Retribution Falls

Thirty-Two

‘Out, you.’

Frey looked up, and saw a thickset, bald man with a bushy black beard on the other side of the bars. ‘You mean me?’

‘You’re the cap’n, ain’t ya?’

He glanced around at his crew, trying to decide whether there was any advantage in protesting. All six of them had been put in the same cell on the Delirium Trigger’s brig. There were five cells in all, each capable of holding ten men. The walls were metal, and the lights were weak. The smell of oil was in the air, and the sound of clanking machinery and distant engines echoed in the hollow spaces.

Silo met his eyes with a customarily inscrutable gaze. Malvery just shrugged.

‘I’m the captain,’ Frey said at length.

‘Cap’n Dracken wants to see you,’ the bald man informed him.

The gaoler unlocked the door and pushed it open, waving a shotgun to deter any attempts at a breakout. Frey walked through, and the door clanged shut behind him.

‘Hey,’ said Malvery. ‘While you’ve got her ear, ask if we can get some rum down here, eh?’

Pinn laughed explosively. Crake didn’t stir from where he sat in a corner, drowned in his own misery. Harkins had fallen asleep, tired out by being afraid of everything. Silo was silent.

And Jez? What was Jez doing right now? Frey had turned it over and over in his mind, but he still couldn’t work out how she could fake her own death convincingly enough to fool Trinica’s man. She’d refused to reveal how she was going to do it when she first told him of her plan. She just said: ‘Trust me.’

Still, he was beginning to wonder if she actually had died.

The bald man took him by the arm and pressed a pistol into his side, then walked him out of the brig and through the passageways of the Delirium Trigger. They passed other crewmembers on the way. Some sneered triumphantly at Frey; others gave him looks of abject hatred. Their humiliation at Rabban—not to mention the deaths of a dozen or so crewmen—hadn’t been forgotten.

When they reached the door to the captain’s cabin, the bald man brought him to a halt. Frey expected him to knock, but he didn’t. He appeared to be deliberating some question with himself.

‘Are we going in?’ Frey prompted.

‘Listen,’ replied the crewman, turning on Frey with a threatening look in his eyes. ‘You be careful what you say in there. The Cap’n . . . she’s in one of her moods.’

Frey arched an eyebrow. ‘Thanks for the concern,’ he said, sarcastically. ‘What’s she going to do, kill me?’

‘It ain’t you I’m concerned about,’ came the reply, and then he knocked on the door and Trinica called for them to enter.

Trinica’s cabin was well ordered and clean, but the dark wood of the bookcases and the brass fittings of the dim electric lamps gave it a close, gloomy feel. Trinica was sitting behind her desk at the far end of the room, on which a large logbook lay open next to a carefully arranged writing set and the brass compass-like device they’d used to navigate the minefields of Retribution Falls. She was looking out of the sloping window. Beyond, night had fallen.

She didn’t acknowledge Frey as he was brought in. The bald man stood him in the centre of the room. After a moment, without turning from the window, she said:

‘Thank you, Harmund. You can go.’

‘Cap’n,’ said the big man, and left.

Frey stood uncertainly in the centre of the room for a moment, but still she didn’t speak to him. He decided he’d be damned if he’d feel awkward in front of her. He walked over to a reading-chair by one of the bookcases and sat down in it. He could wait as long as she could.

His eyes fell to the compass on the desk. The sight of it inspired a momentary surge of bitterness. That would have been his proof. That device and the charts that came with it would have won him his freedom. He’d been so close.

He fought down the feeling. No doubt Trinica had put it there to inspire just such a reaction. Railing against the injustice of his circumstances would do him no good now. Besides, for the first time he could remember it felt just a little childish.

‘You’re going to hang, you know,’ she said at last. She was still staring out of the window.

‘I’m aware of that, Trinica,’ Frey replied scornfully.

She glanced at him then. There was reproach in her eyes. Hurt, even. He found himself regretting his tone.

‘I thought we should talk,’ she said. ‘Before it’s over.’

Frey was puzzled by her manner. This wasn’t the acerbic, commanding woman he’d met back in Sharka’s den; nor did he recognise her behaviour from the years he’d loved her. Her voice was soft, the words sighing out without force. She seemed deeply tired, steeped in melancholy.

Still suspicious of a trick, he resolved not to play into her hands. He’d give her no sympathy. He’d be hard and bitter.

‘Talk, then,’ he said.

There was a pause. She seemed to be seeking a way to begin.

‘It’s been ten years,’ she said. ‘A lot’s happened in that time. But a lot of things stayed . . . unresolved.’

‘What does it matter?’ Frey replied. ‘The past is the past. It’s gone.’

‘It’s not gone,’ she said. ‘It never goes.’ She turned away from the window and faced him across her desk. ‘I wish I had your talent, Darian. I wish I could walk away from something or someone, and it would be as if they never existed. To lock a piece of my life away in a trunk, never to be opened.’

‘It’s a gift,’ he replied. He wasn’t about to explain himself to her.

‘Why did you leave me?’ she asked.

The question took him by surprise. There was a pleading edge to it. He hadn’t expected anything like this when he was led into the room. She was vulnerable, strengthless, unable to defend herself. He found himself becoming disgusted with her. Where was the woman he’d loved, or even the woman he’d hated? This desperation was pitiable.

Why had he left her? The memories seemed distant now: it was hard to summon up the feelings he’d felt then. They’d been tinted by ten years of scorn. Yet he did remember some things. Thoughts rather than emotions. The internal dialogues he had with himself during the long hours alone, flying haulage for her father’s company.

In the early months, he’d believed they’d be together for ever. He told himself he’d found a woman for the rest of his life. He couldn’t conceive of meeting someone more wonderful than she was, and he wasn’t tempted to try.

But it was one thing to daydream such notions and quite another to be faced with putting them into practice. When she began to talk of engagement, with a straightforwardness that he’d previously found charming, he began to idolise her a little less. His patience became short. No longer could he endlessly indulge her flights of fancy. His smile became fixed as she played her girlish games with him. Her jokes all seemed to go on too long. He found himself wishing she’d just be sensible.

At nineteen, he was still young. He didn’t make the connection between his sudden moodiness and irritability and the impending threat of marriage. He told himself he wanted to marry her. It would be stupid not to, after all. Hadn’t he decided she was the one for him?

But the more he snapped at her, the more demanding she became. Tired of waiting—or perhaps afraid to wait too long—she asked him to marry her. He agreed, and secretly resented her for a long time afterwards. How could she put him in that position? To choose between marrying her, which he didn’t want, or destroying her, which he wanted even less? He had no option but to agree at the time and hope to find a way out of it later.

And yet Trinica seemed blissfully unaware of any of this. Though his bad moods were ever more frequent, they didn’t seem to trouble her any more. She was assured that he was hers, and he seethed that she would celebrate her victory so prematurely.

By the time the date of the wedding was announced, Frey’s thoughts were mainly of escape. He slept little and badly. Her father’s obvious disapproval encouraged him to think that the wedding was a bad idea. A barely educated boy of low means, raised in an orphanage, Frey wasn’t a good match for the highly intelligent and beautiful daughter of an eminent aristocrat. Those social barriers, that had seemed laughable in the first flush of love, suddenly rose high in Frey’s mind.

He wanted to be a pilot for the Coalition Navy, steering vast frigates to the north to do battle with the Manes, or south to crush the Sammies. He wanted to be among the first to land on New Vardia or Jagos after the Great Storm Belt calmed. He wanted to fly free across the boundless skies.

When he looked at Trinica, and she smiled her perfect smile, he saw the death of his dreams.

That was when she fell pregnant. The wedding was hastily brought forward, and her father’s opposition to it transformed into whole-hearted support of their enterprise, backed up by veiled threats if Frey should waver. Frey began to suffer panic attacks in the night.

He remembered the sensation of a vice around his ribs, squeezing a little harder with every day that brought him closer to the wedding. He never seemed to have quite enough breath in his body. The laughter of his friends as they congratulated him became a distressing cacophony, like an enraged brace of ducks. He felt harried and harassed wherever he went. The smallest request was enough to send him into a fluster.

He remembered wondering what it would be like to feel like that for ever.

By this point he was absolutely certain he didn’t want to marry her. But it didn’t mean he didn’t want to be with her. Even with all the irritation and buried anger, he still adored this woman. She was his first love, and the one who had teased him from his rather cold, uninspiring childhood into a wild world where emotions could be overpowering and deeply irrational. He just wanted things to go back to the way they were before she began to talk about marriage.

But he was terrified of making the wrong choice. What if she was the one for him? Would he be condemning himself to a life of misery? Would he ever meet anyone like her again?

He was paralysed, trapped, dragged reluctantly into the future like a ship’s anchor scoring its way along the sea bed. In the end, there was only one way out he could face, and that was not to face it at all. He couldn’t make even that decision until the very last minute. He was hoping desperately for some vaguely defined intervention that would spare him from hurting her.

None came, so he ran. He took the Ketty Jay, in which was everything he had in the world, and he left her. He left her carrying his child, standing in front of a thousand witnesses, waiting for a groom who would never come.

After that, it only got worse.

‘Darian?’ Trinica prompted. Frey realised he’d slipped into reverie and fallen silent. ‘I asked you a question.’

Frey was taken by a sudden surge of anger. What right did she have to make him explain himself? After what she’d done? His love for her had been the most precious thing in his life, and she’d ruined it with her insecurities, her need to tie him down. She’d made him cowardly. In his heart he knew that, but he could never say it. So instead, he attacked her, sensing her weakness.

‘You really think I’m interested in a little catch-up to make you feel better?’ he sneered. ‘You think I care if you understand what happened or not? Here’s a deal: you let me go and I’ll have a nice long chat with you about all the terrible things I did and what an awful person I am. But in case it escaped your notice, I’m going to be hanged, and it’s you that’s taking me to the gallows. So piss on your questions, Trinica. You can go on wondering what went wrong until you rot.’

Trinica’s expression was surprised and wounded. She’d not expected such cruelty. Frey found himself thinking that the white-skinned bitch who had taken the place of his beloved might actually cry. He’d expected anger, but instead she looked like a little girl who had been unjustly smacked for something they didn’t do. A profound sadness had settled on her.

‘How can you hate me like this?’ she asked. Her voice was husky and low. ‘How can you take the moral high ground, after what you did to me?’

‘Broken hearts mend, Trinica,’ Frey spat. ‘You murdered our child.’

Her eyes narrowed at the blow, but any promise of tears had passed. She turned her face away from him and looked out of the window again. ‘You abandoned us,’ she replied, grave-cold. ‘It’s easy to be aggrieved now. But you abandoned us. If our child had lived, you’d never have known it existed.’

‘That’s a lie. I came back for you, Trinica. For both of you.’

He saw her stiffen, and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have admitted that, shouldn’t have let the words free from his mouth. It weakened him. He’d waited years to throw his hatred in her face, to confront her with what she’d done, but it had always gone so much better during the rehearsals in his head. He wanted her to wreck herself on his glacial indifference to her suffering. He wanted to exact revenge. But his own rage was foiling him.

She was waiting for him to go on. He had no choice now. The gate had been opened.

‘I went from place to place for a month. Thinking things through. A bit of time away from you with all your bloody demands and your damn father.’ He cut himself off. Already he sounded surly and immature. He took a breath and continued, trying not to let his anger overwhelm him. ‘And I decided I’d made a mistake.’ He thought about trying to explain further, but he couldn’t. ‘So I came back. I went to see a friend in town, to get some advice, I suppose. That was when I heard. How you’d taken all those pills, how you’d tried to kill yourself. And how the baby . . . the baby hadn’t . . .’

He put his fist to his mouth, ashamed of the way his throat closed up and his words jammed painfully in the bottleneck. When the moment had passed, he relaxed and sat back in his seat. He’d said enough. There was no satisfaction in this. He couldn’t even hurt her without hurting himself.

‘I was a stupid girl,’ said Trinica quietly. ‘Stupid enough to believe the world began and ended with you. I thought I could never be happy again.’

Frey had sat forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees and his fingers tangled in his fringe. His voice was brittle. ‘I ran out on you, Trinica. But I never gave up on myself. And I never tried to take our child with me.’

‘Oh, you gave up on yourself, Darian,’ she replied. ‘You were just a little more indirect. You spent three years drinking yourself to death and putting yourself in harm’s way. In the end, you took your whole crew with you.’

Frey couldn’t muster the energy to argue. The weary, conversational tone in which she delivered her accusation robbed him of the will to defend himself. Besides, she was right. Of course she was right.

‘We’re both cowards,’ he murmured. ‘We deserved each other.’

‘Maybe,’ said Trinica. ‘Maybe neither of us deserved what we got.’

All the fire had gone out of Frey. A black, sucking tar-pit of misery threatened to engulf him. He’d imagined this confrontation a thousand ways, but they all ended with him demolishing Trinica, forcing her to face the horror of what she’d done to him. Now he realised there was nothing he could say to her that she hadn’t already thought of, nothing he could punish her with that she hadn’t already used to punish herself more effectively than he ever could.

The truth was, his position was so fragile that it fell apart when exposed to the reality of an opposing view. While he nurtured his grievances privately, he could be appalled at how she’d mistreated him. But it didn’t hold up to argument. He couldn’t pretend to be the only one wronged. They’d ruined each other.

Damn it, he hadn’t wanted to talk. And now here they were, talking. She always had a way of doing that to him.

‘How’d you get this way, Trinica?’ he said. He raised his head and gestured at her across the gloomy study. ‘The hair, the skin . . .’ He hesitated. ‘You used to be beautiful.’

‘I’m done with beautiful,’ she replied. There was a long pause, during which neither of them spoke. Then Trinica stirred in her seat and faced him.

‘You weren’t the only one who turned away from me after I tried to kill myself,’ she said. ‘My parents were disgraced. Bad enough they had a daughter who was going to give birth outside of marriage; now she’d killed their grandchild. They could barely look at me. My father wanted to send me to a sanatorium.

‘In the end, I stole some money and took an aircraft. I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to get away. I suppose I thought I could be a pilot.

‘I was caught by a pirate two weeks later. They must have seen me in port and followed my craft out. They forced me down and boarded me, then took my craft to add to their little fleet. I thought they’d kill me, but they didn’t. They just kept me.’

Frey couldn’t help a twinge of pain. That dainty, elegant young woman he’d left behind hadn’t been equipped to survive in the brutal, ugly world of smugglers and freebooters. She’d been sheltered all her life. He knew what happened to people like that.

‘I wasn’t much more than an animal to them,’ she went on. Her tone was dead, without inflection. ‘A pet to use as they pleased. That’s what beautiful does for you.

‘It took me almost two years to work up the courage to put a dagger in the captain’s neck. After that, I stopped being a victim. I signed on as a pilot for another crew, learned navigation on the side. I wanted to make myself indispensable. I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody again.’

She turned her attention to the window, evading him.

‘I’ll not bore you with the details, Darian. Let’s just say I learned what it takes for a woman to survive among cut-throats.’

The omissions spoke more than any description ever could. Frey didn’t need to be told about the rapes and the beatings. Physically weak, she’d have needed to use her sexuality to play men off against each other, to ensnare a strong companion for protection. A rich girl who’d never known hardship, she’d been forced into whoredom to survive.

But all that time, she’d been strengthening herself, becoming the woman he saw before him. She could have gone home at any point, back to the safety of her family. They’d have taken her back, of that he was sure. But she never did. She cut out every soft part of herself, so she could live among the scum.

He didn’t pity her. He couldn’t. He only mourned the loss of the young woman he’d known ten years ago. This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence.

‘By the time I got to the Delirium Trigger, I’d made my way in the underworld. I had a reputation, and they respected me. I knew the crew was troubled and I knew the captain was a syphilitic drunk. It took me a year, building trust, winning them round. I knew he was planning an assault on an outpost near Anduss, I knew it would be a disaster, and I waited. Afterwards, I led the survivors against him. We threw him overboard from two kloms up.’

She gazed across at him. Her black eyes seemed darker in the faint light of the electric lamps.

‘And then you turned yourself into a ghoul,’ he finished.

‘You know how men are,’ she said. ‘They don’t like to mix desire and respect. They see a beautiful woman in command and they belittle her. It makes them feel better about themselves.’ She looked away, her face falling into shadow. ‘Besides, being pretty never brought me anything but pain.’

‘It kept you alive,’ he pointed out.

‘That wasn’t living,’ she returned.

He had no answer to that.

‘So that’s the story,’ she said. ‘That’s what it takes to be a captain. Patience. Ruthlessness. Sacrifice. You’re too selfish to make that crew respect you, Darian. You surprised me once, but it won’t happen again.’

There was a knock at the door. A spasm of irritation crossed her face. ‘I gave orders that I wasn’t to be disturbed!’ she snapped.

‘It’s urgent, Cap’n!’ came a voice from the other side. ‘The Ketty Jay has gone!’

‘What?’ she cried, surging to her feet. She tore open the door to the cabin. A crewman was outside, obscured from Frey’s view by the door.

‘She were following us with her lights on,’ came the breathless report. ‘All of a sudden, the lights go out. By the time we got a spotlight over there, she were nowhere to be seen. She could’ve gone anywhere in the dark. She’s disappeared, Cap’n. Nobody knows where.’

Trinica’s head swivelled and she fixed Frey with a glare of utter malice.

Frey grinned. ‘Surprise!’