enemy is something else. We have to escape, old friend, we have to locate the commodore and carry the sceptre to safety.’
Boxiron indicated the sea beyond the cliff. ‘Where will be safe? We are hunted in the Kingdom of Jackals, my people in the Steamman Free State will not help me. Where can we go in this world that will be safe?’
‘I think there might be a place, and the person who can help us is closer than you think.’
‘Is this another ploy to engage my interest?’
‘No ploy, old friend.’ But bob my soul, how I wish this all was just an entertainment for your distraction.
I’ll never complain again about working for the bleeding board, Dick promised himself, swinging his machete against the clusters of leathery purple fruit hanging in beards around the tree. Every weary bite of his blade released an unpleasantly bitter smell, thin fronds attaching the fruit to the trunk seemingly as tough as steel.
Immediately below Dick, another prisoner was sawing off low-hanging fruit while Sadly, Boxiron and the ex- parson stood in the water and caught the gillworts, piling pear-shaped fruit in their shallow-bottomed boat. Not that the craft was there for their comfort and transportation through the humid flooded world of the everglades. No, it was only with them to keep the fruit from being soaked and spoiled. Shortly after a gillwort made contact with water it flowered as it bobbed on the surface, releasing a pungent smell to attract lizard-like fish to disperse its seeds; making quick work of the fruit, not to mention trying to take chunks out of any convict pickers’ legs.
It was an old lag, Roald Morris, who had been assigned to convert the newcomers into an effective component of the camp’s harvesting machine. Only too glad to stick to the sides of the boat and issue advice, he had at least warned them to enter the everglades only wearing their breeches. After all, their clothes would be reduced to rags soon enough and they didn’t need any extra layers to perspire like pigs out here. Only Jethro Daunt refused the advice, the eccentric ex-parson pushing their harvesting raft in his full tweeds, sweat rolling off his forehead like a waterfall. A life where the State Protection Board paid a man to stand outside suspected treasonists’ lodgings and watch through the long night hours seemed a world away from the fatiguing labours the Advocacy demanded of its captives.
Morris had lasted in the camp for six years. Supposedly a pearl diver who had lost his compass during a storm and ended up deep inside gill-neck waters, Dick could tell that the man’s story sounded as flimsy to his ears as it no doubt had to the gill-necks who’d discovered Morris’s little ship bobbing in their territory. He had admitted he had once served as a corporal in the regiments back home, and his presence here on the island probably meant he had been a deserter before drifting into smuggling and developing a taste for the gill-necks’ crystals. But Morris had endured out here and had the knowledge of how to live in this hell, which made him someone worth listening to. Surviving had taken its cost, though: Morris’s skin worn as brown and wrinkled as leather from working in the sun every day of the week. He had been fat once, too. Dick could see it in the way skin hung in jowls down the man’s neck. If the sister he talked of so mournfully saw Morris now, she wouldn’t recognize him. She’d walk right past without a hint of recognition. At least he has someone who cares. Who will remember me? Who’s there to miss Dick Tull when he’s gone? Only Damson Pegler in her slum for the last week’s rent he never paid.
Circular platforms were built into the side of a handful of the semi-submerged forest’s trees, gill-neck guards squatting languidly outside of the water with their rifles by their side. It didn’t seem right, them with their affinity for the life aquatic staying out of the water while prisoners from the race of man waded through the everglades with slop up to their waists. But then, the brackish green subtropical wetland smelled bad enough to Dick halfway up a gillwort tree, and he wasn’t even attempting to breathe the stuff.
‘Let yourself hang back in the harness,’ Morris called up. ‘You’ll take easier swings at the fruit. And cut down, not up, gillworts resist less that way.’
‘You can always send the steamman up here,’ Dick said.
‘You’ll all get a chance, that you will.’
‘It is your race that is believed to possess simian ancestry,’ said Boxiron, ‘not mine.’
The steamman got his turn soon enough. Wading through the thick water up to his waist, Morris located a second tree with ripe fruit nearby. Boxiron was dispatched to climb up its trunk while Sadly and Daunt manoeuvred the harvesting raft halfway between the two trees, a couple of convicts sent across to catch the fruit the steamman began slicing off. Even with the strength-sapping device welded onto Boxiron’s chest, the steamman made a faster job of harvesting gillworts than Dick, pneumatic servos beating his tired old muscles, cramping from sweat and heat. After half an hour more of swinging the machete, Dick’s labours were interrupted by the sound of a small gas-driven engine. He glanced over his shoulder, sweat rolling off the tip of his itchy nose and falling towards the swampy surface below. It was On’esse. The camp commandant lounged under a shaded stretch of canvas in the middle of a shallow draft boat, a gill-neck guard at the front of the boat leaning into a tripod-mounted gun while another sat at the back, directing the small motor’s rudder and steering its passage through the everglade forest.
‘Work, you surface-dwelling scum,’ the commandant called from his shade. ‘We are two tonnes behind quota for my next shipment. Fall behind, and I’ll take every tenth man from this gang of slackers and peel your backs with my whip.’
If there was any sign of irony on the part of the gill-neck commander, urging them to labour harder from the comfort of his personal launch, the old sod was hiding it well.
A minute after his boat passed, zigzagging its way through the trees, panicked shouts began to sound from the workers in the water behind Dick, yells growing more urgent as the convicts scattered, some wading though the waters towards the guards’ platform, others heading for the harvesting rafts and the trees. Down below, Morris was shinning up the gillwort tree’s trunk, throwing a harvesting strap around the tree as he climbed.
‘Bloody On’esse,’ snarled Morris as he stopped under Dick’s position, five foot up from the water. ‘He knows the noise of his boat’s engine sounds like their challenge call.’
Dick looked down at the skeletal prisoner. ‘Whose?’
‘ Theirs! ’ The convict pointed towards thin bone-like wands cutting though the water with the deadly intent of sharks’ fins. ‘Snorkel spiders. Get out the water, all of you!’ he yelled down at the prisoners below.
Sodding hell. Sadly and Daunt and the two sailors below were casting around, trying to locate the cause of the commotion and work out their response. Too slow. The harvesting party behind — other sailors captured from the convoy — screamed out as bony snorkels lifted out of the everglades to reveal nests of mandibles stabbing in front of evil blanched skulls. Seconds later the human prey collapsed into the water under the leaping weight of these living thrashing machines. Now the newcomers knew what to do! Yelling in terror, prisoners desperately waded for safety, heading for the guard platforms, trees and the harvesting rafts. Underneath Dick, one of the sailors was trying to climb their tree trunk, but soaked and panicked and lacking climbing strap and hooks, he was barely able to scale a couple of inches above the waterline.
‘My hand!’ shouted Morris, reaching down, but the gap between him and the other prisoner was too wide. A frenzied storm of clicking mandibles lashed out, impaling the man in the spine and pulling him back screaming. Vanishing under the water, he left an outrush of bubbles and a slowly growing slick of blood as the only trace of his presence.
The other sailor in their party had dragged himself aboard the harvesting raft and was trying to pull Daunt out of the water. Behind the ex-parson, Sadly was wading towards the raft, using his cane like a punt to speed his limping passage forward. A bone-white snorkel was arrowing in on the informant and Dick could see the inevitable outcome of their relative speeds. Sadly would be snapped up before he got to the protection of the raft. As it closed on the informant, the creature’s bony skull began to surface, thrashing mandibles extending for the man. Dick hefted the machete he had been using and hurled it with all his strength. It windmilled around, sailing down, impaling itself in the back of the snorkel spider. Not enough. The snorkel spider slowed slightly, the thrashing of its mandibles growing ever more frenzied, leaping towards Sadly as the informant reached a hand’s gap from the raft. Both the sailor and Daunt were straining back out to the surface to catch Sadly, but he turned and dived under the water. He wasn’t pulled, he went under on purpose! Landing where Sadly had just been standing, the monstrous thing disappeared, the water churning. Then its snorkel bone flashed up and down. More thrashing, and Sadly exploded out of the murky liquid, one hand on his cane as he pushed it into the dying, jolting creature in front of him. He was using his cane as a lance, manoeuvring it between the bony plates of his attacker and ramming it into the soft vulnerable flesh. Pulling out the cane as though Sadly was a duellist withdrawing a foil from a skewered opponent, he flopped around and caught the others’ hands, Daunt and the sailor hauling his soaked, bloody form into the raft.
‘Sharply done,’ whispered Dick in surprise. I guess there’s a survivor in everyone, if you just prod ’em hard
