Someone sobbed. Mendy Tanamind giggled again. Brondo Katzin broke from his stasis and began bitterly to mutter, over and over, “The fucking stinking Gillies! The fucking stinking Gillies!”
“What’s the trouble here?” Delagard asked, finally coming stumping up along the path from Lawler’s vaargh.
“Your boys Bamber and Gospo took it upon themselves to carry the news,” Lawler said. “Everybody knows.”
“What? What? The bastards! I’ll kill them!”
“It’s a little too late for that.”
Others were entering the plaza now. Lawler saw Gabe Kinverson, Sundira Thane, Father Quillan, the Sweyners. And more right behind them. They came crowding in, forty, fifty, sixty people, practically everybody. Even five or six of the Sisters were there, standing close together, a tight little female phalanx. Safety in numbers. Dag Tharp appeared. Marya and Gren Hain. Josc Yanez, Lawler’s seventeen-year-old apprentice, who was going to be the island’s next doctor someday. Onyos Felk, the mapkeeper. Natim Gharkid had come up from his algae beds, his trousers soaked to the waist. The news must have travelled through the whole community by this time.
Mostly their faces showed shock, astonishment, incredulity. Is it true? they were asking. Can it be?
Delagard cried out, “Listen, all of you, there’s nothing to worry about! We’re going to get this thing smoothed over!”
Gabe Kinverson came up to Delagard. He looked twice as tall as the shipyard owner, a great slab of a man, all jutting chin and massive shoulders and cold, glaring sea-green eyes. There was always an aura of danger about Kinverson, of potential violence.
“They threw us out?” Kinverson asked. “They really said we had to leave?”
Delagard nodded.
“Thirty days is what we have, and then out. They made that very clear. They don’t care where we go, but we can’t stay here. I’m going to fix everything, though. You can count on that.”
“Seems to me you’ve fixed everything already,” Kinverson said. Delagard moved back a step and glared at Kinverson as if bracing for a fight. But the sea-hunter seemed more perplexed than angry. “Thirty days and then get out,” Kinverson said, half to himself. “If that don’t beat everything.” He turned his back on Delagard and walked away, scratching his head.
Perhaps Kinverson really didn’t care, Lawler thought. He spent most of his time far out at sea anyway, by himself, preying on the kinds of fish that didn’t choose to come into the bay. Kinverson had never been active in the life of the Sorve community; he floated through it the way the islands of Hydros drifted in the ocean, aloof, independent, well defended, following some private course.
But others were more agitated. Brondo Katsin’s delicate-looking little golden-haired wife Eliyana was sobbing wildly. Father Quillan attempted to comfort her, but he was obviously upset himself. The gnarled old Sweyners were talking to each other in low, intense tones. A few of the younger women were trying to explain things to their worried-looking children. Lis Niklaus had brought a jug of grapeweed brandy out of her cafй and it was passing rapidly from hand to hand among the men, who were gulping from it in a sombre, desperate way.
Lawler said quietly to Delagard, “How exactly are you going to deal with all this? You have some sort of plan?”
“I do,” Delagard said. Suddenly he was full of frenetic energy. “I told you I’d take full responsibility, and I meant it. I’ll go back to the Gillies on my knees, and if I have to lick their hind flippers I will, and I’ll beg for forgiveness. They’ll come around, sooner or later. They won’t actually hold us to this goddamned absurd ultimatum.”
“I admire your optimism.”
Delagard went on, “And if they won’t back off, I’ll volunteer to go into exile myself. Don’t punish everyone, I’ll tell them. Just me. I’m the guilty one. I’ll move to Velmise or Salimil or any place you like, and you’ll never see my ugly face on Sorve again, that’s a promise. It’ll work, Lawler. They’re reasonable beings. They’ll understand that tossing an old lady like Mendy here off the island that’s been her home for eighty years isn’t going to serve any rational purpose. I’m the bastard, I’m the murderous diver-killing villain, and I’ll go if I have to, though I don’t even think it’ll come down to that.”
“You may be right. Maybe not.”
“I’ll crawl before them if I have to.”
“And you’ll bring one of your sons over from Velmise to run the shipyard if they make you leave here, won’t you?”
Delagard looked startled. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“They might think you weren’t all that sincere about agreeing to leave. They might think one Delagard was the same as the next.”
“You say it might not be good enough for them, if I’m the only one to go?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They might want something more than that from you.”
“Like what?”
“What if they told you they’d pardon the rest of us provided you left and agreed that you and your family would never set foot on Sorve again, and that the entire Delagard shipyard would be torn down?”
Delagard’s eyes grew very bright. “No,” he said. “They wouldn’t ask that!”
“They already have. And more.”
“But if I go, if I really go—if my sons pledge never to harm a diver again—”
Lawler turned away from him.
For Lawler the first shock was past; the simple phrase We are going to have to leave Sorve had incorporated itself in his mind, his soul, his bones. He was taking it very calmly, all things considered. He wondered why. Between one moment and the next the existence on this island that he had spent his entire life constructing had been yanked from his grasp.
He remembered the time he had gone to Thibeire. How deeply disquieting it had been to see all those unfamiliar faces, to be unaware of names and personal histories, to walk down a path and not know what lay at the end of it. He had been glad to come home, after just a few hours.
And now he would have to go somewhere else and stay there for the rest of his life; he would have to live among strangers; he would lose all sense that he was a Lawler of Sorve Island, and would become just anybody, a newcomer, an off-islander, intruding in some new community where he had no place and no purpose. That should have been a hard thing to swallow. And yet after that first moment of terrifying instability and disorientation he had settled somehow into a kind of numbed acceptance, as though he were as indifferent to the eviction as Gabe Kinverson seemed to be, or Gharkid, that perversely free-floating man. Strange. Maybe it simply hasn’t sunk in yet, Lawler told himself.
Sundira Thane came up to him. She was flushed and there was a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her whole posture was one of excitement and a kind of fierce self-satisfaction.
“I told you they were annoyed with us, didn’t I? Didn’t I? Looks like I was right.”
“So you were,” Lawler said.
She studied him for a moment. “We’re really going to have to leave. I don’t have the slightest doubt of it.” Her eyes flashed brilliantly. She seemed to be glorying in all this, almost intoxicated by it. Lawler remembered that this was the sixth island she had lived on so far, at the age of thirty-one. She didn’t mind moving around. She might even enjoy it.
He nodded slowly. “Why are you so sure of that?”
“Because Dwellers don’t ever change their minds. When they say something they stick to it. And killing divers seems to be a more serious thing to them than killing meatfish or bangers. The Dwellers don’t mind our going out into the bay and hunting for food. They eat meatfish themselves. But the divers are, well, different. The Dwellers feel very protective toward them.”