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are, dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?' He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst. 'I hated the sight of you,' he said. 'I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.' The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise. 'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?' 'Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance--merely because you're young and fresh and healthy, you understand--I thought that probably—' 'You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes all that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?' 'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that, you know.' 'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough. Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him. The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling. 'Where did you get this stuff?' he said. 'Black market,' she said indifferently. 'Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.' The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston's tongue. The taste was delightful. But there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye. He pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo but could not. 'You are very young,' he said. 'You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?' 'It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a chance. I'm good at spotting people who don't belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against THEM.' THEM, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere. A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had left the clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade, with their arms round each other's waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was better to go quietly. Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood. She stopped him. 'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone watching. We're all right if we keep behind the boughs.' They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women's hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming? 'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered. 'That's right, there is a stream. It's at the edge of the next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.' 'It's the Golden Country--almost,' he murmured. 'The Golden Country?' 'It's nothing, really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream.' 'Look!' whispered Julia. A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently--listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings. Winston put his lips against her ear. 'NOW,' he whispered. 'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come back to the hide-out. It's safer.' Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his. 'Have you done this before?' 'Of course. Hundreds of times--well, scores of times, anyway.' 'With Party members?' 'Yes, always with Party members.' 'With members of the Inner Party?' 'Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that WOULD if they got half a chance. They're not so holy as they make out.' His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds--thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face. 'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?' 'Yes, perfectly.' 'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.' 'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones.' 'You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?' 'I adore it.' That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour. Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived. The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 11

'We can come here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.' As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes. The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. 'Never go home the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her. She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing-thread. If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting. 'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. 'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn't it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!' She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication. As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by instalments'. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster. There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet. Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens. When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming. Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like 'Spanking Stories' or 'One Night in a Girls' School', to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal. 'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously. 'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear--not even enough for that.' He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled. 'They don't even like having married women there,' she added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway. She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.' Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that 'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog. They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream. 'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia. 'She was--do you know the Newspeak word GOODTHINKFUL? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?' 'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.' He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one. 'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it--but you'll never guess.' 'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly. 'How did you know that?' 'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.' She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: 'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?' That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago. It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it. 'Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see they're two different colours?' She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him... 'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I would have.' 'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would--I'm not certain.' 'Are you sorry you didn't?' 'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.' They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing. 'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said. 'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?' 'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.' He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse. 'We are the dead,' he said. 'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically. 'Not physically. Six months, a year--five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.' 'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like THIS?' She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his. 'Yes, I like that,' he said. 'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We've given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've got it all planned out. You take the train--but look, I'll draw it out for you.' And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 12

Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness. In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty. Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a love-affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley. Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto: It was only an 'opeless fancy. It passed like an Ipril dye, But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred! They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye! The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen. Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual, Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual. 'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak. 'Tomorrow, I mean.' 'What?' 'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.' 'Why not?' 'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.' For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred to him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened. At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool-bag. 'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here.' She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it. 'It isn't sugar?' he said. 'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of bread--proper white bread, not our bloody stuff--and a little pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk--but look! This is the one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because—' But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again. 'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.' 'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here,' she said. 'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?' 'It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and--look, I got a little packet of tea as well.' Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet. 'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.' 'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or something,' she said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you.' Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling: They sye that time 'eals all things, They sye you can always forget; But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years They twist my 'eart-strings yet! She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about. 'You can turn round now,' said Julia. He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face. She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter. 'Scent too!' he said. 'Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.' They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them. 'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles. Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember. Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove. 'Half that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up and make some coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?' 'Twenty-three thirty.' 'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that, because--Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!' She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate. 'What was it?' he said in surprise. 'A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway.' 'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!' 'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as she lay down again. 'We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that the brutes always—' 'DON'T GO ON!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut. 'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do they make you feel sick?' 'Of all horrors in the world--a rat!' She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats, that's all.' 'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here. I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.' Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass. 'What is it, do you think?' said Julia. 'I don't think it's anything--I mean, I don't think it was ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.' 'And that picture over there'--she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall--'would that be a hundred years old?' 'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.' She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen it before somewhere.' 'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes its name was.' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!" To his astonishment she capped the line: 'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's, When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey—' 'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"' It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted. 'Who taught you that?' he said. 'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight--at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.' 'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.' 'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.' Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 13

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had been crossed out--but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed. The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were wild rumours. The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark. The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat. A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation. In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack. Four, five, six--seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that--a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair--never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin. 'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme. Both of them knew--in a way, it was never out of their minds that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a backstreet. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available. Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the traitors!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up. In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.' Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story. 'Were they friends of yours?' she said. 'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.' 'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren't they?' He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event--years after it.' 'And what good was that?' 'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.' 'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had kept it?' 'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there--small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.' 'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in US.' 'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her. She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight. In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 14

It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen. He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien. At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of speaking. O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members. 'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said. 'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in 'The Times' the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?' Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,' he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the language.' 'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.' Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on: 'What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?' 'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.' 'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?' 'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended. 'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the number of verbs--that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my address.' They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absent-mindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore out the page and handed it to Winston. 'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my servant will give you the dictionary.' He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers. They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it. He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay--he was not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 15

Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?' 'I dreamt--' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking. He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces. 'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?' 'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep. 'I didn't murder her. Not physically.' In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened. His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake. When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen. He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf. One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door. 'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your sister back her chocolate!' He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand. He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die. The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water. He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position. 'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.' 'Yes. But the real point of the story—' From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk. 'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not human.' 'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again. He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it's too late, and never see each other again?' 'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to do it, all the same.' 'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.' 'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive.' 'We may be together for another six months--a year--there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.' 'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.' 'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you--that would be the real betrayal.' She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything--ANYTHING--but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.' 'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.' He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 16

They had done it, they had done it at last! The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in. Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro--everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies. O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries: 'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message.' He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped. Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue. 'You can turn it off!' he said. 'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.' He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose. 'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said. 'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really turned off?' 'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.' 'We have come here because—' He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious: 'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.' He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses. 'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.' The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding--a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity. 'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.' Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass. 'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said. 'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.' 'And the conspiracy--the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?' 'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.' He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You, comrade'--he bowed his head to Julia--'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?' 'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston. O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already. 'You are prepared to give your lives?' 'Yes.' 'You are prepared to commit murder?' 'Yes.' 'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?' 'Yes.' 'To betray your country to foreign powers?' 'Yes.' 'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?' 'Yes.' 'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?' 'Yes.' 'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?' 'Yes.' 'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?' 'Yes.' 'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?' 'No!' broke in Julia. It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally. 'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary for us to know everything.' He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it: 'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair--even his voice would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb.' Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent. 'Good. Then that is settled.' There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at his wrist-watch again. 'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said. 'I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not.' Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes flickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette. 'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.' He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage. 'This is unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. O'Brien went on: 'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.' He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch. 'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to Julia. 'Wait. The decanter is still half full.' He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem. 'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. 'To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?' 'To the past,' said Winston. 'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely. They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped. 'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?' Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's shop. 'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of THE BOOK'--even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they were in italics--'Goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added. 'As a rule, yes.' 'What is it like?' 'Black, very shabby. With two straps.' 'Black, two straps, very shabby--good. One day in the fairly near future--I cannot give a date--one of the messages among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your brief-case. At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say "I think you have dropped your brief-case." The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within fourteen days.' They were silent for a moment. 'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said O'Brien. 'We shall meet again--if we do meet again—' Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no darkness?' he said hesitantly. O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. 'And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?.' Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said: 'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?' Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza: 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's, When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey, When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.' 'You knew the last line!' said Winston. 'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets.' As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 17

Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak. He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at. On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns--after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces--at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally. There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed. The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary. Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs--all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half-burying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable. By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid. With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case. A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein Winston began reading: Chapter I Ignorance is Strength Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable... Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading: Chapter III War is Peace The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet. In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon. To understand the nature of the present war--for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war--one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment. All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different. The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient--a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process--by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute--the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction--indeed, in some sense was the destruction--of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals. Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world. All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre. But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated. None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the super-states are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-states. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs. Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there IS no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character. In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life--the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose. The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This--although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense--is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE. Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they had seen one another. 'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled themselves. 'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest, and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make the coffee. They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead. 'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read it.' 'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud. That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.' The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading: Chapter I Ignorance is Strength Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other 'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston. 'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.' He continued reading: The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters. By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating UNfreedom and INequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently. The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years--imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations--not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called 'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport--everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent. But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the problem of over-production, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure. In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief LINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by bloodties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a GOODTHINKER), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words CRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE, and DOUBLETHINK, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever. A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK. The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love. The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to REMEMBER that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak it is called DOUBLETHINK, though DOUBLETHINK comprises much else as well. DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word DOUBLETHINK it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of DOUBLETHINK that the Party has been able--and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years--to arrest the course of history. All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes. It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of DOUBLETHINK are those who invented DOUBLETHINK and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites--knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism--is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted--if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently--then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; WHY should human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time? Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon DOUBLETHINK But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists... Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly. 'Julia.' No answer. 'Julia, are you awake?' No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them. He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood HOW; he did not understand WHY. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 18

When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below: 'It was only an 'opeless fancy, It passed like an Ipril dye, But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!' The drivelling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed. 'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee. Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold.' She picked the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in it.' 'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.' 'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.' Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on: 'They sye that time 'eals all things, They sye you can always forget; But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years They twist my 'eart-strings yet!' As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower? 'She's beautiful,' he murmured. 'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia. 'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston. He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill. 'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?' 'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.' The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan--everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four. 'We are the dead,' he said. 'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully. 'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath. 'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice. 'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia. 'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.' It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late--no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it. 'Now they can see us,' said Julia. 'Now we can see you,' said the voice. 'Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.' They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control. There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain. 'The house is surrounded,' said Winston. 'The house is surrounded,' said the voice. He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may as well say good-bye,' she said. 'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!' Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands. Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone. The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible, agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her. He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time--had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further. It was not interesting. There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight. 'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply. A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 19

He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall. There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed. He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen. But the craving for food was growing upon him. What he longed for above all was a piece of bread. He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls. It was even possible--he thought this because from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg--that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket. 'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!' He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before being brought here he had been taken to another place which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know how long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling place. They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals. There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with which she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F— bastards!' Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's knees on to the bench. 'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only the buggers put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady, do they?' She paused, patted her breast, and belched. 'Pardon,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.' She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor. 'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes. 'Never keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach, like.' She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face. 'Wass your name, dearie?' she said. 'Smith,' said Winston. 'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thass funny. My name's Smith too. Why,' she added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!' She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp. No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. 'The polITS,' they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one', which he did not understand. It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him here. The dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly. When it grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth. He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O'Brien, with a flickering hope. O'Brien might know that he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone. Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it. Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lost count at some point or another. More often he wondered where he was, and what time of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. His cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground. There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door opened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He motioned to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell. The door clanged shut again. Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side to side, as though having some idea that there was another door to go out of, and then began to wander up and down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston's presence. His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre above the level of Winston's head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking out of the holes in his socks. He was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard covered his face to the cheekbones, giving him an air of ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and nervous movements. Winston roused himself a little from his lethargy. He must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen. It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade. 'Ampleforth,' he said. There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston. 'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!' 'What are you in for?' 'To tell you the truth--' He sat down awkwardly on the bench opposite Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there not?' he said. 'And have you committed it?' 'Apparently I have.' He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment, as though trying to remember something. 'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able to recall one instance--a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word "God" to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!' he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. 'It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was "rod". Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to "rod" in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There WAS no other rhyme.' The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?' No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston. Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very important or interesting. 'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said. Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought about it. They arrested me--it could be two days ago--perhaps three.' His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window somewhere. 'There is no difference between night and day in this place. I do not see how one can calculate the time.' They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent. Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one knee, then round the other. The telescreen barked at him to keep still. Time passed. Twenty minutes, an hour--it was difficult to judge. Once more there was a sound of boots outside. Winston's entrails contracted. Soon, very soon, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots would mean that his own turn had come. The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth. 'Room 101,' he said. Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending. What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston's belly had revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; O'Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in his entrails, the heavy boots were approaching. As the door opened, the wave of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt. This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness. 'YOU here!' he said. Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle distance. 'What are you in for?' said Winston. 'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done anything--only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They'll know my record, won't they? YOU know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't I? I'll get off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?' 'Are you guilty?' said Winston. 'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit--never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?' He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity. '"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late."' 'Who denounced you?' said Winston. 'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. 'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.' He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times, casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts. 'Excuse me, old man,' he said. 'I can't help it. It's the waiting.' He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his face with his hands. 'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.' Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards. Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went, mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour when she heard the words. A time came when, if it had been morning when he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or if it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were six prisoners in the cell, men and women. All sat very still. Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked away there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone's eye. The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something. The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from Winston. Winston did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes. Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell. There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up, waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man. There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The chinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused the gift. 'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of bread!' The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor. 'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice. 'Face the door. Make no movement.' The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quivering uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered and stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinless man, and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with all the weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man's mouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth. The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees. The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a shapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the middle of it. From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of his overalls. His grey eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltily than ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the others despised him for his humiliation. The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man. 'Room 101,' he said. There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's side. The man had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together. 'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me to that place! Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight off. Write it down and I'll sign it--anything! Not room 101!' 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green. 'Do anything to me!' he yelled. 'You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I'll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!' 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. He flung out a lean arm. 'That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!' he shouted. 'You didn't hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give me a chance and I'll tell you every word of it. HE'S the one that's against the Party, not me.' The guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a shriek. 'You didn't hear him!' he repeated. 'Something went wrong with the telescreen. HE'S the one you want. Take him, not me!' The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But just at this moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him loose, but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling stopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a different kind of cry. A kick from a guard's boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet. 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him. A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-faced man was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow bench was such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had dropped it. At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head. He would get up because the ache in his bones was no longer bearable, and then would sit down again almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O'Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at this moment. He thought: 'If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.' But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet. The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in. Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen. 'They've got you too!' he cried. 'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand. 'You know this, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive yourself. You did know it--you have always known it.' Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow— The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 20

He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe. Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing. With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the like--to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: 'I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.' Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again. There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep. The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted--he thought, he could not be sure--ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed. There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them. He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up. He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in, followed by two guards. 'Room 101,' said the officer. The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials. He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O'Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right, there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven. He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had heard O'Brien's voice. All through his interrogation, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once--Winston could not remember whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness--a voice murmured in his ear: 'Don't worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.' He was not sure whether it was O'Brien's voice; but it was the same voice that had said to him, 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' in that other dream, seven years ago. He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight or fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face. 'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would be here.' 'Yes,' said Winston. Without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible. 'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watching his face, 'that in another moment something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking, is it not, Winston?' Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come. 'That was forty,' said O'Brien. 'You can see that the numbers on this dial run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree I choose? If you tell me any lies, or attempt to prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly. Do you understand that?' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien's manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish. 'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he said, 'because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?' 'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.' 'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?' Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial. 'The truth, please, Winston. YOUR truth. Tell me what you think you remember.' 'I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that—' O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand. 'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession--were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.' An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it. 'It exists!' he cried. 'No,' said O'Brien. He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall. 'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.' 'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.' 'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien. Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him. O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child. 'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.' '"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently. '"Who controls the present controls the past,"' said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?' Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one. O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?' 'No.' 'Then where does the past exist, if at all?' 'In records. It is written down.' 'In records. And—?' 'In the mind. In human memories.' 'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?' 'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!' O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial. 'On the contrary,' he said, 'YOU have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.' He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in. 'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?' 'Four.' 'And if the party says that it is not four but five--then how many?' 'Four.' The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four.' The needle went up to sixty. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!' The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!' 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Five! Five! Five!' 'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?' 'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!' Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it. 'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently. 'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.' 'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.' He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O'Brien. 'Again,' said O'Brien. The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien had drawn back the lever. 'How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.' 'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?' 'Really to see them.' 'Again,' said O'Brien. Perhaps the needle was eighty--ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?' 'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six--in all honesty I don't know.' 'Better,' said O'Brien. A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O'Brien's arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was looking down at him with an expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone. 'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said. 'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.' 'Do you know how long you have been here?' 'I don't know. Days, weeks, months--I think it is months.' 'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?' 'To make them confess.' 'No, that is not the reason. Try again.' 'To punish them.' 'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?' He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again Winston's heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently: 'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.' Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed. 'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference--in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is "THOU ART". No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed--Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping--and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.' His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind CONTAINED Winston's mind. But in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again. 'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.' He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston's. 'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to the man in the white coat. Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his. 'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.' At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain. 'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?' Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war. 'I don't remember.' 'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?' 'Yes.' 'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?' 'Yes.' 'Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?' 'Yes.' 'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?' 'Yes.' O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed. 'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?' 'Yes.' And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment--he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps--of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person. 'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate possible.' 'Yes,' said Winston. O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose. 'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he said, 'that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if you choose.' 'Any question I like?' 'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial. 'It is switched off. What is your first question?' 'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston. O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately--unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness--everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.' 'You tortured her?' O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said. 'Does Big Brother exist?' 'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.' 'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?' 'You do not exist,' said O'Brien. Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, 'You do not exist', contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O'Brien would demolish him. 'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?' 'It is of no importance. He exists.' 'Will Big Brother ever die?' 'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.' 'Does the Brotherhood exist?' 'That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.' Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him: 'What is in Room 101?' The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He answered drily: 'You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.' He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 21

'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.' As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember how many sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a long, indefinite time--weeks, possibly--and the intervals between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two. 'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered--you have even asked me--why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY"? It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read THE BOOK, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?' 'You have read it?' said Winston. 'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.' 'Is it true, what it says?' 'As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.' He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get back to the question of "how" and "why". You understand well enough HOW the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me WHY we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained silent. Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy? 'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore—' He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five. 'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing like that.' He pulled the lever back and continued: 'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer. 'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?' He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket. 'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body--but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter--external reality, as you would call it--is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.' For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully. 'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death—' O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.' 'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.' 'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.' 'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.' 'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.' 'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.' 'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.' 'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.' 'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.' Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection: 'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?' Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he KNEW, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him. 'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?' Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said. 'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.' He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on: 'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands--all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.' Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly. 'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?' 'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.' 'Why?' 'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.' 'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.' As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack. 'I don't know--I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.' 'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside--irrelevant.' 'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.' 'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?' 'No. I believe it. I KNOW that you will fail. There is something in the universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never overcome.' 'Do you believe in God, Winston?' 'No.' 'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?' 'I don't know. The spirit of Man.' 'And do you consider yourself a man?' 'Yes.' 'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are ALONE? You are outside history, you are nonexistent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly: 'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?' 'Yes, I consider myself superior.' O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped. 'Get up from that bed,' he said. The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily. 'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.' Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him. 'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.' He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease. 'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face--the face of a member of the Inner Party--looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?' He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him. 'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look here!' He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell. 'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.' Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stop himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly. 'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.' 'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.' 'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.' He paused, and then went on: 'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?' Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien. 'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said. O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said; 'no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.' The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he HAD betrayed Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the Party--everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had seen what he meant without the need for explanation. 'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?' 'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.'

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 22

He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to speak of days. The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures. Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal. They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien--not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying. By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a walk, he could not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not stand on one leg without falling over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre. But after a few more days--a few more mealtimes--even that feat was accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times running. He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand on his bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror. His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself. He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love--and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do--he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only—! The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 23

But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord. He wrote: GOD IS POWER He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except—! Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. CRIMESTOP, they called it in Newspeak. He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions--'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water'--and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment. The tradition--the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said--was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell. One day--but 'one day' was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once--he fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows. Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud: 'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!' For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help. He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness? In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that--O'Brien would understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry. He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst. One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom. He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big Brother? There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed guards. 'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.' Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely. 'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.' He paused, and went on in a gentler tone: 'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston--and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect a lie--tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?' 'I hate him.' 'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.' He released Winston with a little push towards the guards. 'Room 101,' he said.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 24

At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by O'Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible to go. It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him. For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O'Brien came in. 'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.' The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was. 'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.' He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats. 'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.' A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water. 'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice. 'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible.' 'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.' 'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?' O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston's back. 'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable--something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.' 'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?' O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey. 'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, 'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.' There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself. O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from Winston's face. 'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.' The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left--to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human being, between himself and the rats. The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless. 'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien as didactically as ever. The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then--no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment--ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over. 'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!' He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars--always away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

1984

George Orwell

Chapter 25

The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens. Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe. Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced. A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those— He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released him, and had regained his old colour--indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of 'The Times', with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old job had been. The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been overfulfilled by 98 per cent. He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates. The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinkling music struck up again. Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in some way? The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board. THERE was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their communications by land and sea. He felt that by willing it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost--struggled inside him. The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table: 2+2=5 'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is FOR EVER,' O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest in him. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist. There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and done THAT if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been. He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed. 'I betrayed you,' she said baldly. 'I betrayed you,' he said. She gave him another quick look of dislike. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.' 'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed. 'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer.' 'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.' There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go. 'We must meet again,' he said. 'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again.' He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her. He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer recognizable from behind. 'At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean it.' He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over to the— Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then--perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound--a voice was singing: 'Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me—' The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle. He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work. He had been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. They were engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out. It was something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four others on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself. There were days when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there was not really anything to be done. But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow. The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again. The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram: a black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally eastward, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist? His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because— Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting opposite him and also laughing. It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was a moment of reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had temporarily revived. He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane and the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room pulling everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the end his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'll buy you a toy. A lovely toy--you'll love it'; and then she had gone out in the rain, to a little general shop which was still sporadically open nearby, and came back with a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still remember the smell of the damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and without interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat down on the floor to play. Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slithering down the snakes again, almost to the starting-point. They played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood. He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him. A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the cafe. Even the waiters had started and pricked up their ears. The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside. The news had run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as he had foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black. Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: 'Vast strategic manoeuvre--perfect co-ordination--utter rout--half a million prisoners--complete demoralization--control of the whole of Africa--bring the war within measurable distance of its end--victory--greatest victory in human history--victory, victory, victory!' Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements. He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world! The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He thought how ten minutes ago--yes, only ten minutes--there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this moment. The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain. He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 1

Your beautiful mind encouraged so many. Without you, none of this exists.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 2

Her bloody finger left a translucent smear on the phone screen as she glanced through the list of private investigators in Vegas. There were more than she'd imagined. Most had important-sounding names like Blackman Private Investigation or United Investigative Services. Big firms. Not what she was after. Her stained nail came to rest on Sin City Investigations. She tapped the link for the web page. It was sparse—only two pages. One was a long list of qualifications. The other was his contact info. One cell phone number and one email meant a one-man operation. How corporate could a guy named Jim Bean be? She pictured a string-bean thin man with glasses and a crooked tie. Perfect. She tapped the number, cleared her throat. The phone rang. "Bean." The voice was deep and breathy, but not gruff. "Hello, Mr. Bean. My name is Cynthia Hodge. I'm looking for an investigator to help me track down my brother." She paused, but he didn't immediately speak. She continued. "He's been missing for several months. He took off with most of my mother's nest egg. You know the type." "Drugs?" More labored breathing. He was doing something. "Have I caught you at a bad time?" She was ready to get on with the plan. She didn't have time for his drama. "In the middle of something." Somewhere in the background a man groaned and then came the scratching, rustling sounds of a struggle. "Hold on just a moment, Ms. Hodge." A loud noise pierced her ear as the phone clattered to the ground. The definite sound of a punch, that smacking of skin on skin, possibly the crack of bones snapping. There was a grunt, then a second of silence. Visualizing the scenario made her pulse jump again. Maybe this Bean guy had more mettle than his name gave on. "Are you okay?" "Fine. Just needed to get someone's attention." "Do I need to call you another time?" Not that she would. There were plenty more PIs in the area. "How long since you've seen your brother?" She wanted to tell him the truth. That it'd been seven long years since she'd seen Dan. It almost slipped out, but she managed to catch the words on her tongue. She wasn't sure how long one would go without searching for a missing sibling. Seven years seemed too long. "Almost two years for me. Mother, a few months back." "What makes you think he's in Vegas?" "I'm not sure he is. He's been here before, staying with some card players for months on end. But I can't find him this time. I need to see if he has any of the money left. To confront him. Try to talk him into rehab or something. My father's passed. My mom's heartbroken and not able to pay her bills. Knowing Dan stole her money is killing her. She's not so strong these days. I need your help, Mr. Bean." She tried for tears. None came. She thought she managed the appropriate amount of despair in her voice. "It's a hundred an hour, plus expenses. If any experts need to be brought in, they get their own fee on top of mine. Finding druggies can be slow. Expensive." He was direct. Unconcerned with her mental state. She had chosen wisely. Jim Bean would serve her well. "I have the resources to make payment." "Five thousand up front to get me started." "That's fine." "This is a Vegas number. You live here?" "I do now, yes." "You know the Coffee Girl diner?" He didn't give her a chance to answer. "Meet me there at nine a.m. with the retainer. Cash or credit only. No checks. No Discover cards." Yes. He would do nicely. "Tomorrow, Mr. Bean." "Nine a.m." The phone chirped that the call had been ended. She took a cigarette out of her pack. Lit it with a match from a book she'd taken from the dive hotel she'd been forced to endure for the last two months. She blew out the flame. Let the burnt cardboard stick go, watched it flutter, the smoke leaving a crooked path to the floor. It landed next to the dead woman at her feet. Pooled blood was darkening under her head. Her once perfectly coiffed blond bun was now a bloody red mess. "Did I sound like you, Ms. Hodge?" she asked the corpse and felt obliged to give it a moment in case there was a response. There was none. She shrugged and tucked Cynthia Hodge's phone in her own pocket. "Let's see if this guy can find your brother." Don't get cocky. Her own voice, young and angry, echoed in her head. Condescending. Always judging. Sophie Ryan Evers blew out a large puff of smoke. "Quit your worrying." If Sophie was the type of woman who giggled, she would now.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 3

"They're not that bad." Sandy, his favorite morning person, maybe his only favorite person, had stopped just shy of pouring his coffee. He eyed the pot as she held it just above the rim. A tease, so close to filling the empty mug. His coffeemaker at home had broken months ago and he'd not bothered to replace it. She was young, cute and blond, midtwenties, a pro at sarcasm. Sandy had been taking classes at the University of Las Vegas for forever, she'd groan. Jim guessed closer to five years judging by how long she'd been serving him breakfast. She'd yet to declare a major. Like many kids, Sandy had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. Waiting tables at this joint was good enough for now. Or so she said. Her quip was referring to the eggs, but the whole plate was suspect. Everything she'd put in front of him was mustard yellow. The organic substitute eggs, the shredded cauliflower that was supposed to replace hash browns, and the toast that was some kind of gluten-free cardboard shit that crumbled if you attempted to hold it. Even the plate itself was yellow. He was certain it was exactly that bad. "How does he make it all the same puke yellow?" "You come here almost every day and order the same thing. Either quit your complaining or pick somewhere else to have breakfast and conduct your business." One eyebrow rose, daring him to argue further. "I wasn't exactly complaining. I was trying to figure out the percentage of yellow foods in that kitchen. I thought all healthy shit was supposed to be green." "You want green eggs?" Sandy grumbled like she was tired of his shit. But she was half smiling, half smirking. The exchange routine. He went to great effort to get her face to make just that expression every morning. Jim thought on the green eggs for about one and half seconds. "Nope. I do not. I want a real egg that I can order sunny side up. And soft white bread to soak up the yolk." He pushed his cup closer to her. "I know you don't have those either." The pinko bastards had turned his greasy spoon into a vegan something or other food oasis over a year ago. She poured. Turned on her heels. "One of these days … " She walked away, shaking her cute, too-young-for-him ass. He smiled. Banter with Sandy was a great way to start the day. He took a couple bites and, once again, he was correct. It was that awful. He took a swig of coffee. A well-dressed woman pushed through the glass front door and stopped at the counter. Sandy greeted her and pointed to Jim. Had to be the new client. Good. She'd showed. He needed the funds. The cat food supply was getting low and Annie was not a happy kitty when she was hungry. The woman was tall, redheaded, and well put together. Her hair was pulled back in a loose knot, her clothing snug and professional. Her face was a hint softer than her clothing. "Jim Bean?" He nodded and motioned for her to sit. She sneered a little as she checked the vinyl seat. Snob? Maybe he'd read the light makeup and relaxed lips too soon. The place was old but, as was posted in the window, the menu progressive. She didn't seem convinced. He noted the lingering hint of cigarette smoke on her. She'd eaten a mint, but it was still in the clothes. An inspection of his plate didn't ease her expression. "How's the food?" She slid into the seat gracefully considering her footwear had tall, pointy heels. "Not bad once you wash it down with the equally horrible coffee." She smiled. Wow. That made a big difference. She was a beautiful woman. Nice to have a client with cash and a pretty face. He sat back, pushing his yellow plate aside. "Ms. Hodge. Nice to meet you." She nodded. "Thank you for seeing me so quickly." She folded her hands in her lap over her bag. Okay. Down to work. He pulled out his notepad and little golf pencil. "Your brother stole from your parents and you want him back?" She nodded. "Why not the police?" Sandy brought Ms. Hodge a mug and set it down. The redhead nodded again, this time to Sandy. She poured. "Would you like to see the menu?" Ms. Hodge eyed Jim's half-eaten plate with that same repugnant look. "I think not." Sandy left without filling Jim's cup. Evidently she didn't care for the uptight woman. Jim wasn't sure he did either, despite the amazing smile. He looked at her and waited for an answer. "Oh. Sorry." She cupped her hands around the cup as if she was cold. "The police will be more aggressive than we'd like. We're sure he's got a meth problem. With his history, god knows what else. I want him in rehab, not prison." Jim nodded. He'd heard that before from families looking for lost children in Vegas. "Where was his last known residence?" "He quit college years ago to rodeo. Bronc riding, I believe. Last I could find was Texas. He had a camper on the back of his truck." "No real address?" She shook her head. "And the last time you spoke to him?" She looked down. Her face tightened for the first time. "I haven't talked to him in years. I know he used to come see our mother. But after he got her to sign those papers, nothing. Not even a call on her birthday." Her gaze was on the cup. She didn't look at Jim. "What papers?" She glanced up. "Giving him access to her accounts so he could help her manage her money. She's got Alzheimer's and it's getting pretty bad. She needs full-time care. That's why I need to find him." Jim shook his head. This was not going to be a pleasant conversation. "Addicts aren't big on maintaining savings accounts, Ms. Hodge." Her arrogance was momentarily replaced with sadness, it danced quickly around her brilliant green eyes. She nodded. Recovered. "Call me Cynthia, please." She tilted closer, put her hands on the table. "It's more about Mother knowing he's okay than the money. When she's lucid, he's all she talks about. When she's not, she screams for her boy." "You have his phone number?" "No." "Have his social security number?" "No. Mom can't remember it. I can't find any paperwork in her belongings with it listed, either." "You're not making the job easy on me." "If it were easy, I would have found him myself. I tried all the avenues you're asking about. Nothing. Otherwise, I wouldn't need you, would I?" She flashed that killer smile again. True. "Anyone else know where he'd go off to? Any other family members or distant relatives he may have made contact with?" "We have a cousin somewhere in the northwest, outside Seattle maybe. I called. He said he hadn't heard from Dan." "Full name?" "Daniel Kent Hodge. Born August 1st, 1985." She fished a snapshot from the small clutch purse she carried. Small bag. Not much room for a cash down payment. That meant she'd be paying by credit card. He'd have to factor in the bank charges in her fee. He jotted down the DOB. Glanced at the picture. It was the two of them together. The pair were smiling. Dan had his arm around her. "Not very recent." "Most recent one I have." For a wordless moment she was fixated on the snapshot. Please don't cry. Crying women made him uncomfortable. He should be more empathetic in his line of work. But he wasn't. Everyone had their troubles. Every client brought theirs to his door. Those became his troubles. If he got emotional about it, he'd be in the nut house. Detachment Island was his happy place and he planned on retiring there. She tossed the picture onto the open notebook. "He won't look so different." "Drug addicts always look different." He watched her eyes. She'd flinched as he said it. "Side effects of the toxins." "You're probably right. I hadn't thought of that." "Anything else you can think of?" He'd ask her about fraternities, clubs, or other social activities, but if Dan was using meth, that was his whole life. Jim would start looking at the arrest records. Probably find him relatively quick that way. "Not really. Like I said. I don't want him arrested, just found." "Got it." He scribbled a few more thoughts. "The number you called from a good one?" "Yes." "This could take a while." "Can you keep me apprised of your progress and what you find out?" "Always do. The retainer is five thousand. I will have to travel to Texas. If I find him quick, any monies not billed to my rates or the cost of the investigation will be returned." Cynthia took a stack of hundreds out of her little black bag and tossed them on the table. It skidded across the laminate surface, stopping beside his notepad. The bank band wrapped about it had fifty scribbled on it next to a pair of initials. A withdrawal. Neatly bundled. No need to count. Easy to deposit and pay all his bills with. Thank you, Cynthia Hodge. She was all business. Easy and clean. He liked that. Liked that a lot. He handed her a standard contract. "You agree to pay me what I need to find Dan and I agree to do my best to recover your brother." She signed without reading it. "There is a chance we won't find him, or that we find out he's died. I've seen it happen more than once. I just want you to be prepared." He hated this speech, but it had to be put out there. "When you're dealing with addiction, it takes people into some very dangerous places. Both with the drug use and the people who live in that culture." "Are you trying to prepare me for that eventuality? You think he's dead?" A few strands of red bangs fell lose and dangled in her eye. She made no move to push it aside. "It's a possibility you need to be aware of." "He's not dead." She fidgeted with the corner of her bag. He'd heard that before too. But it wasn't his job to be her shrink. "Okay." She stood. Held out her hand. Jim took it. Her fingers were cold. Her grip surprising. Strong. "Please keep me up to date when you find anything. I like to know where my money is being spent. Remember, don't contact him. Just find him." Not an unusual request. But she needed to know the reality. "I'm happy to do that. But know that this could take some time. I don't have much to go on here. Some of the process is a waiting game." "I'm not so good with patience or being in the dark." She turned to leave. "Mind if I ask how you got my name?" Most of his business came from referrals. Jim liked to know if he needed to thank someone, or pay them. She headed to the door. "Your yellow pages dot com ad." She said it over her shoulder, not bothering to slow the swing of her hips in that creamy mustard yellow skirt. Maybe yellow wasn't so bad after all.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 4

Sophie peeled off the clothes she'd taken from the dead woman's closet. They were tight and not at all comfortable. She'd never been a slave to fashion. Even for work, comfortable slacks, a loose jacket, and flat shoes were her usual uniform. She sat on the side of the bed and rubbed her feet. The mattress felt good under her weight. Much better than the hotel she'd occupied for the last few weeks. She pulled her jeans back on and padded barefoot into the living room. She paused at the end of the short hallway. Danny's sister's body still lay where Sophie had dropped it. The thing had to be moved. If someone came to the front door, they might catch a glimpse of her ugly feet sticking out from behind the couch. The layout of the little ranch was a simple T with the guest bath far enough away from the bedroom to prevent Sophie from living with the impending smell. She rummaged through the hall linen closet and found a tattered plastic tablecloth with strips of the plastic peeling away from the fabric liner. Red checked. Rather quaint for the task. She rolled the body onto the plastic, wrapping it like a burrito. Then, using the top corners, she dragged it down the hall and into the muted pink tiled bath. Obviously seventies, but the lighting and nickel fixtures helped to modern it up a little. She heaved the wrapped body into a sitting position against the side of the tub. After a deep breath, she squatted over it. Needed to have the power of her legs to lift. The woman was small, but dead weight was dead weight and Sophie didn't want to wrench her back. She grunted with the upward force. Teeth clenched as she hefted with all her might and the body flopped ungracefully into the tub. She looked in the cabinet under the basin and found several cleaning products. Clog remover. She read the label aloud. "Sodium hydroxide and lye. Perfect." The tablecloth had slipped under the body and exposed a good bit of flesh. Carefully, she reached around the thing's legs and pushed the stopper down. She emptied the bottle over its length and ran enough water to cover it. The foaming clog remover created an unusual mix of blue swirling with the scarlet red seeping from hair and clothes. The trashcan was overflowing with rumpled tissue, so she dropped the empty bottle in the tub. Sophie washed her hands under hot water at the vanity. "Don't look in the mirror." The instruction was given to the thing in the tub, but Sophie wasn't about to glance into the looking glass either. Mirrors brought opinions and commentary from the past, from a time before she'd messed up her life. When there was hope, maybe even a time or two she felt joy. With this messy job it was likely to have something nasty to say. That bitch in her head loved to pick apart Sophie's inadequacies. Doubtless, it looked down on this performance, would preach at her for being impatient and leaving a body lying around the house. But Sophie had no desire to get it into the car and drive out to the desert. For now anyway. Maybe tomorrow. She had promised the voice to learn something each time she killed. To look past the way it made her feel and find ways to make the task easier, faster, or cleaner. After all, she had to be perfect when the investigator found Dan or he would still find her unworthy. Spurn her again. Memories of his mocking words the last time she found him made her chest tighten, her blood pulse. Trying to find Dan had caused her much anxiety, but it was worth it. He was hers. Anyone who tried to stop them this time … She tried to swallow past the bile in the back of her throat. Reminded herself she needed to take her meds. She needed to be in control. She dried her hands and ducked out of the bathroom without looking in the mirror. She'd already covered the other three in the house. She grabbed a big blanket from the linen closet on her way back to the living room. Folding it over twice, she spread it over the blood the body had left on the floor. Only a small bit peeked out near the counter. You should clean that. "No one's coming here. It's not a problem." Her stomach grumbled from lack of breakfast, but there was no way she was eating the tree-hugging fare in that diner. It reminded her of regurgitated baby shit. Come to think of it, Bean really didn't look the type to eat it either. And he did not match the impression she'd had of him. Instead of a skinny nerd with thick glasses, Bean was at least six-two, and if she had to guess, he was every bit of two forty, two forty-five. It would take a big dose to put him down. She'd keep that in mind. One of the reasons she hated people was their unpredictability. She liked things to have a certain amount of the expected to them. Made decision making easier for her. A PI punching people yesterday and eating vegan mush for breakfast today. Who'd have thought it? Sophie grabbed some cheese slices out of the bags she'd set on the counter. She'd made a quick stop for cigs and snack food. After all, the body in the bathroom wouldn't have had much food on hand, now would she? Cynthia Hodge had thought she was going to an accounting seminar in L.A.—all expenses paid. "Brilliant." Sophie marveled at her mind at times. She'd set up the trip. Going as far as to buy an airline ticket and express it to this address so the body would be packed and all ready to leave. And more important, take plenty of time off work. No one would miss her for days. "Brilliant," Sophie said again for a verbal back pat. She lit a cig and took a long drag. In her opinion, nicotine was more help than her Prozac. Sophie had done her part now. The final leg of her long-term plan was in motion. All she needed was for Bean to find where Dan was living in a hurry, before the body would be expected back at the office. He had a week at most. Sophie would monitor its emails and calls in the meantime to keep the body's friends from becoming worried. But the charade would only be sustainable for so long. She stuck one of the supposedly lean frozen meals in the microwave. It took her a moment to figure out the unfamiliar controls. When the turntable started spinning, she stood over the couch and picked up the remote control neatly waiting on the armrest. The noon news was on. A perky weather girl detailed what any moron could figure out with just the graphics. "Fucking hot all week." She muted the sound. Two other bags sat at her feet. Not from the grocery but an earlier excursion to the hardware store and the pharmacy. Easing onto the couch, she carefully opened her little black suitcase on the coffee table. Her fingers traced the foam compartments. A long time went into the planning and arranging in there. Her knife drew her attention as she sat on the cream-colored cushions of the sofa. Good thing she'd not gotten blood on it. The leather chair looked far less comfortable. The gleaming batwing switch with an English staghorn handle had been a present to herself after Number One. The switchblade she'd used on that bitch had been cheap. The handle had cracked, almost snapped, and it slipped in her hand. Sophie rubbed a small scar at the base of her thumb. Fortunately she'd managed not to leave any DNA around. Or if she had, she didn't think the police had found it. "Pays to be prepared." So she'd invested in some proper tools and this beauty. It was heavy, thirteen inches with the blade extended, and finely sharpened. It had never let her down. Never bit back. The blade felt like magic under her light caress. The pleasing light hazelnut­–colored staghorn was textured just enough to help keep a firm grip. Next to it was a foam cutout big enough to hold several pairs of gloves. She double gloved most the time after that first incident. New knife, yes, but she couldn't be too careful. It wouldn't do to have someone search for her DNA now. Now that the plan was in action, now that she was so close to Dan. A cell phone rang. Sophie jumped, even squeaked. She needed to calm her nerves. Take her meds. The ringer went off again. The body's phone. Sophie let it go to voicemail. She didn't want to talk to any of the body's friends or coworkers. But she would text them back if she felt like they needed placating. She'd check it later. Work then play. Her attention swung back to her case. Below the knife were auto injector pens set into the foam so she could get to them easily if need be. Seven. All had been preloaded with a strong animal tranquilizer—ketamine. Easier to obtain than the human equivalent and just as effective. She'd used one on the body in the bathroom. When Sophie, disguised as a cabbie, had come to her door for the ride to the airport, there was a cab running in the drive. Sophie had stood there in dark jeans, a dark long-sleeved shirt, and a cap. She'd offered to get the luggage. The body, his sister, had been happy for the assistance, even turned her back to get her purse from the kitchen counter. That was the magic moment. That instant when Sophie knew all would be well. Easy peasy. She'd hit the body on the back of the neck with the injector and held the body in a headlock from behind until it started to falter. Then she'd used her staghorn knife. Thirteen inches of beautiful steel to cut a precise six inches. Most people say ear to ear when they talk about a slit throat. But the sweet spot was lower, about two inches on most average-sized adults. So she sliced from artery to artery. The body fainted from the drugs before a good fight or bleeding out. It then sagged to the floor at Sophie's feet with nary a struggle. Quite sad really, for her life to go out in an instant when she had spent the week expecting a great trip and conference. Not Sophie's concern. Cynthia Hodge was a tool. Just like the items in her case. A nice clean kill, that was. She'd retrieved a tiny syringe from the fresh box she'd bought with a forged 'script and filled it with the tranquilizer from the amber bottle nestled inside a bundle of gloves for protection. The ketamine. She plunged the needle in and sucked out the tranquilizer. She loaded it into the disassembled auto-injector. With a quick twist and a compression of a spring, she had the Epipen-type auto injector back together. Only this brand was smaller, slimmer. Admiring her ingenuity and skill, she returned it to its proper place in the kit. A square cutout in the corner of the case housed a roll of green plastic-covered garden wire, a small pair of wire cutters, a few bandages, a spare pair of contacts, and a trash bag. Her tools were ready. Calmness tingled through her body. She was ready.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 5

Bean poured a shot of very good scotch he'd bought using the top Benjamin from the stack of Cynthia Hodge's bills. He'd been drinking cheap rot-gut brands over the last few weeks. Annie was chomping happily on her indulgence as well. Tuna Feast the can had read. He thought the picture of the white longhaired cat on the can was the perfect negative of his little black Annie. He popped open a spanking new laptop. The new computer was part of the reason his funds were dangerously low this month. He'd been watching a thug for an insurance company and the mark had caught on, bum-rushed Jim's car at four in the morning with a two-by-four, and swung away. His computer took the brunt of one of the blows. Jim used it to protect his face as the wooden weapon crashed through the windshield. Shock resistant … my ass. It had been cheaper to get his head fixed than replace the computer. Sadly, he'd needed both. Got a new laptop a week later, but he was stuck with the same old skull. He sipped the scotch in lieu of more pain meds. Only hurt occasionally now. Couldn't discern the pain from his normal morning headaches anymore. On top of the cost of replacing the hardware, he'd lost the revenue from not getting the information for his client. They'd fired him. Asshats. The screen opened for the INtellix database. He typed in Dan's full name and hit search. Little bubbles swirled in a circle as the software searched nationwide for criminal records on Daniel Kent Hodge. Several hits returned. Oregon, Texas, Florida, and Michigan all listed individuals by that name. He clicked the one listed for Texas. That click costs him eight bucks. Three more listings appeared on the screen. Possible relatives and associates. Cynthia, his mother, and another male in his sixties, deceased, with the last name Hodge. And another man named Halbert Winters. Arrest record was pretty short for a junkie. Forth Worth, 2006, Drunk and disorderly. Fined $200 and time served. Austin, 2007, Drunk and disorderly. Resisting arrest. Fined $350. Time served. Neither of those would be pled down from a drug charge. Chances were he hadn't started using while he still lived in Texas. Jim popped over to another database. Financial trail. Harder to trace, but it might even generate him a sweet social security number. That would be a help. Again, all of Dan Hodge's records disappeared after 2009. Cold trail. Not looking good for evidence of life. Hopefully he wouldn't find a death record. The stack of cash was burning a hole in his pocket. Finding the kid dead in two hours meant giving most of it back to the redhead. Jim let another sip linger on his tongue. Annie jumped onto the table and settled beside the laptop to begin her grooming ritual. The cat was so predictable. Always started with her paws gently rubbing over her eyes like a tired baby, ended with her ass. Next step was to try to rub his face. He scratched her head. With an annoyed, chirping meow she turned away but didn't deviate from her routine. Jim tried another search tool. The results closely mirrored the INtellix information. How does someone drop off the face of the earth and still manage to come see or call his mother? Maybe he'd snail mailed her. Bank accounts needed socials, credit cards needed socials. This kid had no marriages, no liens, no judgments, no back taxes, and no death record. Not on file anyway. He Googled. Found one picture of Dan standing next to Halbert Winters. He saved the pic and zoomed in on the banner in the photo's background. Party on the Porch … Texas Circuit Finals Rodeo. He typed in Halbert Winters. Hal was a veteran of the Pro Rodeo Association. If he was, maybe Dan had been too. He looked up the history page on the association's website. Sure enough. Annie finished with her ass and padded her way to him, purring, wanting attention. "No way, stinky butt. You're not kissing me with that mouth." He directed her away from his computer. He scanned the pages. D. Hodge and H. Winters traded the top spot in the saddle bronc events from 2006 to 2009. Both made pretty good money for the finals. Dan had had some cash back then. The association had an event this coming weekend in Fort Worth. "Maybe Hal is still around." Annie meowed her agreement at him. In the meantime, Jim decided to pop in and see what Dan's momma had to say about her baby boy. Maybe she would remember something. Jim was good with talking people into doling out facts. Sometimes facts they didn't even know they knew. It was his talent. Besides, old ladies liked him.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 6

"Get your skinny butt outta my room." The command was almost a shriek. Serious enough to stop Jim in his tracks. He looked to the open door at his back. Nothing but empty hall. Who was she talking to? He was just shy of 230 pounds these days. No one would call him skinny. The woman faced away from him, silver hair shining in the late-afternoon sun. The glow was the only thing in the room that looked warm. Beige walls would have made it a bit warmer, but almost every inch below about the five and a half foot mark was haphazardly covered in newspaper articles. Momma Hodge's retirement suite was little more than a hospital room. A beige couch that might seat two people was jammed into the space between the window and a cinderblock wall. No other seating but the rolling chair Mrs. Hodge currently occupied as she faced the open window. He doubted she could see out from her low angle, but a collection of scuffs on the floor indicated her attraction to the location. A hospital-gray bed frame with a knot of tangled white sheets was the only other furniture. A small stand held a lamp, a glass of water, and a mirror. Beside the bed at Jim's feet was a two-foot-tall stack of newspapers. Jim glanced at the front page of the one on top. Older than a week. "I said … " She spun the swivel chair and rolled it several feet until directly in front of Jim. She nudged her glasses closer to her eyes. "You're not Stephen." She chuckled. Shook her head, apparently amused. "But I suppose you knew that, didn't ya?" "I believe so. Last I checked I was Jim Bean." She was a feisty one to be talking to the staff like that. "Beam? Like the whiskey? Could sure use a snort of that at the moment. You bring me any?" Her face was painted with hopeful anticipation. Jim smiled. There it was. Several times a week he answered this question. Used to piss him off. Not so much anymore. He was the one who changed his name. He should have given it much more consideration at the time. He thought it was kind of cool when he did it. He'd been holding an expensive cup of joe from a fancy place down the block from the courthouse. A bean was roughly painted on the cardboard sleeve. Behind him a loud talker was jabbering away on the phone. He was in coveralls, like the mechanics wear. James was scrolled across a patch on his chest. James Bean. Good enough. He'd shortened it to Jim as he filled out the paperwork for the change. And Jim Bean was born. These days he used the question: "Jim Beam? Like the whiskey?" as a way to judge character. The more uptight or nervous a person was, the less likely they were to bluntly ask him. He shook his head. She was pretty out there. "No, ma'am. Like green. Green bean, Jim Bean." She didn't crack the slightest hint of a smile. "Don't know no Bean either." That hope turned to a suspicious glare and a raised lip. "You're not dressed like one of the morons who works here." She was not holding back, more wary. "Nope. And I suggest you be a little nicer to the people who bring your food." Jim smiled. He didn't want to say the word investigator unless he had to. Might upset her. He wasn't sure if Cynthia told her mother she'd hired a PI. "Ha. I can make my own way to the food lines, mister. Don't you worry." He scanned the articles on the wall. Lots and lots of them. Nothing seemed to connect at first glance. Entertainment, sports, political. More obituaries in one place then he'd ever seen. Few had pictures. Most were bold headlines and story copy. They gave him an idea. "I was wanting to do a story on the residents here. One of the morons said you were a firecracker. Told me you'd be a good interview." "Me? In the paper?" She used the heels of her scuffed black shoes to scoot the chair a bit closer. He hated to lie to the old girl, but he didn't want to upset her. Given most his life was lived in a lie these days, what the hell? Nothing like the fluidity of ethics. "Mind if I sit?" "Heck no." She seemed bright and alert. Cynthia had given him the impression the old woman would be out of it. This exercise may garner him better intel than he'd hoped. He started with how long she'd lived in the facility. "I've been here almost seven years, best of my recollection. Since right after Kennedy died." Jim nodded. "Kennedy, huh?" His hopes of accurate information faltered almost as fast as her smile. "Sad day." "It was." He'd best get to the point then. She wasn't going to give him Danny's last address. "Heard you have a son, Mrs. Hodge. Daniel?" "I do." Her face was unreadable. No longer smiling, but not exactly unhappy. "He's a cowboy." "I heard that too." Jim leaned in, glancing behind again. Never liked his back to the door. But in this case it was to make her feel like he was secretive, that she could trust him. "You know where he is?" "Out riding horses, last word I got." "You've heard from him?" "Not directly. Not in a while. Cindy says he's busy." Her face fell. "But he's promised me cake for my birthday next week. Tuesday. And a clown face. He always wore the best clown faces." She scrunched up her face and rolled her chair to the wall on her right. She plucked down an article. "Five hundred and seventy-five words." She handed it to Jim and grabbed another. "Fourteen hundred and seventy-five words." She pushed herself out of the chair, teetering on the brink of disaster. Jim braced to catch her. She swerved and twisted, grabbing one of the highest and longest sheets taped up. "Three thousand six hundred and seventy-five." He looked over the long wall coved with the newsprint. "They all end in seventy-five?" "That they do, mister. You'd be wise to remember that." She tapped her temple and winked. He smiled down at her as she resettled in her rolling chair. "I'll do that." He sucked in a deep breath. "Anyone else come asking questions about Dan, Mrs. Hodge?" "My name's Lynette. And only girls come round. But you know how handsome my boy is. Just like his father." She worried at a loose thread from her sweater, inspected it, and then let it fall to the linoleum floor. He'd give her a moment. See where her thoughts went. She refocused on the paper in her hand. "My Andrew's last article was two hundred and seventy-five." Jim remembered the name listed on the database. Andrew Hodge. Daniel's father. She closed her eyes. "Obits ought to be short."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 7

Jim parked the bland Japanese rental among jacked up pickups and horse trailers the next afternoon. He'd thought it was hot in Vegas, but the oppressive Texas heat and humidity had him sweating before he made it five feet from the car and its robust air conditioner. He'd parked behind the arena area on purpose, guessing that would be where the riders and pros hung out. And as he suspected, there were several guys working horses and moving livestock toward the action. He looked like a cop in this environment even with his jeans and hiking boots on. Three men stopped what they were doing to watch him approach. He pulled out his ID. "Name's Bean. I'm looking for Hal Winters." As expected. No answer. Three blank stares from three thin men in tight jeans and boots. They all had the same look. Pressed bright shirts with patches all over them, big buckles, and dusty well-worn boots. These guys were riders and had been around a while to pick up so much sponsorship. "I'm hoping he can help me find a missing guy. He's not in any trouble." The information brought little change of expression. Jim stood his ground and stared at them. The rather short one on the left finally looked down. He was the one who'd spill. Jim addressed him. "Really, man." He tried to look like he was harmless. "I'm looking for Daniel Hodge. His sister hired me to find him. Their mother's sick. Help a guy out, would ya?" Shorty nodded and tipped his hat back a bit. "I remember Dan. Haven't seen him in a few years. But you're on target with Hal. If anyone knows, he will." "And he's here?" Jim was hopeful. Long trip if he wasn't. The circuit standings online had ended with last season. No way to know if Hal was riding the same one this year. One of the quiet men spit. It landed close to Jim's feet but if it was directed at him, he'd have known. Jim ignored it. Shorty pointed to a building off to the left of the covered arena. "Having a Coke in the AC would be my guess. Broncs don't go off till later." "Thanks." AC sounded good to Jim. Inside the cafe Jim didn't garner as much attention. There were all kinds of people there to watch the rodeo with families, people working the snack bar, even a couple cops in the corner. The seating area sported three long rows of white plastic folding tables. It would maybe hold a hundred people. There were only about thirty scattered around now. No tablecloths. No pretense. The food smelled like a summer baseball park at dinnertime. A huge whiteboard displayed the handwritten menu. Empty bottles displayed the choice of beer. A couple dozen cowboy hats dotted the room. Jim scanned the faces of those turned in his direction. A cute blonde was smiling up at him as she spoke to her friends. Working. He moved on. A behemoth of a man in a pressed white shirt stood from the table closest to Jim and gathered a plate of fried chicken remains. He nodded. Jim took that as an invitation. "Hal?" The man hesitated. "He's not in trouble. I owe him money." There's a lie that almost always works. After another once-over the guy evidently agreed that Jim wasn't there for trouble. He pointed to the far corner of the room. No subtlety. Good thing Jim didn't need to sneak up. "Black hat talking with that lady in the green shirt." Not to mention the guy had a mustache the size of Dallas. "Thanks." Jim walked straight toward Hal. No surprise to Hal since he'd seen the big fucker pointing his way. Jim still had his ID in his hand. He flipped it open to Hal. The blond girl looked a little frightened. "I'm a PI from Vegas. Cynthia Hodge asked me to help her find her brother, Dan Hodge." Jim gave the guy a quick minute to think on that. Wanted him to relax. Understand Jim was not there to find him for any troublesome reason. After about four seconds he said, "I haven't seen Dan in a few years." "Last time he beat your ass in the regionals." The blonde laughed. Her face was over-tanned from the Texas sun and over-coated in Maybelline. Lips the color of a fire engine. Eyes painted up cornflower blue. A look Jim was used to on the showgirls. Intentionally overdone for the lights and the stage. Hal smiled. It made it to his eyes. Genuine. "It was." "You two used to pass that title back and forth from what I could see online." Jim slid into a folding chair uninvited. The blonde turned more his way. "He was a great rider," Hal said. "Was?" "Up and disappeared one weekend." Hal's accent was thick and rolling. He used his index finger and thumb to smooth his handlebar mustache. "Last day of regionals, 2012. His entry fees were paid. He was sitting in first place after the first go round. Never missed a ride before that. Never seen him since." "Unusual for a guy to disappear in the middle of a competition?" The blonde tapped an unlit cigarette on the table to pack the tobacco. "I've never heard of anyone else running out like that. I always thought he had to be dead to miss out on the buckle." Jim let his eyebrows rise as she elaborated. "I mean, he was in the money all the time. Had a decent truck but kind of lived out of it. We're on the road a lot, but most of us have a home base. Dan didn't." "You think he could have gotten mixed up in drugs?" "Oh. Hell no." Hal straightened, offended by the idea. "This is a real sport, mister. You have to have a clear head to strap yourself to a twelve-hundred-pound animal and hold on. We all get behind it at the bar every now and then, but he took this shit serious. Was saving to move to Montana and buy his own land." Interesting. Montana's a big place to get lost in. "You guys know any other riders who did that? Move up to Montana?" They both shook their heads but Hal answered. "I don't know anyone who could save his money like Dan." If the man had some cash and no drug problem, there had to be a money trail. But why would his sister think he was a druggie? "Could he have started the drugs right before he disappeared?" Jim asked. Hal pressed that mustache down again, stretching his lips into a frown. "Don't see Dan like that. He was smart. Hardworking. The guy you'd trust your sister with." "Drugs change people." Hal shrugged. "I think you're throwing your rope in the wrong direction." Jim stood and nodded. "I appreciate your time." He said it to Hal but made eye contact with the blonde as well. "One more thing. Anybody else come looking for Dan after he went off?" "Not that I can think of," Hal said as the woman shook her head. "Great." Jim had a thought. "I need to get some cash out of the bank. Want to hit the bar myself tonight. What's the biggest bank around here? Don't want to pay too many fees." "There's a First Texas Fed on Highway 377. I use them. Got an All Points ATM. No fees no matter where I go." Another leather-faced woman stepped up behind the cowboy. "You best get to the chutes, Hal." "I'll get out of your way. Have a good show … ride?" "Go." "Go. Have a good go." Jim headed back into the Texas heat. Follow the money.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 8

Jim sat at the bar, his reflection directly below a buffalo butt the size of his first car. The rust-colored, stuffed rear-end was once part of a whole bison merrily roaming the range. Where the hell ever a range might still be these days. Now half a dead bison hung from a bar-back mirror in tribute to the house labeled beer, Buffalo Butt. Jim opted for scotch to accompany the rare piece of meat in front of him. No butt beer. He pressed his shoulders back and cranked his neck to the side for a crack and stretch before cutting into what might be the end of his almost-decent cholesterol score. Twelve ounces of marbled perfection. It sliced like butter. Tasted like heaven. The texture of the aged beef was flawless. The seasoning minimal. Perfect. Jim was dog-tired from the late flight last night. A beautiful meal and the scotch was exactly what he needed before an early night and a dawn flight tomorrow. It'd been a good trip. Fast and efficient. Just the way he liked it. One interview and he had a good lead. Jim stopped chewing when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His dark hair was too long, spilling over his ears, his gray eyes looked gaunt above dark circles. The haggard appearance in the reflection made him wonder what had made Dan go so far off course. The kid was in college, then quit and joined the rodeo, and then turned junkie. Jim's own life had been buffalo kicked too. His derailment was caused by a co-ed and a false accusation of assault and rape. He'd lost his scholarship, his spot in the FBI training academy, and a good deal of his mother's retirement to make bail. The following scrutiny and mistrust had sent him to Vegas. He'd changed his name and put out his plank declaring himself a PI. Started all over. In the beginning he'd drunk enough to kill that buffalo hanging above his reflection. He counted himself lucky no one had offered him heavy drugs. He closed his eyes to the darkness that lingered from the self-loathing and anger of his past. Yeah. He'd have been happy for that kind of chemical-induced escape from reality. Maybe Dan had come across a need to indulge, to bury pain, life. Someone maneuvered into the stool next to him even though there'd been plenty others open along the bar. Slowly he opened his eyes and looked down at the steak. He was in no mood to chat with a local. "Well, Mr. Bean." His gaze snapped back to the mirror. The voice was smooth. The face familiar. "Did we find anything today?" He blinked a couple of times, letting the confusion of seeing someone completely out of context ease out of his brain. He slowly took another sip of scotch. Catching his tongue. He didn't like being surprised … or followed. He needed to edit his thoughts before he vomited out words he'd wish not spoken to a client. He silently counted to ten to hold his tongue. So the court-mandated anger- management class had paid off. This time. "There was no need to come all the way to Texas, Ms. Hodge. That's what you paid me for." "Call me Cynthia." She'd crossed her legs and angled herself to face him. Her elbow was casually draped over the dark-stained wood of the bar. She tilted her head and loose red locks tumbled over her shoulder. It was longer than he had imagined when he met her. That grin was mischievous at best. But damn, she was hot. "I told you I wanted to see him as soon as you found him. So I figured if you were coming to Forth Worth, why not?" "Shouldn't have." It came out more of a growl than he would have liked. Cynthia's spine straightened, her face hardened, and she glanced around as if to make sure no one heard his harsh tone. "Please don't think I'm questioning your prowess as a PI. I'm just anxious." That didn't help. "You wasted a trip." Relaxing back onto the bar, her body language changed, softened. Jim got the feeling this woman rarely lost her poise for long. "He's not here?" She eased over even closer. He could smell her perfume. Something exotic. Not fruity or sweet. "I really didn't expect him to be. But I do have a lead." He decided to hold off telling her his thoughts on Dan having cash at this point. He had no idea how long his techie guy would take to find the money trail. If there was one left to follow. "Oh?" "Old friend says he talked about Montana a lot." "Montana. That sounds about right for Dan. Always loved the thought of the West. He thought Texas was too … not green." "His rodeo buddies find it hard to believe Dan got into drugs." She blinked hard. Swallowed. "So did we. It happened so fast. Seems like he was visiting one day and he was fine and then he missed his next planned visit. After that, he was always flighty and we got calls from a hospital once. He'd almost OD'd." "I didn't find any arrest records." With that she sat up and recrossed her legs. Jim tried not to notice that they were long and lean. He took another sip. "I don't find that surprising. I did a criminal background thing online as well." She twisted and glanced around then nodded to the back of the restaurant. "I have the corner booth" She picked up his plate and handed it to him. "Join me. You can buy me dinner with my retainer money." Before he could answer she grabbed his drink. "Sir." The bartender looked up from his phone as Cynthia continued. "I'm moving Mr. Bean to my table. Is that okay?" She urged him out of the stool with a flick of her wrist. Dammit. He really wanted a quiet evening alone. Sinking into bed in a scotch haze. Like most of his evenings. He fell into the booth. She said something to the waitress before leaning back to the bartender. With her back turned and the angle she was leaning over the bar, he could see the shape of her ass in that tight denim skirt. He let his head fall back and hit the booth. It was not soft, as the upholstery made it appear. Dammit. A clock to the head would do him good right now. She turned back to him holding two glasses—his close to empty one and a full one. She showed a good bit of cleavage as she set them in front of his plate and eased into her place behind her plate, which looked remarkably like his. Rare beef and vegetables. With a wink she raised her wineglass and offered a toast. He groaned internally as he raised his glass. The evening reminded him of a very bad prom date. Wrong place. Wrong girl. Again. She chatted about Texas and accounting through the meal. She smiled a lot. Even touched his arm a couple of times. Cynthia was a knockout, but he would never get involved with an active client. She blasted him with that amazing smile again, this time with the head tilt thrown in for a murderous effect. The last gulp of the scotch did seem to help. He felt it. Woozy. Must be the traveling, because two drinks would never make him this relaxed. Damn shame too. Would have saved him a stack of cash during the years he was drowning the reality of his trashed life and bad choice in women. The waitress stopped by and filled the water glass in front of Cynthia. "You two okay?" The waitress cleared the plates. "One more?" Cynthia asked. Jim felt the back of his teeth. His litmus test for years had been to stop when his top front teeth felt a little numb. They were still there and still hard. That little exercise was pretty danged effective. No need to worry. No driving tonight, as the saloon was attached to his hotel. All he needed was to stumble up the stairs to his room. She was buying and he was beginning to enjoy the company. "I think so." "Good." She turned to the young girl. "I think I'll have a different glass of wine." She picked one off the small list she was handed. "Well, Mr. Bean. What's your story?" she asked when the waitress was out of earshot. He let out a laugh that sounded a little too feminine in his head. "It's long and sad and I'm in no mood to go down that road right now." And he wasn't. He was feeling light. Happy. Strange. "Okay. Life history is off limits. How about music? I'm guessing this country music is not your favorite." She hadn't pushed. He liked that. "I'm a classic rock guy. Grew up with it in the house." "I would have guessed that." She tossed her hair off one shoulder and scooted around to his side of the booth so she was sitting next to him. She pulled out her phone and tapped into the music section. "Love the classics." The play list was rather fuzzy but he made out ZZ Top and CCR. With a little twinkle in her eye, the waitress set down their new drinks. The night was looking more and more like a first date. He took another drink. A big one. He needed to back away from his client. Cynthia got her lipstick out of her bag and touched up her lips. No need to waste the good stuff. He would finish the drink and be on his way. "Not so fast, big guy." She grabbed the glass and pushed it away from him. "We should have a toast before you slam that down." Jim looked from the glass to her face. His head felt like it took too long to make that short distance. He blinked. Also sluggish. Travel must be kicking his ass this trip. Not usual, but the bed in this joint felt like sleeping on a fresh doughnut. Soft and unsupportive. He'd tossed all night. "What toast?" "Here's to you bringing Dan home to me?" She pushed his glass back to him. Then she let her pretty nails trail up over his fingers oh so slowly. The delicate movement mesmerized him. His gaze took the path up her arm, across that sexy spot just where her neck curved into her shoulder, and then found her recently re- reddened lips. "You are amazingly pretty in this light." The words were out and he hadn't even thought them. He chuckled to himself. It should be embarrassing. Inappropriate. Client. Bad juju. Her hand slid over this thigh. But … "You're very handsome yourself." Client. Stop. His thoughts spun to the toast. Dan. "I may not, you know?" "You may not what, Jim?" "Find … find him." His lips felt dry. Licking them only seemed to spread the condition to his tongue. She inched her fingers up the seam inside his jeans along his thigh. It tingled, burned. Nails grazed over his zipper. "You will." For a moment the sexy smooth lines of her face hardened. She gripped his package. He sucked in a larger than normal breath of scotch-flavored air. Her touch seemed hot. His body jumped to react. "Yeah." The waitress slipped the bill down. Cynthia opened the vinyl folder and signed it, all with her right hand. Her left was working him through his jeans. He was melting to her touch. His bones had deserted his being. The music in the room picked up in tempo. He felt the melody twisting and turning around his head like he could visualize dancing notes. Humming. He felt like that when he'd had a contact high at his tech guy's house once. Ely was a Viet Nam vet and prone to smoke without thought or care of who was around. He felt that way now. Like he'd been too long in front of Ely's computers while the man puffed away. Floaty. Comfy. Her hand changed pace. He liked the rhythm. "What's your room number?"

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 9

Cynthia watched as Jim worked diligently at his jean button. He pulled at the fastener with the finesse of a man wearing mittens. The continued failure to achieve his task didn't appear to upset him in the slightest. Rather, he seemed amused by the activity. How long would it continue if she didn't intervene? Tonight's little game wasn't the first time she'd used GHB. The first foray had left the man vomiting and completely unwakeable. She read on the Internet the next morning that he'd died. Number Four. She didn't get upset because the experiment failed. The supplier had warned her that the date rape drug produced a very ugly overdose. He was correct. No real loss, him being an over-cologned stranger from a sleazy bar. He was already falling-down drunk and in horrible shape when she'd found him. She shuddered at the thought of the unappealing naked man on the lime green motel quilt and took a sip from her wineglass. The fourth time she'd played around with this shit, she managed to overdose another one. Not to the point of danger or passing out, but he couldn't maintain an erection or concentrate on the task at hand. Dead weight. And he remembered too much the next day. She'd messed up that time. Picked a target who was too close to home. And, as should have been expected, it turned into a big mess. That experience cost her a great job and she had to change towns again. She slipped off her shoes as Jim chuckled at his efforts. He looked younger without all the stress. When she'd first approached him at the bar, he'd looked beaten down. Maybe even sad. Now, playing with his zipper like a nervous teenager, his gray eyes danced with delight. Sophie tossed away the memory of that past faux pas. Now she had a better job, made more money, and had greater flexibility with her schedule. She was ready for Dan. The house was ready. The plan in place to find him was moving along nicely. She eased up and kissed Jim's neck. He froze for an instant. He left off working on the button and slowly responded with a deep, if sloppy, kiss. She enjoyed the scotch on his lips and the rough feel of his hands as he dug his fingers hungrily into her hips. Now, this was workable. The mix of GHB to alcohol was perfect. The experience would be useful research for when she got Danny to the house. He would need some coaxing the first time or two. Until he understood. She let her hand slip back down to the PI's crotch. He was still as hard as he'd been in the bar. The drug was lasting. Maybe he was even harder now. But his rugged breathing worried her. "How does that feel?" She wasn't sure the cause was the drugs or his excitement. "Amazing." That sounded strained as well, but she was vigorously stimulating the man. She was sure he would deny her without the drugs. Not because of her looks—no, she had that covered—but because she was a client. Yet here he was with his baser needs overriding rational thought. She'd provided the catalyst for his actions, but men were low-minded animals, really. They all turned on her eventually. They used her. Always had. Starting with her foster father and all the way through her life, until she got older, smarter. Not soon after she was out of that fucking house, Sophie started turning the tables, using men how she pleased. If she could gain something from it or if she thought they would wound her or detract from her mission, she'd use the blade. Simple plan. But right now she was enjoying the outcome of this spur-of-the-moment party. Risky in that he might remember, but she felt this one wouldn't talk to anyone about it. He had far too much pride to whine about a drunken sexual encounter with a client. Men rarely cried rape. He staggered back a little as she twisted the fabric around the metal button. He looked down at the jeans as if she'd accomplished some huge physical feat. His smile was boyish, even charming. Caution tingled her senses. Maybe she shouldn't play with someone she knew again. She supposed he could get upset and stop looking for Danny. Then she'd have to start over with another PI. But she'd decided on this course as she watched him stalk into the restaurant and pull himself up to the bar. He was a good-sized man. His muscles thick and powerful and he wore a kind of arrogance mixed in with his confidence. He may not know how appealing his masculinity was. But maybe he did outside of work. Maybe he played games with women. Probably did. She liked to take men like that down a notch. "Take it out." "Huh?" He pulled his T-shirt off with only a minor amount of flailing and unsteadiness. Jim stood before her bare-chested, his jeans unbuttoned and hanging low on his hips. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. His balance seemed to disappear and he stumbled backward a few steps. Fortunately, the bed was there to stop his progress and catch him before he hit the ground. This was perfect. He was happy as pie to be there. To be with her. And she was sure there was some rule in his profession that said don't sleep with clients. One he clung to. One she was able to strip away with ease. She could see it on his face just after she'd put the GHB into his glass. Mr. Bean was not happy to be joining her for dinner. Not that she'd given him a chance to argue. In such a short time, he was very happy to pull his penis out of his pants for her. She chuckled to herself as she stalked closer to the bed. In this state, the PI was compliant and excited. "Come to papa." He propped up onto his elbows. "Did I just say that?" His brows drew together. She slipped off her shirt and apparently all thoughts of his last comment were washed away. Simple. Base. Flash a smile and bit of flesh and they fall all over themselves to give her what she wanted. She'd managed to accumulate a small fortune with that tactic, conning and stealing and killing. Three pimps died when she'd hit Dallas with her plan to get off the street. Not that anyone missed them. The plan had been to kill the lowlife fuckers for seed money. Maybe save a working girl's life in the process. Then she took the money, the drugs, and the guns they all hoarded. It was easy enough to sell the stolen shit to make a nice profit. Sophie thought of herself as an entrepreneur, after all. Hadn't taken more than a couple months to get where she didn't have to sell her own body or take out the drug dealers or pimps anymore. She reinvested almost every dime into the plan. Hard work and savings paid her way through school and earned her a degree. Back then she'd had more money in the bank than any two people her age. Over time she bought several sets of identification. All with real social security numbers. She was smart. Determined. Danny would be impressed. She eased to the edge of the bed and tugged on Jim's jeans. He did his best to lift his hips and she slid him out of his pants. Commando. "Yay me." She was getting excited as well. Jim Bean was a very nicely built man—defined muscles, nice abs, all without looking vulgar. She liked it. Big and just enough body hair to accentuate his physique. Reminded her of an Italian model she used to drool over. Jim was mumbling, shaking his head. He'd lost his ability to voice his opinion on the upcoming amusements. The thrill of taking someone against their will was almost as good as a kill. It was best when she could see the aftermath. The anguish that men suffered at having been violated. It was usually a woman's territory to be used. It gave her such a jolt to turn those tables. No one used Sophie Evers anymore. She crawled up Jim's naked body, touching and teasing as she went. His muscles flinched and skin twitched as she tickled or stroked. "Are you always this sensitive?"

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 10

"Usually when a guy looks as bad as you, he's leaving Vegas, not heading into the party." The man's voice was at least one octave higher than Jim's current tolerance level. Jim nodded but didn't respond or look his way. No way he wanted to chat with the high-talker for three frickin' hours. "I take this flight a few times a month," the guy went on as the plane finally settled into its course and quit floundering around the airways like a wounded bird doing its best to make Jim hurl. "These nonstops are hard to get. Sure am glad to have it today. It's my girlfriend's birthday." The rumbling of the jet engines was like a team of Clydesdales running a long-distance race in Jim's head. He leaned forward and used his thumbs to hold pressure on his temples, hoping for some relief. Nothing. His eyes squeezed shut trying to block out the morning light. The closed plastic window shade wasn't cutting it. Too many others in the cabin were wide open. He hoped this man didn't request that he open it back up. Jim needed what little respite from the glare he could manage. Might have to punch the high-talker in that flapping piehole if he didn't shut up. Fuck, he didn't remember drinking that much. He couldn't remember drinking enough to feel like this in years. Maybe ever. Not that he remembered much after his client had started rubbing his junk while he stared at the taxidermied buffalo ass. He eased his thick head against the seat back as the plane banked north to head away from Dallas and toward Nevada. The sensation and a tiny bit of turbulence made him swallow hard. Bile. How the hell did he manage to get himself into these situations? Do the job and get paid. Easy. No need to add a fat layer of drama on top. Women. Of course it was a woman. He had to have the world's worst luck when it came to the fairer sex. Maybe he should consider only taking cases involving men. Those cases would all be men looking for proof of cheating or lying wives. Although, he made a good bit of cash from women looking for proof of cheating husbands. Behind his closed eyes he saw choppy images of Cynthia in the dark. Flashed moments of the night. The restaurant. His hotel room. Her bare shoulders looming over him. Long red hair in his face. Soft thighs pressed against his. Her breasts caressing his chest as she moved. The silent mental video of her talking to him as she dressed. But those memories were as cloudy as an abandoned fish tank. Hazy. Green. The sound dampened. "You visiting Vegas?" He shook his head. "Local." "Me too. I'm in poker table sales. I'll be glad to be back home. A lonely casino out in the Texas sun was not for me." The plane jumped again. Usually, turbulence didn't bother Jim much. Hell, he'd jumped out of planes a couple of times, but this time his stomach felt as though the big plane had taken a five-thousand-foot drop in altitude. He swallowed hard. Fighting what quickly was becoming a losing battle. Maybe that famous rare steak was bad. Could have been actual buffalo butt for all he knew. Food poisoning. Maybe that would account for his memories of Cynthia naked. Could it be hallucinations? Fantasies? He hoped so. There had been no real evidence of her stepping foot in his room this morning. No abandoned underwear or lipstick stains. He searched the seatback pocket for the airsick bag. None. "Jesus … here man." The high talker shoved the bag from his seatback pocket into Jim's hands. Just in time too. Fortunately, it was just bile. The tiny bag was enough to manage until he shuffled down the aisle to the lavatory. Many eyes on him as he went. He had to stop himself from planting his fist into the face of one guy who gave him the you pussy smirk. Then again, the constant throbbing in his head egged on a burning desire to punch everything. He tried to think back on his anger-management class. They hadn't covered anything about working through the world's worst hangover. The cramped quarters made it hard to puke into the metal john. He was listing back and forth with the sway of the plane. Public restrooms suck. While he balanced, he considered the thousands of bare asses and men with bad aim who had come before. His best hope was that the minimum-wage cleaning crew did a decent job before he boarded. No other choice. Fuck. He hated being sick. Felt weak. Out of control. It ended. His shoulder banged the wall as he splashed water on his face. He paused to consider the state of his innards. No rumbling. No cramping. All seemed calm. For the moment. He pushed the door to the side. "Not feeling so good this morning, Mr. Bean?" She was standing right there. A foot from his face. The shock of seeing her made him almost stumble back. He had to catch himself on the folding door. Her voice echoed around in his skull. "No. Seems not." With a little pout, she handed him an opened bottle of water. "Drink this." He choked on the first swallow. Bitter. Fake limes and something spicy. He inspected the half-empty bottle. "What the hell is it?" The plane bounced over another air pocket. He fell against her. His body responded to the feel of hers even though his head felt like it was being melted by sulfuric acid. Dammit. He hated this situation. No denying it. Hated himself for breaking his own code of ethics. Bright eyes and an impish flash of her dazzling smile convinced him the snippets were memories and not hallucinations. At the moment, drunken fragmented fantasies would have been much better. "It's aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, and a secret ingredient. Family recipe. My college friend called it the Wings of Angels." She turned to walk back up toward the front of the plane. "Drink it, Bean. You'll feel better by the time we land. Trust me." She glanced over her shoulder and winked. He watched her walk past his third-row seat, back to first class, and slide in. Right-hand aisle seat. He took another swig. It was horrible, but what the hell? The only other choice was scotch. The stomach did a little complaining at just the thought of it. He waited another few seconds before making his way to his seat. This time he passed pity-filled faces. The contempt had felt better. He settled in, chugged his liquid remedy, and then tried to close his eyes and sleep. Within seconds the frayed images from the previous night replayed like a bad horror movie preview. No hesitancy on his part. He could tell that. But the rest was unclear. Out of order. He'd woken to an alarm set on his phone. He never set his alarm. Didn't usually need it. Maybe Cynthia had done that. But how did she unlock it? He twisted in the seat, searching for a spot on his head that didn't feel as if it was propped against a bed of nails. He didn't remember if he'd felt like he'd had sex this morning. His body was as groggy as his mind. The guy next to him started to snore. The erratic, guttural snorting was far better than his voice had been.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 11

He hesitated at the gate. Paced a small circle in the midst of the gathered throng anxiously waiting to board the plane he was very happy to have just disembarked. His head was no longer pounding, but his chest was tight. Was she waiting up ahead to speak to him? As promised, Jim felt much better. He wasn't sure he wanted to deal with her right now. Breaking his own rules and the issues it would most likely cause going forward angered him. By all rights … "Aww. You waiting to walk me to my car?" He turned to see her maneuvering around someone's overturned bag. Didn't slow her down a hitch. She moved with the grace of a tiger. He shook his head and bit his lip at the thought of the sleek line of her hips. "Not really." He squared his shoulders. "I should drop this case, Ms. Hodge. I have the names of a couple other capable investigators in the city. I can get any of them up to speed in an hour." He realized he was looking at the stained terminal carpet instead of her. Coward. "What happened between us last night … " He raised his head to meet her gaze. The amused smirk on her face was demoralizing. He deserved it too. There were a few lines he just did not cross. Seducing a client was one of them. "Don't be silly. It's not like you took my virginity, Jim." She leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. "You follow that lead you got. Let me know what you find." "I think it would be best if you contracted with someone else. I apologize for my behavior in Fort Worth." "Jim, I really appreciate your commitment to being moral or following some PI's ethical code. But we had a few drinks and we had a good time. We're both past the age of playing at making a good time into a lifetime. It was fun. It was in Texas. Today we're back here and you have a job to do. A job I'm paying you very handsomely to do." "I …" "Really. I won't become some love-struck teenager over this. I expect you won't either." He really needed this job. And was genuinely curious as to what happened to Dan. So far, the facts didn't line up. Nothing pointed to drugs being the reason this boy went into hiding. He wasn't sure he was relieved to be keeping the job and the cash or worried that she was more of a shark than he suspected. "Ms. Hodge. Please allow me to pursue the leads without following me. If I find your brother, you'll be the first to know." Her shoulders fell and she let out a huff that reminded him of a teenage girl not getting her way. "Are we really going back to this formality, Jim?" He didn't answer. "Fine. I will take your request under consideration, Mr. Bean." The cold eyes and aloof look of the businesswoman from their first meeting returned. Good. He could manage that. Naked and beautiful, not so much. "However, this is my case, my brother, and my money. If I choose to be involved, I will. Now, go do your job." With that, she turned and stalked down the terminal with nothing but a small carry-on bag.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 12

"You no look so happy, my friend," Ely said in a fake second-rate Mexican accent as Jim disconnected his call. Ely often did strange things, so an acute-onset accent was not a real shock. "Strange client." He turned to see Ely talking to Annie as she sat on his counter. The cat glared at Jim's friend. Beside the fact that he was the best tech guy Jim knew, Ely was gracious enough to watch Annie when Jim was traveling or spending days on a long stakeout. Ely's urban loft was her second home. The guy had served in Nam. A POW. He let small bits of experiences of his tour and his time in the hands of the enemy slip every now and then, but he never told the whole story. He was a badass then and a smartass now. And he was the best hacker in Vegas. The guy was older and weirder than any of the young bloods in the tech game and many lawyers didn't like Jim to use Ely because he wasn't a reliable witness. But even stoned, he was the best, and most of his cases never saw the inside of a courthouse. Jim knew when to use Ely. Annie ducked Ely's attempt at physical contact. "I was talking to her. Don't so much care about chew, man." That cat loved to play hard to get. She darted up the counter just out of Ely's reach and then plopped back down to stare blankly and twitch her tail at the two men. "But now that you mention it, you do have the look of a man wid bad hemorrhoids." "Annie's just hungry. I have a missing man that is really missing and his sister is a serious control freak." "She the client?" Jim knew what Ely was getting at. He gave him a shrug. "She have the cost of admission, hombre?" Ely poured Annie's food from a container kept under the counter. The bowl was a permanent feature on his countertop. While eating, she let Ely run his skinny fingers down her back. Jim put his phone in his backpack. "Yeah. Cash." "Then you got no beef with telling the chica what you doing with her money." He gave Jim a creepy grin that showed way too many stained teeth. If only it were just the giving of information. Jim still felt a little off from his drunken liaison with Cynthia Hodge. His head no longer hurt but his lack of concentration lingered like a bad odor. "You here to take Annie home?" Ely asked. "Not yet. Let's see if we can get anything from First Texas Federal on Daniel Hodge. Savings, ATM card, anything." "Shit. I hate bankers, man. Almost as much as jowers. But not as much as creepy cable guys." "What is a jower?" Jim was sure the man was stoned out of his mind. He checked for the smoky haze that hung around the high ceilings. The place was an abandoned lawyer's office. Ely bought the run-down building several years ago. It was one of the few pre-seventies buildings in the area that had not been demolished and replaced with a huge hotel. Trump must have missed the listing. Vegas loved the new and shiny. The upstairs to this unique place sported two rooms that now served as bedrooms and a gallery that was—in the past and still today—a library. Jim's guess was the literature wasn't original to the law office. Who knew? He hadn't spent any time up there. From down here, a good part still looked like law books. The big change was artistic. Ely crafted disturbingly large metal sculptures of eagles and dragons suspended from metal and wood railings around the galley. It was a bit freaky from the ground floor to have them looming overhead all the time. But it was not his place, and Ely loved them. Enough pot smoke to give Jim something of a contact high lingered. Maybe he could use the buzz to clear the cobwebs. Ely held up Annie. "Jowers. You know, attorneys." He shook his head, kissed Annie. "Sorry, girlfriend," he said to Annie and put the cat on the floor. "Got to work for the man." Jim wasn't sure if he was trying to imitate a Mexican accent or if he'd done a Cheech and Chong movie marathon again. Probably the latter. "Can we drop the Spanglish?" Annie let Ely scratch under her chin one more time before she darted for the stairs. Ely slid behind one of the terminals on his wall of servers, routers, processors, and lord knew what else. The man could find out what an FBI agent scored on their entrance exam. Tracking down a bank account should be fairly easy. It wasn't a local bank, so Jim had no connections to call upon. Movement high and to his right caught his eye. Jim turned to see Annie circle then settle down in her favorite spot, right on the back of an eagle sculpture closer in size to a VW than the national bird. She loved the precarious position. It used to make him nervous, but Ely had moved a big cushy chair under it in case she ever rolled over in her sleep and took an unintentional dive. After all, she was hanging out near the smoke zone. Keys clacked at the pace of Morse code. Green lines of text tracked across the screen. Ely grumbled. Jim made his way back over to the kitchen area and opened the fridge. "I made margaritas this morning!" Ely sounded excited. "Have one. They're amazing, man. I got some Herradura from this dude for fixing his satellite feed. Good shit." So that was the inspiration for the Spanglish this afternoon. "You got high-dollar tequila and decided it was a good idea to dilute it with juice and salt? No thanks." He was ready to be home with his own scotch and his own bed. "Ding, ding, ding," Ely sang out and threw his hands up as if he'd scored a winning field goal. "What you got?" "I found a K. D. Hodge." Jim moved closer. "Utah, baby." He typed into a window and brought up the database Jim used to track people. They found two listings for K. D. Hodge in Utah. One was a small loan from a boat dealer. Paid in full two years ago. The second an account with First Texas Federal. "Dude's got no car registration, nothing in that name. If that's your boy, he is playing a serious game of hide and stay hidden." Ely scratched the back of his head so hard Jim thought he'd draw blood. "If he's a junkie … " Jim started. "No dammed junkie lives in Bryce Canyon, Utah. Seriously?" Mountains, red rocks, tourists, and canyons are not the perfect place for someone with a serious drug habit to hang out, blend in. "There is a possibility." Ely pulled up the Wiki page for the city of Bryce Canyon. Amazing nature shots of snow-covered rock formations and summer hikers neatly placed alongside the printed history, both natural and cultural, for the area. The last shot in the slide show was of happy travelers riding horseback through the spires and standing stones "Of course. That's it." "Dude's on a dude ranch!" Ely's sly giggle was more spooky than maniacal. "Gotcha."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 13

The Broken Spur Inn was just ten miles ahead according to the hand-painted sign Jim had recently passed. He'd rolled down his window a ways back as the elevation rose and the numbers on his car's thermometer fell. It was under 50 degrees at the moment. The air gushing into the car felt like heaven after forty-eight hours in Texas and returning to 102 in Vegas. Back home it'd still be 70 even after dark. His phone vibrated against his leg before he heard the ringtone. The number displayed on the screen made him grit his teeth. Cynthia Hodge. At least he was almost there. Too late for her to follow tonight. "Bean," he fired. "Where are you?" No greeting. She'd turned cold fast. "In my car." "Funny." But she didn't sound amused at all. He hadn't meant to be. "It's best not to aggravate your investigator, Ms. Hodge. Slows down the progress of the case." It was best not to sleep with clients too, but … She laughed. "Really? Well, I wouldn't think looking for an update would constitute aggravation. But you seem to dwell on being unhappy, Jim Bean. Maybe you should see a counselor to help with that pent-up aggression of yours." Five years of counseling and his therapist was as done with him as he was with her sessions. "Shit doesn't work. I'm still angry." "Maybe one day you'll tell me exactly what you're so angry about. Maybe I can help. You ooze hostility. I can feel it in the way you move, the way you look at people. Even the tone of your voice screams asshole. My guess is there's a correlation to the women in your life, but I'm no therapist." Shut up. He wanted to snap it at her. But he was still spending her money in hopes of getting lots more of it. "I'm on my way to Utah. Actually, I'm in Utah as we speak. Weather's great. You shouldn't come." There was a moment he thought the call had dropped. "Utah?" "Lead on an old loan. The account was closed a couple years ago, but I'm checking it out. Gonna circulate his picture around the local dives." He saw another hand-painted sign on the right. It was in much worse shape than the last one. A splintered sandwich board only two feet high, tilted and half hidden in the red sand. White with black lettering. Broken Spur This Way! Under the words was a crude arrow missing more paint than not. "Utah's a big place. What city?" "Bryce Canyon area. Seriously, there's no sense you rushing out here, Cynthia." He used her first name, tried playing it calm enough so maybe she'd believe he wasn't hiding anything. "I'll call as soon as I know if Dan's here. I'll wait for your instructions once I know. Okay?" Again the line was silent. The racket from his open window blocked any cellular noise from the conversation. It sounded empty. For a second an eerie sensation crawled up his neck, tickling his hairs. Like someone was watching him. But the road was dark. "All right, Bean. I'll give you this one. But I want to be alerted as soon as you lay an eye on him. Don't talk to him first. You got me?" Jeez, pushy woman. "I got it." She hung up. That time he was sure of it. The beeping of the call dropping. Cynthia Hodge was pissed. He smiled as he pulled up to the Broken Spur Saloon and Inn and parked in front. A second entrance for the saloon was on the left side of the building. More cars parked over there than out front. He pulled the picture of his prey out of a folder and tucked it in his shirt pocket. It was dead-on midnight. A few people were heading in the direction of the saloon entrance. The rest of the night was dark and quiet. He had a sneaking suspicion Cynthia Hodge was packing her bag. The lobby area was only populated with a couple swapping DNA on an overstuffed couch. As expected, the inn's decor was a stylized version of the early West. A carving of a howling coyote and two boot-shaped lamps sat on the front desk. Romeo pried his lips away from his pretty little Juliet's lips. "Jay will get ya up at the bar." Jim nodded. He headed toward the blaring country music off to the left, past the elevators. The saloon entrance was marked with swinging doors. He pushed in, wondering if people really enjoyed such over-the-top gimmicks in their travel accommodations. He just wanted a bed and bottle. Looked like he'd have both tonight. Didn't take him long to track down Jay. She was the only one tending bar and her nametag was a dead giveaway. He was an investigator, after all. After supplying a large number of long neck bottles to a tiny waitress, Jay turned to him. "What'll you have?" "A room and a scotch." "Reservations?" "Bean, Jim Bean." For an instant, Jay looked like she was going to say it. Beam, like the whiskey? But given she was a bartender, had bright intelligent eyes, and had possibly already seen his name printed out on her list of late arrivals, he correctly decided she would not. She fingered through a couple papers next to her register, then handed him a key envelope. At least they weren't still using metal keys like in Texas. "212. Upstairs at the back. Nice view in the mornings." She poured the scotch without waiting for a reply. "Anything else, Bean, Jim Bean?" "Kitchen open?" She retrieved a small menu. "Just bar food. All full fat and all full flavor." Jim glanced and ordered the burger without much thought. She went off and attended to other customers. His stomach was as empty as the canyon out there and wasn't particularly happy about the scotch after the hangover from hell and the drive up here all in one day. He took another sip and turned to scan the room. From what he'd seen online there were only two real bars in the area. This was one. The other was a ways up north. His glance rested on each male face, trying to compare them to the picture of Dan in his head. None matched right off the bat, but the picture was old. Men changed. Grew facial hair. Went bald. Jay set his food and a glass of water in front of him like it was a drive-by. She didn't slow a step on her way to service the small crowd. The plate was just as he expected. Burger too. Huge and dripping in cheese and barbecue sauce. The best he'd ever tasted. Given the state his body was in, boot leather would probably sate his appetite. Jay came back to check on him. "Let me ask you something." He slipped the pic of Dan and Cynthia onto the counter. She looked down, blinked, and her gaze snapped back to him. Oh. She was good. Covered her recognition fast. But Jim had seen the glint for a half beat. She shook her head. "You don't know which of the pair I was going to ask you about." "Don't matter. Even if I did recognize them, you know we got a kind of doctor-patient confidentiality thing going in this business." He smiled. "Nice. I'm looking for Dan. He's not in trouble. His mother's ill and his sister asked me to help find him." She managed an eye roll in combination with the lash flutter. She was cute and smart and a hell of a bartender. "You think I'm green enough to fall for that?" "I think you trust your gut." He pulled out his card. "I'm a PI, not a cop." He slid it over to her. "His mom's in a rest home outside Las Vegas. Her time is short." That might have been exaggeration. Anyone her age was short on days in his opinion. Jay walked away again. Filled several glass mugs. Washed a few more. She glanced at him more than once. She knew something. He finished the burger, leaving most of the fries on the plate. It was close to one a.m. when she slid him his third shot. His water glass stood full. The place was still hopping, but the busiest part of the night was over. "His mom's sick?" "Alzheimer's." "Damn." She huffed and then downed his shot. "You'll find him eventually, I suppose. We're a small town. He's out at Ruby's." Jim raised his brows. As much for her taking his drink as for wanting more info on Ruby's. "Ruby's Horse Adventures. It's north of here. He's the barn manager or head wrangler or something like that. Keeps to himself mostly. When he comes in, he's never as drunk as the rest of the bunch. Polite guy." She refilled the shot glass. "You better not be here to cause any trouble or you'll answer to me."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 14

This puzzle was not coming together, and not for missing pieces. To Jim, the mystery had a couple wrong pieces in the mix. Like a puzzle of a cat with random pieces from an Eiffel Tower picture thrown in just to mess with your head. None of Dan's acquaintances had any knowledge of the guy ever using drugs. His existence was so far off the grid he was close to impossible to find. Took a lot of work to have an electronic footprint so light. No Facebook. No cell that could be traced to his name. No job on record. And yet, here he was, a head wrangler or something at a resort in Utah. Jay had made it sound as though he'd been around long enough for her to judge his character. Bartenders were good at that. And his experience in Vegas had told him female bartenders were particularly talented at it. Jim had been tossed out of some pretty low places by some pretty tough ladies. He drove the quiet road north the next morning, following a bus from the Broken Spur Inn. It pulled up to the opening of a huge barn. Jim parked at the far end of the lot and watched as hotel guests filed off the aging blue shuttle bus. He mingled into the back of the group as they made their way to be checked in by a couple of smiling young girls in tight jeans and dirty cowboy hats. He lingered as parts of the group were led off in different directions. Older and less-mobile to the wagon rides, younger and more-agile to the horseback rides. To the left side of the barn was a sign: No Guests Beyond this Point. Looked like the path led to the main house and the back of a snack bar/gift shop building. No doubt the buggy rides let off directly in front of that building when finished. Like how theme parks now guide guests through gift shops after they get off the rollercoaster. Sales. Sales. Sales. Farther along were cabins. Plain. Not for vacationers. Living quarters. Eight doors. If they all had two bunks, at least sixteen of these hands lived on site. Would explain why there were no real estate or rental records for Dan Hodge. Beyond those were wide open spaces, fenced paddocks with horses milling about, and another big barn. The closest was rugged, less painted than the one customers came through. Likely for working rather than impressing guests. A lot of people around in the Ruby's T-shirts but none were his guy. He eased his way to the edge of the barn. Two horses were tied in the aisle between rows of stalls that lined each side of the building. Both were resting with one back leg relaxed and seemed content to be tethered and left alone. Better than pulling a wagon. Jim moved along the outside of the barn. It smelled like a horse ranch back here. He peeked around the corner. A tall, thin guy was giving instructions to a young kid with a clipboard. Jim's gut told him the tall cowboy was Dan. His jeans were clean and pressed, his shirt only wrinkled from where he'd sat down, nice crease still down the sleeve. The thing that confirmed what his gut knew was the name Kent stamped on his leather belt. The horse tied closest to Jim snorted his displeasure at being ignored. Both men turned to look. Jim backed around the corner, but they'd spotted him. His choices were few—turn and run or face the music. They were close and knew this area. Nowhere to go out there but the parking lot or the wilderness. His instinct told him to stay put. Cynthia would just have to get over it; he was gonna talk to Dan first. Besides, this guy was no junkie. Jim's gut was talking to him, he just had to figure out what it had to say. "Can we help you, mister?" Dan and the much younger man stuck their heads around the corner. Dan tilted his head a bit. "Insurance company says you can't be back here, sir." They'd given him an out. He could leave and follow Cynthia's orders. "Sorry." He felt that tingle on his neck again right before he was going to turn and walk away, following her orders. His feet stayed put. "Are you the boss round here?" he asked, looking at Dan. "Of the horses, yeah. That's 'bout it." "I have a couple questions about running a barn, you have a minute?" Dan looked at the other guy. "Don't worry. I'll get the meds from Doc Milton." With that the kid rushed off toward the main building and the parking lots. "I need to get these two out in the paddock. Can you walk and talk?" "No problem." Ah, the needs of a workingman. This workingman was clearly not on drugs. Possibly never had been on drugs. What was Cynthia's motive for saying so? Jim would have found Dan for the money. He didn't need to be convinced to hunt someone down. Why the misdirection? And why did it matter to him now? He should back away, call the client, and get his money. Job done. The guy unhooked the horse and spun it toward Jim. "Hold her." He handed Jim a rope attached to the animal's head. The beast had to weigh a ton, maybe more. She was sniffing his arm, her lips nibbling at his sleeve. "Is she a biter?" Dan walked past with the other horse. "Only if you bite first." The horse followed right on her horsey friend's tail. Jim was along for the ride. He didn't want to bring up anything until he was not attached to a thousand pounds of animal that could kill him with her feet. Dan opened the gate and spun the horse around and took off her head strap. He took the rope from Jim and did the same with that one. It was impressive just how hard they ran to the open pasture, kicking and farting along the way. It was amazing to see in real life. He'd been a city boy most of his life and had never been really close to horses. "Now." Dan latched the gate. "What can I help you with?" "You ever ride rodeo?" The man's eyes narrowed. "A thousand years ago. Yeah." "In Stephenville, Texas?" Dan's body stiffened. He took a step back. Boy was going to run. "I'm not a cop. You're not in trouble." "You say?" "Didn't see any paper on you." No warrants, no tickets, no nothing. "And who are you, mister?" Dan's hip cocked. It was not a fighting stance. "Jim Bean. I'm from Vegas. A PI. Your sister hired me to find you." Dan's face twisted up and he scratched his cheek. "My sister? I talked to my sister last month. What the heck would she hire you for?" Jim's expression must have mirrored his confusion. "What exactly did my sister say?" Dan's expression changed in a heartbeat from confused teenager to frightened child. "That you'd been missing for a while." Jim leaned against the fence for support. His gut was screaming at him loud and clear. There was something wrong here. This boy was not a drug addict. Never had been. Cynthia had lied to him about her brother. She followed Jim to Texas, got him drunk and seduced him, probably to keep him off-guard. Keep him from thinking about her or the job too much. If Dan was telling the truth that meant Cynthia was the puzzle piece he hadn't expected? The odd part that didn't fit quite right? "What … what does your sister look like, Dan?" "Blond. Short, a little thin." "Oh, fuck." This was as bad as bad got if the kid wasn't playing him. "What did she look like when you met her?" Dan stepped a little closer trying to loom over Jim. Jim had thought he had all his ducks in a neat quacking row and now the little bastards were scattering. The feeling of not being in control, not being sure of himself, dug in his side like a spur. That woman had followed him all the way to Texas to make sure Jim did not speak to Dan. Now he might know why. And to top it off, they'd … "Redhead. Shapely. Green eyes." "Sophie. Oh my fuck. Was she in Vegas? Did she talk to my sister?" "Who is Sophie?" Dan started walking toward the cabins. He cursed and shook his head. Jim caught up as he hit the wood porch. A single rocking chair sat next to the upside-down bucket that worked as a table. He stopped. "Sophie was a girl I grew up with. We hung out some. I grew up, moved on. She showed up years later when I was in college. The crazy bitch couldn't take no for an answer." He took his hat off, then ran his hand through his hair. "The girl I was dating at the time suddenly disappeared. I was investigated. Almost accused. None of us thought of Sophie as a suspect. I had an alibi. The case was never solved. Sophie disappeared again." He let his thin back slam against the wall. He slammed his booted foot backwards. Boards cracked. Jim's FUBAR meter sounded the alarm. Dread churned with the acid in his stomach. Been a while since he'd screwed up this bad. "When Sophie showed up next, it was at a rodeo. I was hooking up with some buckle bunny at a bar. Sophie got all pissed. Said I was cheating on her. Cursed out the girl. Poor thing was no one I'd even met before that night. The next day that girl went missing too. They found her with her throat slit two days later." He rubbed his eyes with enough force Jim heard the squeaking sound of it. "So you've been living a cash-only life out here in the middle of Utah to hide from Sophie." And Jim had led the spider right to the fly. "I wasn't sure what to do. I was ready to leave the rodeo circuit anyway. Not being where she'd likely be looking for me only made the idea more appealing. It's not like I was settled down in Texas. I drank too much, played too much, whored around too much." Dan's gaze went out to the stunning rock formations. The view from his porch was travel-magazine perfect. "Turns out the quiet life suits me right down to my Justins. I do my job. Read. Sleep. I don't miss the traveling or the partying at all." Dan let his head fall back to the wood siding. "It's been seven years. After a couple without hearing word one from her, I was sure she'd gone off and found someone else to obsess over. Or maybe I was overreacting. Either way, Sophie needed some serious help." "This your place?" He nodded. "Let's go inside." Jim looked around the barn lots before closing the door behind him. The one-room cabin reflected Dan's words. A single worn, overstuffed chair with a thick blanket sat in front of a fireplace. A pot hung over cold coals. Small table for two and an efficient little kitchen. The couch and chair that made up the living room were made of carved logs. Reminded Jim of a lodge in Montana he once stayed in when he was trying to forget his own past. No TV. No phone. Jim understood. What a fucking mess. The kid had to be right. And that being the case, Cynthia—no, Sophie—had had overnight to catch up to him. He eased over to the thin curtains and peeked out the edge. She was not in plain sight. The day seemed eerily quiet out there. Only a few horses milled about with their heads to the ground, chomping what little grass they could find. No breeze moving their tails, not a soul in sight. Everyone must be on the trail ride by now. "You're convinced she killed those girls?" "I need to call Cynthia." Dan pulled a cheap throwaway phone from a kitchen drawer. "Not a good idea. I think she has Cynthia's phone." Jim pulled out the old photograph. He had to know. If he'd brought danger to this kid, he would never forgive himself. And if that was the case, he worried over Sophie's current mental condition. Well, this was why. How many times was he going to let his guard down only to have a woman blindside him? "Is this Sophie?" Dan sat back on the bed gripping the picture in both hands. They trembled a little. His mouth was a tight straight line and his brows drew in. "Yes, sir. That's her." Crap. Jim's mission had just changed.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 15

Sophie drove past the cluster of barns and parked in a little-used driveway to a ranch up the rocky hill from Ruby's Horse Adventures. The overgrown grass might be a result of neglect, but it looked more like abandonment to her. She lifted the hood on Cynthia's car just in case someone came up the long drive. More than likely it wouldn't be a problem, but she didn't want to explain herself if someone stopped and questioned her. Through her binoculars, she found Jim's car in the middle of the lot. Just about where the GPS locator she'd attached under his bumper told her it had stopped. After Bean got so upset in Texas, his forthcomingness with information was in doubt. So this was the easiest way to keep in the loop with instant updates. Follow him. So when she'd called last night, she wasn't far behind him. The idea of tracking the tracker gave her a little thrill. She stretched her neck to the side. The audible pops told her it was time to relax. Bean was checking out a horseback riding business in Utah. It was a perfect place to find her Danny. She'd called around and asked at a bunch of them in Texas years ago when Danny first got lost. She'd had no luck. She would have never guessed Utah. Bean had been a good investment. Sophie took a drink and patted her side, making sure her blade was in its place. In the event Bean called and confirmed Danny was there … She shivered. Always be prepared. You learned the hard way, didn't you? She shook her head. "That was a long time ago." When she was experimenting with the tranquilizer in the auto injectors, she didn't think she might need more than one per outing. After stalking a woman for hours through the garish bars in Dallas, Sophie broke the needle in her skinny neck before the shit could be injected. She'd had to fight the bitch before she could kill her. It'd been much more physical than Sophie would have liked. Number Nine. Too much contact with her germ-laden skin. Excessive physcial contact could lead to DNA transfer to your victim as she pathetically tries to scratch her way free. Sophie took pride in her strength. Working out five days a week ensured she could hold her own enough to get the job done, but the fight-or-flight response could make even a drunk socialite stronger than one would imagine. You've made a few mistakes. "Back then," she snapped at the voice in her head. Always critical, derogatory. But she was better now. She'd gotten exceedingly good at getting better. Of using her brains and her brawn to move ahead. She rubbed the back of her neck. She was sweating. Heart pounding. "Now I'm smarter." Stealth, perfect. Danny would be so impressed with what she'd done to create a place where they could live happily. She swept the binoculars around to the opening of the barn and all the activity of the unloading bus. She saw no sign of Bean or Danny. Something moved to the side of the barn. She'd found her PI. He was watching around the corner. The barn blocked her view of what he was looking at. Jim started back toward his car at a good pace but stopped short when Danny and another man approached him. She gripped the plastic of the binoculars. Driving hard all night had not done her nerves any favors. "No! Dumbass. What part of don't talk to him didn't you get? Do what you're being paid for!" Danny approached Bean. Her clenched jaw was so tight her grinding teeth echoed in the still air. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, used her inner strength to calm. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth her yogi would chant during class. It kept her calm and she desperately needed that now. Rushing down there to throttle that PI, no matter how much pleasure that would bring, would do no good. She focused on the ultimate goal. Danny in her sights. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. A moment of joy and excitement was well deserved. A scant celebration even, if only internal. There had been so much preparation, buildup, this was not the climax she'd hoped for. She'd wanted to come into his life by rushing into his arms. Bean had ruined that fantasy moment forever. Anger is not your friend. Control is your friend. Anticipation had been growing, consuming her for the last year. And there he stood, as beautiful as he'd been ten years ago at twenty-three, still fit and looking good in those jeans and boots. He smiled for just an instant. A giddy rush of excitement washed though her. Soon they would be bound together. As it was meant to be. Only Bean needed to walk the fuck away. She pressed the glass hard to her face and watched, not caring if there would be a round impression in her skin. The conversation looked light. Maybe it was just small talk. Why hadn't she taken a lip-reading class? She'd taken about everything else under the sun over the last seven years. An extended conversation between these two would ruin everything. It wouldn't take Bean long to figure out her story was a lie. Danny wasn't a junkie. I told you that backstory would be a risk. "Shut up. I know. But I needed a good excuse for the cops being left out of the search for a missing person." She shook her head and kicked a little rock at the stupid car. Should have told him Danny was a thief. "But then he may have insisted on police involvement. Or decided not to be involved in finding him without having him arrested after." She marched about three feet and spun around. Hopefully Bean was just chatting, getting her precious information on her "brother." The asshole loser needed her cash. With any luck he wouldn't give two shits about the why of finding anyone. She looked through the binocs again. Not really his business at all, is it? "PIs would go broke if they only took cases that found out good things about good people." They moved, and she found them in time to see them entering a cottage. No telling what Bean's thoughts were until he let her know. An hour later, they hadn't come out. "Fuck." Sophie slammed the hood down. There's always a plan B. "Too soon for that."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 16

Detective Miller was on the phone, running down what his guys intended to do, but Jim was distracted as Dan slammed a pair of boots into an old duffle bag. The thing was covered in rodeo patches and torn in two places. Dan was making a living here, but it was simple. Cheap. Jim couldn't help but think of Dan as a boy who needed help, running from a past that was not in his control. Living on an as-needed basis. Using what was left of his skills as a rodeo star to be a ranch hand at a cheesy tourist trap. Spooky similar to Jim's running to Vegas and using what was left of his life to start his investigative agency. Dan's face was beet red. The color spread to his neck. "I have to get to Cynthia. If Sophie … " Dan mumbled as his panic peaked. Jim finished up his conversation with Miller. The guy was a good cop with the Las Vegas Police Department. The police worked with PIs most of the time, provided you weren't moving in on a case they were working. And provided you weren't a pain in the ass. Jim usually managed to break both those caveats. "I talked to a detective in Vegas. He's putting out a BOLO for Sophie and sending uniforms to check on your sister right away." Dan had convinced Jim that Sophie was, in fact, playing him. It took all of five minutes. Dan had pictures of both women. His sister looked just like her mother, Lynette, in the nursing home. Plus this client had felt odd to him from the beginning. Clearly, Sophie had lied to him. Used him. Violated him? What if he hadn't just been drunk in Texas? What if she'd drugged him? Hard to wrap your head around being sexually assaulted by a woman. No way. It couldn't be. He'd wanted her. He remembered that much. Remembered the way she felt. Then again, if he was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, he would never sleep with a client. Wouldn't under any circumstance confuse the professional relationship. Fuck. He fought off a wave of bile threatening to bring back his breakfast. And if she had really killed two people associated with Dan ten years ago, there was a bigger problem to deal with than what had happened in that Texas hotel room. "Dan. Slow down. We need to think this through. She hired me to find you. If she was anxious enough to follow me to Texas, there's a good chance she's right on my ass now. Here." Dan made a deep growling sound. "No one's called me Dan since I left Texas and right now all I can hear is Sophie saying my name." He slid a light straw cowboy hat onto his head. The mirror by the door caught his attention. With a quiet hesitation he said, "I'm Daniel Hodge." He grabbed up his bag and shook it to make more room. "I want my name back. Sophie's a ghost I didn't want to tangle with, but she's back. I need this to stop. I've got to make sure my mom and Cynthia are okay." "I get that." Jim had changed his name to run away from something he'd wanted to forget as well. One difference: he hated the sound of his birth name now. No going back. Never wanted it back. Dan paused. "Did you tell her you were coming here?" "In general. But not specifically." Jim caught the shaving bag Dan tossed toward the bed. "Look. Let me drive you to Vegas. We'll meet with Detective Miller. He's a friend of mine. A good cop too. We'll check it all out. We'll find her and settle this mess for good." "I can drive to Vegas." "I know you can. Fact is, if she followed me, she's got a line on you. I want to be able to protect you." "She won't hurt me." Dan put his hands on his hips and looked up at the ceiling. "She wants me. She's had this fantasy of us being married and shit since she was a kid. I told her not to think that way a thousand times. It just got worse. She got more and more needy." "Don't be so sure. I once saw a woman shoot her husband in the foot over a few bucks. Women are not afraid to do some damage. She's been looking for you for a while if she went to this kind of extreme." Jim did the math in his head. She could have left right after their phone call last night. Time was running out if she had followed. "Listen, Dan. I hate that I brought this on you. I do. But it's done. I can help you. I have friends that can help you. The longer we stay here, the more chance she knows I found you. We need the time to get to Vegas before she does. That way, we can catch her before she does any more harm." Dan jerked the zipper shut on the bag. "Fine. But she knows your car. We should take my truck." Made sense. "Okay." "I'm driving." Dan tossed his head to the back of the cabin. "Truck's out back." They exited the cabin: there were three trucks sitting back there. Two were regular, base model, everyday pickups. They walked past those to a small lean-to shed. Inside was a fire engine red eighties Ram with twin pipes that shot up over the back glass and exhausted above the cab. It was jacked higher than a street truck, but not so much the thing would tip over in a tight curve. Chrome everywhere. Pretty thing. Dan walked up and tossed the bag in the back. He got in and started up the truck. It roared like a bear on a mission. "So much for living a quiet life." "A guy's gotta have a hobby." Dan tilted his hat. "Consider it hiding in plain sight." "I'll feel like a sitting duck in this thing. Might as well have a target painted on the tailgate." "If you don't like it, you can ride on your own. I want to be able to do my own thing if I need to." "Disappear again?" "No offense, dude, but if I have to, I will. Right now, I just want to check on my sister." "I need to grab a few things from my car." Jim didn't want the man going to Cynthia's at all. The drive was almost five hours. He suspected they'd get a call from Miller about Cynthia long before they hit the Vegas city limits. And then there was another soul to worry over. Dan had not mentioned her and Jim forgot to have Miller check on Dan's mom in the rest home. "Wait here." Jim scooted back the way he'd come, ducking behind fence rails and water troughs. He eyed the surroundings. Only one good vantage point to spy on the open area and a car similar to the one Sophie had been driving was sitting right there next to an old mailbox. He didn't have his binocs, so he couldn't verify, but his intuition told him it was her. He crawled along parked vehicles to his car. She wouldn't be able to see. He slowly opened the driver's door and pulled out his laptop bag and his small duffle. The rest would have to stay put for a few days. With any luck the ranch owner would have it towed. Impound's a safe place for a car to be. He crawled back to the barn and made his way around the cabin keeping fairly good cover. With any luck, he hadn't been spotted. But everyone knew Jim's luck sucked. "Go."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 17

Miller's call came before the screaming red truck crossed the Nevada border. The detective's voice was shaky. "It's a fucking mess in there, Bean." Not what Jim wanted to hear. He'd been holding out hope that this was all a nightmare. He wasn't sure his reputation could survive getting hired by a killer to help her find the object of her obsession. "Yeah?" "Throat cut. Left to decompose in the tub with some drain cleaner to speed it along. Looks like Sophie has been staying in the vic's house with the body. She's been living in the space with the vic in that tub. Clear evidence she's been eating in the kitchen and she's slept in Cynthia's bed." "Damn." "More than damn. ME's doing his thing to collect her now. He'll probably have her out before you two roll into town, but I think it's best your boy doesn't come here until we've cleared out and there's been some clean up. Not how I'd want to remember my sister. Bring him to the station. I'll meet you there." Now Jim really wished he'd not forgotten to tell Miller to check on Dan's mother. The acid in his stomach churned and his pulse sped up at the thought of something so horrid happening to an elderly woman. She was all alone in that nursing home. "Check his mother. Silver Hills nursing home on North Buffalo." "Ahead of you for once. Saw some paperwork on Cynthia's desk. Already tracked her. She's fine. Got a uniform outside her room." The sense of relief was almost as good as the burning of a good scotch going down this throat. Would not have wanted to deliver that much bad news to Dan. Cynthia's death was going to be hard enough. "Check in when you get in town." "Will do. Thanks, Miller." Jim hung up and glanced over at Dan. His face was tight. Grim. He knew what the call was about. "Why don't you let me drive for a bit? I won't scratch the paint, I promise." Jim looked straight forward, not wanting to see the pain in the kid's eyes. Not wanting to be the guy to deliver the painful blow. Jim glanced his way. Dan was chewing on his upper lip. "She's dead?" No real need to answer. Silence was the coward's way out and Jim was going to take it. Dan screeched to a stop on the shoulder, slammed the truck in to park, and got out. At first he just looked across the cloudless sky with his hands propped on his hips and his shoulders sagged. He closed his eyes tight for a moment, chin trembling, and then he took in a long breath. Tears escaped the outer corners of his eyes. He made no move to rub them away. Jim felt the anger and grief roll off Dan like steam as he lumbered a hundred yards or so down the shoulder of the highway. He spun and paced back, his boots scuffing the asphalt at a military pace. He turned again and stopped with his back turned. His shoulders shook. Jim stood numb-footed next to the truck. Staying impartial over this case was no longer possible. Sophie had made sure of that. He internally raged at the thought of his night with her, wishing she was within reach so he could choke the life from her. Sooner or later his night with her would come out. He'd have to talk to Miller or someone about it. Maybe. If she'd drugged him and used him as a distraction from the case, or as a ploy to keep him off her track. Using his self-doubt and self-blame to keep him from seeing behind her deadly mask. He didn't know Cynthia or Dan, but their lives were forever changed by Jim's fuck up. Vetting customers who paid cash wasn't something he always did. He'd only run checks on the guys who wanted him to work on credit. That would change. Jim made his way to the front of the truck. Dan paced down the road and back once more. He used his sleeve to clean his face and sniffed as he met up with Jim and leaned against the hood as well, both facing south, toward Vegas. "I'm sorry, Dan." "How?" "You'll get the details …" "How?" He deserved to know. "Throat cut." Dan's eyelids clinched shut again. Jim chose to leave the rest of the details for Miller to pass on. "Your mother's fine. They have a uniform outside her room to make sure she stays that way." Dan nodded again. "Now what?" "We go see Miller. They'll probably want to put you and your mom in some sort of protective custody while they trace Sophie." Dan kept looking straight ahead, as if looking at Jim—at anyone—would cause him to break. "Miller says the FBI is looking for Sophie as well. Got a flag when he ran her name. Not really a surprise, given the lengths she went to. She may have killed more than just those two girls you suspected." One small nod. "Cynthia's dead. I can't believe it. I should have figured Sophie would use my family to get to me." "No way you could know she'd go this far. Blaming yourself is counterproductive at this point. She's out there. We need to help the cops help you." Dan stared down the perpetual white line toward Vegas. "Let me drive you in. You relax. Think of anything you might be able to give the police that will help catch her." Jim thought the man would argue. His body was stiff and his face tight, defensive. "What's she like now?" His voice cracked slightly. "Sophie?" "Yeah." He looked at Jim, his eyes etched with grief. "When she hired me, she was in a suit. Direct. Gave me cash. Not a lot of emotion. Just how I like my clients." He neglected to mention how much that changed the next time he'd seen her. "I could rip that crazy daughter-of-a-boondock-whore to shreds with my bare hands. No remorse. No guilt." "I'm no doctor, but I'm certain that's a damn normal reaction to the situation. We could make it a party." "Are they going to find her?" "Yeah. If LVPD doesn't, I will. That's what I do."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 18

Several cop cars and a big van sat outside Cynthia Hodge's shitty little house as Sophie cruised by acting like a lookie-loo neighbor. Her scalp itched in the short blond wig, and the stupid dog in the back of the van wouldn't quit whining, but she would have to make do until she figured the lay of the land. Two men in street clothes with badges at their waists stood out front talking with a uniformed cop. Slacks and dress shirts meant those were the guys in charge. A block away, she parked and got the dog out. The scruffy-looking mutt had been tied up outside a roadside restaurant where she had stopped to pee on the road back from Utah. Seeing the squeaky little thing had given her an idea. On the way out, he was still there, and still eager for attention. Sophie baby talked as she slipped his leash off the post and absconded with the dog. Now he was happy as pie to be walking along beside her. A grand adventure, it seemed. They rounded the corner and walked causally down the street, directly across from the house with the dead body inside. Cynthia's house. Sophie paused as the pup peed on a street sign and the big van pulled away. Likely the ME picking up her mess. So it wasn't there any longer. Sophie cursed herself for not taking a photo or even a peek at the deterioration the drain cleaner caused before leaving the house. The decay would have been far from finished, but the melted patterns of her flesh would have been cool as hell. No matter. She got a good look at the guy in the front yard. Men in charge were always easy to pick out. With cops it was even easier. They all felt they were better, special. This one oozed that hubris as others approached for instructions, information. Within a few seconds, he glanced at her. She gave him an uneasy smile and worried eye contact for long enough to get his attention, no more. The actions said she was just a curious neighbor. He gave her a curt nod. Perfect. No further interaction was needed and she urged the dog to abandon whatever smell had him so intrigued and move on. It had not been soon enough. Next thing she knew a uniform was hurrying up the street after her. "Ma'am … Ma'am." She stopped as he closed in. Without fear, the mutt jumped on his pants legs, wiggling his tail, begging for attention. She gave the officer a big smile. No need to make an attempt to remove the distraction. "I'm …" "Going to ask me if I know what happened at that house, right?" He returned her pleasantry with his own smile. Guy needed dental work. Shouldn't the state have a plan for that or something? She almost asked but he spoke first. "Do you know Cynthia Hodge?" Hearing her name almost made Sophie cringe. That person was gone. But she kept the fake smile over her face. She'd used the same plastic mask to cover her emotions for years and it hadn't failed to fool yet. "No. Sorry. I'm house sitting a block away." She pointed over her shoulder to indicate a vague direction. "I've only been in the neighborhood since yesterday." The mutt was still jumping, whining for attention. The officer relented and bent down to give him a friendly little head rub. Frumpy brown hair flopped with the motion. "Cute dog. What's his name?" Her mind was suddenly blank. Sophie had never had a pet. She'd never been allowed one when she was younger and never wanted the stinking things around since she could make that kind of decision on her own. An arbitrary pet name shouldn't be so hard to conjure. "Carl." "Carl?" That was dumb. But it was the best thing she had. She shrugged. "Like I said, house sitting. He's not mine." "So, I guess that means you didn't notice anything unusual in the last couple days?" "I wouldn't know unusual for this place. I live near the Strip. Not much around here would make it high on the unusual scale for me." "Okay. Thanks." He handed her a card. She tilted her head to indicate the crime-scene-tape-encased yard. "What's the detective's name? The one in the blue shirt." "Miller, ma'am." Miller was now getting in a navy blue Charger, unmarked. She memorized the plate. "Would you prefer to talk to him?" "Oh no. I really can't help you." She smiled at him and pulled the dog away. "He just looked familiar." She walked off, wondering at what pace one walks a creature that wants to stop and smell everything. They're going to figure it out this time. You've left a mess, girl. All kinds of trace evidence in there. "Shut up. I cleaned up good before leaving. Always do. Oxy bleach and a good wet nap makes short work of a room. No prints will be in there." She turned the corner and circled around back to the main drag. Now she had two separate people to follow. If Bean brought Danny back to Vegas so that cop could put him in a safe house, Sophie would find him. Not exactly plan A. I told you that lie was too weak for a paid investigator. "The man was cheap and easy. His dead eyes said so. I always knew the motive was the weak part of the PI plan. No matter what I said, there was a chance he'd figure it out before delivering my Danny. But it worked out, didn't it?" Not a sound from inside her head. "Don't like it when I'm right, do you? Bitch." She pushed on her temple. At all the nagging and hate. I am what you are. Who you are. You can pretend all you want. But … Loser. Fat. Ugly. Stupid … Hate. Hate. Hate. She rounded the corner with the pup in tow and found the car down the street. No one behind her, no one around the car. She looked down at the dog. "Plan B is really not that bad." He wagged his curled tail at her. His little eyes were so cheerful and he seemed excited to be on the adventure. She lifted him back into the car. You're not going to bring that mangy animal with us, are you? "No mange on this guy. Smells like flowers, means he's been groomed. So shut the fuck up." Sophie drove off without a look back. All she had to do was figure out what they'd done with Danny. After driving a few blocks north, she pulled into a random parking lot behind a closed tire center. She searched her pack for Cynthia's cell phone. The dog jumped to the passenger seat and licked her hand as she fumbled. She'd have to stop and get him something to eat on the way home. Tomorrow she'd find the dang safe house. Wouldn't be a problem at all, but there were so many players to follow. Following was her strong suit, not finding. That's why she'd needed Bean. Now she would follow him or that detective or … "Silver Hills. How can I help you?" "Yes. I'm looking for my aunt Lynette. Lynette Hodge. Is she available to chat?" "I'll connect the room." It was likely both Cynthia's phone and the nursing home's phones were being monitored. But that was okay. For now. The line clicked and then rang in the old lady's room. And rang. Seven. Eight. She hung up the cell phone and then turned off the power in case the police could trace the location. The TV shows said they could. Her research was a little wishy-washy. No matter. Better safe than sorry. Time to get rid of the thing. She tossed it as hard as she could toward a dumpster. It bounced off the side and broke. Fingerprints! Sophie squeezed the steering wheel. "I know. Damn it," she growled at herself in the rearview mirror, then got out and stomped over to the bin. The stink reminded her of a hot South Dallas Friday night. Walking the streets, picking pockets and hooking. She felt no shame in the memory, just a satisfaction. That shit had been the foundation of everything she'd built for herself, and for Danny, the beginning of the journey, the first brick in her financial house. She found the three biggest pieces of the shattered glass and plastic. She dumped a glob of hand sanitizer on the tail of her shirt and used that to rub the phone parts down as best she could, taking extra time around the mouth and ear sections to kill off or remove any DNA. The she tossed them off into different directions. "All clean." What would you do without me? "Celebrate." She got back behind the wheel of the rental and drove southeast. The pup eased into her lap. Thing couldn't weigh six pounds and she found herself giving in to the urge to rub his head. "We'd have a big old party to dance the night away in honor of her demise. Wouldn't we?" she said in baby talk to the pup. Don't let it touch you like that. It's probably got fleas. Sophie sighed. Carl turned his little head as if to empathize. The sun was setting in the rearview. She lit her first cig of the day. The surge of nicotine would clear her mind. Yes. The PI had complicated things. But he was still useful. Until he is … expendable. She blew out a puff of smoke, followed its path to the cracked passenger side window. The reflection of her face was clouded in the smoke, making her look young. "Everyone's expendable."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 19

Detective Miller led Jim and Dan past the front desk at the Boulder Area Command Center where a young officer awkwardly avoided eye contact with Dan. Hard to deal with people in pain when you first start this type of work. Kid must be straight out of the academy. Didn't take long to realize that most civilians who come through the door of a stationhouse were suffering or in big trouble. The vics may have suffered everything from loss of a loved one to loss of property. Hurt and violation existed somewhere along a sliding scale that ranged from irritation to devastation. It all showed in the eyes. The conference room came to an immediate hush as the door swept open and Miller led the young man in. A blown up copy of Cynthia's driver's license was pinned on the wall. A fact sheet with her vital info was tacked below it. Fortunately, no crime scene photos were pasted up. Yet. "I'm sorry for your loss." Miller pulled out a chair facing the mirrored wall and set down a bottle of water. Dan took it. As usual, Jim opted to stand with his back against the wall, but this time he chose a spot close to Dan. "I have coffee if you want it. The Command Center has the best in Vegas." Miller slid his fingers around his waistband to straighten his tucked shirt. Jim had seen him do it a thousand times. As if he needed to pull his pants up, but he didn't. The man was feeling for his gun belt, the one he no longer wore since being promoted to detective. Jim figured no matter how long the detective had been out of a patrolman's uniform, he wasn't used to missing the weight of a gear belt. "Not now." Dan managed a sip from the bottle. "The medical examiner is with your sister. We should have a better idea of time of death when he's finished. But the crime scene tells a pretty clear story." Miller looked back to Jim. Jim would give his left nut to shield Dan from this conversation. Miller put his hand on the back of Dan's chair. "Looks like she was planning to go to a convention. It came up pretty last minute, according to her boss. He saw her Wednesday." "She travels to train people at other companies all the time. Accounting software stuff." Dan picked at a bit of the water bottle label, peeling it away from the glue line that held the cellophane wrapper around the plastic. He didn't make eye contact with anyone in the room. "That's what he said. From her phone records, we can see she called a cab company. Then an hour or so later, Mr. Bean was called. Last we have on her is that. No credit card usage. Nothing." Miller paused. "Cab company sent out a driver named Lulu Strong. Said she was closest to the address. Lulu only worked for them for about four weeks." Miller pulled a page from a dark green folder. The contents were already a good inch think. The paper was a fuzzy copy of a Nevada driver's license. "You recognize her?" Jim sure did. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, she was wearing a headband, and she had a bad makeup job going, but that was Sophie. "Sophie Ryan Evers." Dan's hands trembled as he pulled more of the label away. Miller twisted back to address Jim. "This the girl who told you she was Cynthia Hodge?" "It is." Jim's skin itched with the need for another shower. Images of the night in his Texas hotel room played in his head like a bad music video. One of those catchy songs he didn't like and couldn't shake from his mind. Thankfully, the memories were vague. He wished them gone. But, wishes got only empty pockets and headaches. Nothing more. "How do you know her?" Dan huffed out a tired laugh. "She moved in next door when I was about fourteen. Lived with a foster family. Not a good one. Her real dad had killed himself. Her mother left her in a department store when she was a toddler." He pushed away from the table and leaned back in his chair. Crossed his arms. "I felt bad for her. So I hung out with her some." "How old was she?" Miller took notes on a fancy electronic tablet. No more paper for the Vegas police. "About nine or ten. I don't remember exactly. Her foster mom was a bitch. The dad was a drunk. I think he was abusing her, but she never would talk about it. Got real mad if I even tried to ask about home, you know? It didn't take long for her to get real attached to me. I knew it. But like I said, I thought the kid needed a friend. My mom would let her come to dinner and stuff, you know?" "Sounds like a nice thing to do." "It was. Until I hit high school and wanted to date and shit." Dan got up from the table and paced to the far corner. "Sophie didn't like that at all. She got mad if she found out I was talking to a girl. I tried to explain that she was too young. That she and I were just friends." "Did she get violent?" "With me?" Dan shook his head. "With the girls you were talking to?" "She threatened me and them, but I never believed she'd act on it. I mean, she was like twelve years old. Even with all that, I would still hang out with her some. But she'd gotten mean by the time she was sixteen or seventeen." "Mean?" "You know, liked to hassle cashiers in the super-mart or rush the old lady in front of her at Mickey D's. Sophie was always bitching about the kids at her middle school, and she cursed way too much. Once, she told me she wanted to chop the popular girls' hair off or cut up their faces so they wouldn't be so pretty and powerful anymore." He shook his head and then pointed a finger at Miller. "And she really hated the boys in her class. I think she got suspended once for beating up one kid. Hit him in the head with a rock in the parking lot." Dan picked up the bottle as if to drink, then set it back down. "She'd gotten to be a real manipulator too. The chick could talk my mom out of cash. She easily got out of trouble with the teachers. I think she even talked her way out of getting arrested for borrowing a car once. And her grades were excellent." Dan moved again. Just a few paces, as if to get away from the things he was saying. Not enough space in the conference room to walk away from those memories. "She liked classical music when the rest of us were into country. Could have been opera too. It sounded so dark and depressing to me. She dressed like the girls down at the private school. In dark blue uniform-looking stuff. None of it looked good on her. It was as if she was trying to hide herself." "You two ever in the same school at the same time?" "No. I was off in college by the time she hit high school. Thank god." He took his hat off and laid it carefully crown-side down on the table. Rubbed his head. "Next time she found me was a couple years later at a rodeo. I had dropped out of college cuz I was making serious cash on the rodeo circuit. Saddle bronc. That's when I was seeing Beth." "You made enough to quit school?" Miller offered him a cigarette. Dan declined the smoke. "That's what I thought at the time." Went back to his stream of consciousness as if he'd forget if he stopped. "Sophie came out of nowhere. Damn, she looked great. Dressed to kill in tight jeans and boots, all grown up. Cowboy's dream. Even sounded normal for a short time. Talking about how well she was doing, and all. I was happy for her. Till she asked about my girlfriends." He rubbed his eyes. "I said I was seeing someone. Sophie went from zero to bitch in two point five seconds. Screaming and crying, accused me of cheating on her. Said she had been saving herself for me. I yelled back. Said some mean things I shouldn't have but I was drinking a lot back then. She put a chokehold on me that night. It was crazy." "You're a lot bigger than she is." "I know. Bitch wrestled me to the ground with some kind of twisting move that damned near broke my wrist." A bead of sweat rolled down Dan's cheek. His hands were shaking again. Miller didn't interrupt him. "Then she just froze in place for a minute. Staring into my eyes. I swear I could feel her anger. After a few seconds, she let me go. Started to cry. I was put on my ass in a parking lot by a little woman. I should have been embarrassed. All I could think of was that I'd never seen her cry. Even when stuff was bad when she was a kid—and I mean really bad—at the old house, she just got quiet. Mad. Never sad. She got up, started talking to herself. But it was one-sided like she was talking to someone else. Freaky. And then she walked away." Miller stopped writing and looked up at him. "What happened to Beth?" "The next day she didn't show up to see my rides. She didn't return my calls. I had to go to Austin for a few rodeos, was gone a couple weeks. When I came back, no one knew where she was. She'd disappeared." "Did you suspect Sophie?" "I thought Sophie had gone and found Beth and scared her off me. I didn't think anything too bad right off the bat. But after Amanda Pen, well, I tried to tell the cops then that Sophie had to have been involved." "Amanda Pen?" "Yeah. Months after the Beth thing. I was, well … I was with Amanda in the bed of my truck." Miller nodded his understanding. "I look up and there Sophie was, standing beside the truck. Watching me and Amanda with that same freaked out look in her eyes. Scared the shit out of Amanda, and me. I jumped up and tried to talk but she only said one thing and then walked away." "She threaten you two?" "No. She asked why. I didn't answer. Had no clue how to. Wasn't sure what the why was for, exactly. Why was I living my life? Why was I getting some tail from a chick in the parking lot? I figured silence was the better part of valor at the moment. I didn't want to say anything to piss her off again. She walked away muttering about loyalty." Dan slammed himself back into his chair and took a long drink. "Amanda scurried out of there. She was just a buckle bunny. No one I was dating or anything." Miller half smiled. "I assume that's a cowboy groupie. Around here"—he nodded toward the door—"we call them badge bunnies." "Yes, sir." A smirk crossed his lips. "Cowboys and cops." He shrugged. "Anyway, three days later, Amanda was found outside a different bar with her throat slit. The cops came to me. I told them about Sophie and about Beth. She was still missing, as far as I knew. They questioned me. Not as nice as all this either." He motioned to the room. "But I had a group of guys I'd spent that night with on the road to Austin. No way I could have done it." "It was about two weeks later that Beth's body turned up in the woods. Throat cut, just like Amanda. And the cops came back. But again, they couldn't pin it on her. They said they found Sophie in Dallas and she was at work during the time of both murders. Not that I think they tried that hard to prove that fact. They didn't believe she could do that." Miller closed his book. "Hard to picture an attractive female cutting someone's throat. Investigators are no exception. Today, I believe she's our guy." Jim decided it was time his opinion was heard. Asked for or not. "I think this bitch is a lunatic. I have no doubt she'd take a knife to every one of us in this room." Why she hadn't knifed him in his hotel room was another question. Likely, because he hadn't found Dan yet. All he could think at the moment was that he was responsible for leading that wolf right to the sheep. The sheep who'd done a fine job of blending in and hiding away until Jim Bean came to town. Jim had no option but to help this kid. "We have your mother in a safe house with medical care and two uniforms on guard. I'll take you there." Dan stood. "Can I see Cynthia?" "Not yet." Miller looked him in the eye. "And when the medical examiner releases her, you shouldn't. Have her sent to the funeral home. See her after that." Dan's eyes closed. His frame seemed to shrink a full two inches. Miller put his hand on the man's shoulder. "I'm sorry." Not much to say that would mean a hill of cat's asses to the guy at this point. "Shit like this shouldn't happen." Dan gave the slightest nod to Miller's statement. "I'd like to go with him." Jim spoke up knowing eventually Dan would hear or read about the drain cleaner and the shape of his sister's remains. But he'd keep Dan from driving straight to the ME's office to see Cynthia. "Not necessary. We've got it covered. It is a police matter now, Bean." "I brought this on him." "And we'll take it from here." Jim didn't want to make a scene when the kid was suffering, but he could help stop Sophie. "I need this, Miller." "I can't let a civi in on a homicide investigation. You know better than that." Dan chimed in. "I'd just as soon have him around." "It's against policy." Miller gathered his folder and headed for the door. "Do I have a right to hire my own security?" Miller's sigh was probably picked up on the recording. He put his back to the door and gave Bean a fuck you look. "Yes." Dan looked back to Jim. Why he wanted a washed-up PI's protection over the police's, Jim would have to puzzle out later. "How much did she pay you?" Not a conversation Jim wanted to have at the moment. Stupid facts like that eat away at a man. Like when his client wanted to know how many times their spouse cheated or what the girl's name was. The guy cheated. Move on. "I mean, you're still under some type of financial agreement with her, right?" "She gave me a substantial retainer." "Any of that left?" "A good deal." Dan nodded. "Then I would like to hire you, Mr. Bean. Using the balance of that retainer." That was a great way to spend the money. Better than Jim blowing it at the blackjack table. Dan looked at Miller. "As my protection and an extra investigator." "Dandy," Miller growled and glared at Jim. "When you stick your nose in my cases, Bean, people tend to get hurt and/or killed. You live in a bubble of bad luck and misery. Don't bring that into this situation." Jim wasn't sure how to break it to him, but there was no way to turn that shit off.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 20

"You find the whack-jobs like no one else, Bean." Ely tapped away on one of his many keyboards. Jim rubbed his eyes so hard he saw spots. It was late. He was beat, the long drive with the distraught young man then the interrogations, and he was done for. From Jim's angle the monitor Ely was reading looked like a wave of green static. The events of the past few days replayed, highlighting his inadequacies and his fears on one short mental film. Trusting the wrong person. No. The wrong woman. He'd been living loose and reckless for years. Since college when he lost everything. Lost it all because a woman lied. His life altered, distorted by a false accusation. He'd quit really caring about people. Working on autopilot. Job to job. Bottle to bottle. Culminating in dead bodies because he was more interested in cash than seeing Sophie's intentions as she sat across that table from him and lied. Lied her ass off. There was a time he'd have read that like yesterday's comics. Known her story before finishing the headline. "I do." He lifted his gaze to Ely. "A damned curse." "Suppose you were marked by banshees at birth?" He said it in a hushed tone. "Banshees?" "I don't know. Whatever creature crawls into children's beds and marks them so the dark and devious are called to them." He looked up from the screen. "I'll look it up later. Know I read it somewhere." "Don't bother. I don't want to know that shit. I want to know where to find Sophie Evers." Annie wrapped around his legs and gave him a little half mew. He reached down and pulled her up so she could prop on his shoulder. Her approving purr vibrated against Jim's collarbone. "Not sure why she still likes you. Was here more than she was at home this week." At least the cat loved him no matter what. Well, as long as there was plenty of food around. "Absence makes the cat grow fonder?" "I guess, man," Ely said. The screen changed from the green mess of characters to a browser Jim was more familiar with. "Here we go." Jim wiggled his rolling chair a little closer. "Sophie Ryan Evers. Born in Grapevine, Texas. Father died of drug overdose. Location of mother, a Belinda Evers, is unknown. Sophie entered the foster system at fourteen months old." Jim leaned over the records. "Aren't most babies readily adoptable?" "She had some signs of fetal drug syndrome. Probably got her looked over." "Doesn't have any retardation or signs of birth defects now." Drug dependency might explain some of her neuroses. Dan hadn't mentioned her ever doing any drugs. If she was getting away with murder, Jim suspected she was clean. Ely clicked away. "Her foster records are going to be harder to get." "Social services?" "Yep." Jim scratched under Annie's chin. "Arrest records?" "Nope." "Try Lulu Strong. She used that alias here." He clacked away. A different page opened on the monitor. A Nevada license came up. Same as the one Miller had. Cab company registration. Address listed as the Crabtree Hotel, south Vegas. Not a nice place. Jim paced to the kitchen counter. Annie leapt off his shoulder. "Wait a second." Ely typed a little more. "Found something on Lulu." An arrest record came up. The picture was a dirty young black woman. A mug shot after a bad night. Her right eye was swollen and red. "Prostitution?" Jim asked. Ely nodded. "And drug charges." "My guess is Miss Lulu came to a bad end." "If so, that makes four." As Ely stood and stretched, about fifty bones cracked. The skeletal sound made Jim shiver. Ely had lived through a nightmare as a POW in Nam. The man had seen everything and done even more. It showed in his leathered face and his lanky frame. A very slight limp on his left leg was the only hint of any disability. Didn't slow him down or make him any less lethal. Jim would take him as a second in any situation. "Correction: four that we know of. She's got a taste, Bean. Sounds like Sophie's drug of choice is violence." "Not good." Jim's phone chirped in his pocket. He answered. "Miller, was about to call you." "Yeah?" "Dan settled?" "Yes. His mom is a hoot. But that's not why I called." There was a moment of background noise. Jim chose to take the opportunity to give his info first. "The identity Sophie used was a pro with an arrest record." "We got that too. Sent someone to see if any of the other girls knew this Lulu or has seen her. I'm hoping she was paid to leave and not killed." "Not likely." "Yeah. I got a call from a Dallas FBI field office. An Agent Webb saw our BOLO. They will be here by eleven tonight. Wants a one-on-one with you and Dan while it's fresh." "What's the FBI want with this?" "Says there's more to the case. I'll bring them to the house." "Great." "I'll probably lose control of the situation at some point if this girl's got an open federal jacket." "Got it." Jim did. And that made the prospect of his staying involved rather slim. The FBI didn't take to PIs all that well. Or maybe it was just him.

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 21

Jim approached the address of the safe house. It sat one lot off to the right of a tight cul-de-sac. New neighborhood. The kind with the low price points for first-time buyers. Cheaply made and so much alike it was hard to distinguish one from another. The development was far enough north to keep the price at casino worker level and still close enough to work on the Strip. One unmarked car sat on the left side of the double drive, a black Crown Vic. Not too obvious, but enough that this smart-assed chick would see it as a cop car right off the bat. Jim would have been happier if the place was a ranch. Two floors divided the area and made covering it harder. But it had a nice front porch and fake grass. Almost-middle-class quaint. A plainclothes sat on the porch swing smoking. He sized up Jim's car as he approached. Jim swung through the cul de sac and parked past the house in front of the neighbor's. Ely's car was a gold, dull, no badges, late model whatever sedan. Easy to miss. Hard to remember. The officer stood as Jim got out. He relaxed when Jim waved. Most officers had seen him on stakeouts or around the courthouse. PIs were not always the cop's favorite—Jim included—because most of their work came from defense attorneys. Prosecutors had the entire police force to gather evidence for a case. The defense needed its own investigative team. Often Jim was it … if the case was being handled by a low-rent attorney with a tight budget. Inside the house was as ordinary as the out. He scanned the layout as he followed the officer. A short hall led back to a larger-than- expected living area, open concept. He could see all the way from the front door to the kitchen and the back door. Sliding glass. Didn't care for that. "Well. If it ain't the reporter again. You need a close up of me for your story?" Lynette was in the same rolling chair from the nursing home. Here she looked younger. The non-florescent light gave her back twenty years. Jim now figured her for early sixties. Too young for this kind of memory loss. Not remembering this day will be good for her. Small favors. Her fist balled up and under her chin, smiling big and pretty, ready for a portrait. "How are you, Mrs. Hodge?" "Fine as pie. My baby boy's here. He got us this swanky room for my birthday. Whatcha think about it?" "It's a great spot for a birthday. It today?" "Nope, tomorrow. He's bringing cake, you know?" "And a clown face." Dan came in. He shook Jim's hand and leaned close. "She knows nothing." No mention of Cynthia. Got it. Her medical assistant was the big guy from the home. The one she was yelling at the end of Jim's visit. He brought her a mug. "Lynnette, don't spill this one." She giggled. "I will if I want, Steven, and you'll bring me another then too." "I should go right on home and leave you to all this." He turned to Jim. "Not sure what I signed up for here. She's even more of a smart ass than usual. All excited to be out." He stuck a meaty palm out. "Steven." Lynette barked at him. "And hang up my papers." Her chair rolled like she was on the ice rink as she crossed the tile floor. She skidded her feet to stop just short of the wall by the back sliding glass window. She snatched a couple of the articles out of an open box on the floor. The leather furniture sat empty and uninviting around the fireplace. The tiles inside it were pristine ivory, the logs old and dry. That fireplace had never seen a spark. Like a show house full of rented furniture, cold and stiff. It reeked of Rental World. Steven didn't seem worried. "When I can quit making you tea over and over again, I can do that. Sit still and drink that, old woman." Dan chuckled. "They really do love one another." He patted Steven on the back as Lynette Hodge let out an indignant grunt. "Always felt good knowing you were there." He looked down and then back up to Jim. "But to know Sophie was in her room makes me sick." "I've been with Lynette for a while now. Nothing's happening to her with me around." This was Jim's chance to ask some questions before the Feds showed. He pulled Steven toward the kitchen. Dan followed. Lynnette was busy sipping her tea and looking about the window. Jim glanced over to see that it was locked and barred along the bottom. "Did you see Sophie when she was in Lynette's room?" "I see everyone that comes into any of my patients' rooms, if I'm on my shift. Can't vouch for the others. Some don't care so much. Usually we see family, a few old friends, sometimes a pastor. I recognize most of Ms. Lynette's visitors. I knew there was a stranger there so, like I'm supposed to, I checked with the front desk. They said she was okay. Nothing looked threatening. A pretty woman making one of my patients laugh and smile generally is no concern. I kept to my rounds." No help. "So you didn't talk to Sophie Evers?" "No, sir." "Steven." The distress in Lynette's voice made all three men turn to her. She was red-faced as she looked down into her tea-soaked lap. "Good, glorious Lord Jesus. This is why I give you lukewarm tea." Steven fussed with her skirt. Dan looked on, dark circles becoming evident under weighted lids. Jim made a quick assessment of the rest of the first-level floor plan. Front and back door only. A stairway was evident from the back of the kitchen area. He followed the hall back to the front door. Master bedroom on the left. Master bath, one small window. Bedroom was smallish, two windows overlooked the side yard. The hair on his arms twitched with minor air movement and he smelled the hint of dime store cologne as someone came into the room. He felt no threat. No reason to look away from his inspection of the latches. "Upstairs are locked too. I checked. There's an officer up there sleeping." "The night guy?" "Girl." Dan had his hands buried in his pockets. "I want a gun." "What for?" "So I can protect my mom." Jim hated guns. Never carried one. "Guns get people dead." "Exactly." He huffed. "Usually it's not the right people who get dead, Dan." He knew that for a fact. "You have two uniforms and me. Lynette will be safe until we find Sophie." "What the hell am I supposed to do?" "Relax. Spend some time with your mom. Read." "Read?" "Yeah. There were some classics on that bookcase. Try The Great Gatsby." "You're serious?" Dan held his gaze. He was trying to read Jim's face. "Hated that book." Jim smiled. "Me too."

19 Souls

J. D. Allen

Chapter 22

Miller showed first. It was almost nine o'clock. Steven had taken Lynette to get her settled in bed for the night. Miller tossed a folder onto the kitchen table. A Lady Fed in a black suit marched in, another agent behind her. The folder she carried was several inches thicker than Miller's. The second suit stood by the glass door. The agent in charge. Feds seemed to move around the world according to their pecking order. Often it looked like a pack of dogs following an alpha. They all looked very unhappy to be there, no matter where they fell on the FBI food chain. Sometimes Jim was glad his path into the FBI Academy had been blown to pieces back in college. Sometimes. The lady agent's suit was impeccable but not highly expensive. Her shoes more serviceable than dressy. Her weapons were hard to spot at first but he noted at least two. She didn't smile as she made her way to the head of the table. She obviously assumed she would be taking the lead. Miller stood. "I'm Detective Miller. We met …" "On the Porter case two years ago." She gave him a curt nod. "Right." Miller hadn't extended his hand to shake but Jim got the feeling that if Miller had put his hand out there, she'd have left him hanging. Her gaze snapped to Jim. "You the PI Sophie Evers hired?" She opened the folder, flipped a couple of pages over, and scanned. "Jim Bean." He said it sharply. Didn't want her to think he was intimated by the suits or the badges. He'd been in court on many occasions and had to face off with some pretty hefty characters. An FBI agent didn't faze him. Her brow pinched as she looked back down and read a few more lines. "Okay." She glanced at him and back to the page. Obliviously it was his paper. His jacket. "Jim Bean it is then." Jim's grip tightened, he eased his balled fists behind his back. Why would she, the FBI, have information about his history, the changing of his name? It'd been a straight legal change. His records were supposedly expunged when all the charges were dropped. But it appeared she knew something anyway. And why would they need that kind of info on this case? He was not the target of this investigation. The room got a little warmer. What the hell else did she have in that fat folder? She slid into the chair at the head of the table. "Special Agent Ava Webb." With no foreplay she started sliding pictures of dead men toward Dan. He cringed. Miller pulled the pics away from Dan. "Who are these men?" The gnarled look on Miller's face said he was biting his damned lip to keep from telling this woman where to shove those photos. She should have brought this to his attention first. Discussed it before shocking a witness. "When you put the BOLO out on Sophie Evers it triggered a case I've been working in Texas for years. These three men were drug dealers and/or pimps in South Dallas. All were killed within a three-month period. All had their throats cut. The scenes were messy. No drugs, money, or weapons left behind so we suspect the murders were a means to robbery." She looked down. "All had had intercourse just before dying. But there were no viable DNA traces left behind. They'd been crudely cleaned with bleach spray. Likely she slept with them to get their confidence and killed them just before—" "I'm sorry, ma'am." Danny took his dirty cowboy hat off and set it upside down on the table beside the pictures. It did a nice job of blocking the view of the mutilated bodies. "But what's this got to do with my sister?" "Twisted trail but hang with me." She looked at Miller. "I do have a point." "Make it." Miller's face was easing up. She turned her attention back to Dan Hodge. Looked him straight in the eye with the authoritative gaze of a woman in charge. She held his gaze, not saying a word, until his head tilted just enough to give the impression he was asking for more info. She knew the moment he was ready to listen. Agent Webb was good. She tapped the third photo in the row. "A video surveillance camera near the back on this one's apartment caught a woman leaving the building with a large duffle bag and a bad disguise. Not enough for an identification in the tape." She thumbed through the file and supplied the picture. Dan eyed it carefully. "Two more dealers turned up about a month later. These guys weren't pimping. All they did was sell cocaine. The area was a little higher rent. And the victim's both had slit throats. This time, the wounds were much cleaner. The crime scenes were cleaner. Showed fewer signs of struggle. Each was robbed blind. One of them was reported by one of his drug runners. Dumb girl called it in because she said the guy was holding a thousand dollars of hers and she wanted it back." Dan's face was white as the Formica tabletop. "Are you suggesting Sophie did all this?" "This time we caught a break and a witness saw the woman in that picture"—she tossed out the BOLO—"with one of the dealers the night before making a buy." Dan shook his head. "That's her, but, Sophie buying drugs?" "I don't think she was using the drugs, Mr. Hodge. The most successful and hard-to-catch dealers never do. We think Sophie was treating the pimps and dealers as a means to make a living. Kill off the scum and take their cash and valuables." She pulled out a mug shot of Sophie. "She was arrested in Arlington, Texas, with a couple ecstasy tablets. She gave a fake name. Had a fake ID. It was a misdemeanor because she only had the pills and a syringe on her and it was her first offense. She walked after giving up the name of her supplier." Agent Webb pulled the pictures back into the folder and tucked them away. "My guess was she took the cash off these guys, sold the drugs and guns. My math says she was making a dang good living. Next I could find, she was spotted in the swanky North Dallas area. High-end dance bars selling shit to the rich and spoiled." Webb ran her right hand over her hair to make sure it was in place. "Looked like she was reinvesting, moving up to bigger targets with bigger wallets and bigger stashes. We think Sophie has been saving all her money. I have witnesses who put this woman in those bars. Most didn't recall what name she was using. All this time we didn't know her name." She looked at Miller. "Your BOLO told us who she was." She started to pull out two more photos, but shoved them back in the folder after glancing at Dan's white face. "There were two more bodies. Women. Young, pretty girls out behind the bars. No signs of a struggle at all. Not dealers, just girls out for a night at the clubs. Lack of a struggle indicates both were willing to let her get close. The killings were very personal." She straightened the folder and glanced coolly around the room, making eye contact with each person … except her silently looming partner. "Nine murders we think she's responsible for. Probably more." "A serial killer." Miller whistled. "Not really a classic serial because her MO has changed. She has the timing of a serial, lots of time in between, but she's all over the place. No standard method other than the slashed throats. All these men and women were killed like it was Sophie's nine-to-five job. Nothing special. She started with street scum, but then the vics got more respectable, the take larger, and the kills cleaner." Dan's hands were shaking like he was a druggie in rehab. Jim pushed back the bile threatening to make him puke. Sophie had used him. Not only to find Dan either. If she'd drugged him, why hadn't she killed him like the others? What was she playing at? Jim eased into the seat on the far side of Dan. He tried to block the memories of her and that night from his head, pretend nothing had happened. If he ignored it long enough, he would no longer feel so violated. Dan shook his head. "Twelve," he whispered. "Cuz I'm sure she killed two girls I was with, Beth and Amanda. And Cynthia." He looked up at the woman. A single tear rolled from his eye. "I tried to say so back then. No one would listen." Agent Webb put her hand over his where he was picking at his thumbnail. "I'm listening."