The Isis Knot Read online

  “You mad?” came another convict’s Yorkshire voice. “How could you bet on ol’ Will?”

  William turned, curious to hear the answer.

  It came from a man who’d somehow remained doughy and plump during the journey. His eyes met William’s as he replied, “Because of the reason why he’s in those chains. He bested two men at once in as many seconds, and then had the big, hairy bollocks to attack the quartermaster when the sailors tried to pull him off.” The man took a half step back. “And something ain’t quite right…in his eyes.”

  William merely nodded, because the convict spoke the truth.

  “Out of the way, Jem.” William nudged his chin toward a safe corner, and the lad scurried off.

  The wagers on Riley blossomed, and he ate them up with a rotten smile.

  With thumb and forefinger, William pushed his unruly blond hair off his face. He bounced on the balls of his feet, the shackle a mere feather, the lightest of tickles against his ankle. Riley snarled. Advanced. He was a large man, taken to stealing other convicts’ food when he couldn’t have his way with them, and he rushed forward with a mighty roar. The sight might have scared William if he’d had any fear left after what the Spectre had subjected him to. As it was, William was more than ready.

  Riley charged straight for William’s midsection, trying to take him down by force, but William knew how to throw a punch in the face of that kind of attack. He knew how to throw two, in fact, so that was what he did. Left, right. Cheek, chin. Riley’s head flew first to one side and then snapped back on his neck. William let him recover, then got in two more hits. Ribs, chest.

  With a loud crash the Irishman hit the floorboards. Simultaneous groans and cheers went up among the various audience factions.

  William planted his shackled ankle in front of Riley’s face. “Get up. Get up.” He didn’t want to kick the man when he was down. He wanted another go at his face. Wanted to see Riley come for him again, and then watch the defeat as it blanked out his eyes.

  Riley pushed laboriously to his feet, a swelling cut splitting his cheek. The blood satisfied William, but he wanted more.

  One of Riley’s mollies—the shorter one with the lazy eye and the distended belly—rushed between the two fighters, taking the Irishman’s shoulders. “Don’t do it,” said the mollie. “I seen Everard fight before.”

  Quiet, little man. I need this. I need to feel this. And I want Riley, not you.

  Riley scoffed over his mollie’s shoulder. “So have I. Two drunk convicts are mighty opponents, aren’t they?” He pointed to William’s ankle, drawing scattered laughter.

  William pointed to Riley’s busted face and laughed even louder. Riley lunged but the sallow-faced mollie pushed against his chest.

  “No, no,” said the mollie, breathy with fear, “in King’s Cross. The street fights three years back. Won more than any other fellow.” He lowered his voice, as if the whole lot of convicts didn’t already have their ears and eyes trained on the fighting circle. “Said he killed a man, they did. Said he’s mad.” He even waggled a finger near his ear.

  At this point, William wasn’t about to counter such a brilliant exaggeration. He’d soundly beaten his opponent that night three years ago. Later, the other man had caught a disease or had eaten something rancid or something of the sort, and had died a few days later. The rumors of him perishing at William’s hands were far more dramatic. And more to his benefit.

  William threw back his shoulders and cracked his neck. “What say you, Riley? Are you frightened? Think you’ll meet the same fate as that chap?”

  Riley puffed up his chest, but his eyes shifted back and forth. “Never.”

  William raised his fists. “Come on, then. I have one leg tied. You have the advantage. Don’t squander it.”

  “Richard,” warned the mollie.

  Riley’s hand shot out to the side and caught the man’s sweaty throat in his grip.

  “But…he’ll…kill…you.”

  The Irishman threw the mollie to the floorboards and stared at him, running the heel of his hand down the front of his trousers. William knew who would receive the brunt of Riley’s frustration when this scene ended. Riley pulled at his scraggly, ruddy beard and scrubbed his hands through his bug-infested hair. He swiped his bloody cheek with the back of his hand, then flicked some red droplets at William.

  “When I am ready,” Riley sneered, “when there is no surprise, and we both have our strength, I will take you. I will beat you. And then I will have you.”

  Disappointment hung heavy in William’s chest. “Talk means nothing. These men want to see fists.”

  A rousing shout of encouragement and agreement rose, which quickly transformed into cries of disappointment and taunts as Riley whirled, grabbed his second mollie by the back of the neck, and shoved him toward the berths near the stern. Several convicts followed him, waving their lost wagers in his face.

  “Some other time, then!” William called after him with false gaiety. “We have seven years!”

  The remaining convicts dispersed, the melee quelled. For now.

  William found Jem, who stood near the empty berths at fore starboard. The wind had shifted, dragging the John Barry around its anchor so that the starboard portholes now looked out at the shore of Sydney Cove.

  William slowly went to Jem, who looked as narrow as one of the posts holding up the ceiling, standing with his hands stuffed into his armpits. Jem inhaled several times, trying to speak, but each time emotion swallowed his words.

  “It’s all right,” William said, careful not to touch him.

  At the reassurance, Jem shuddered. His head bowed, greasy brown-gold hair swinging in front of his bulbous eyes. “I didn’t think he’d ever come for me again. He kept his distance the entire journey. Thanks to you.”

  Jem so rarely spoke, but when he did, William could hear the Cockney trying to poke through carefully corrected speech. It allowed him to guess at Jem’s origins, but beyond that, the lad had revealed so little of himself. And William hadn’t asked.

  He waved away the gratitude. It was what any decent man should do for another.

  “This is for you.” Jem poked a bony finger into the partially ripped hem of his shirt and pulled out something shiny and round, about the size of a tuppence.

  Quickly, William reached out and folded Jem’s fingers around the coin, hiding it from one hundred and forty-four pairs of greedy, thieving eyes. He jerked his chin into the lower berth, the one under the last porthole. They climbed onto the unforgiving wood slab not even rats would call a bed.

  Jem unfurled his fingers again, revealing the coin. He ran a thumb over it as though it were a diamond. “I carved it while at anchor in Portsmouth. I wanted to leave it to my sister. She was the only one who ever loved me. But she ran off a long time ago and must be dead like my mum and father.” He extended the coin to William. “It’s yours now.”

  The look on Jem’s face wouldn’t allow him to refuse. He accepted it reluctantly. It was a tuppence, but all official British letters and images had been filed down and it had been re-carved. As the John Barry had rocked in Portsmouth harbor for six months prior to departure to New South Wales, he’d watched bored and fearful convicts carve these tokens, meant to be left to their families in remembrance. He didn’t know Jem had done so as well.

  William hadn’t had purpose himself. He had no one left in England. Not a parent or sibling, not a wife or a child, not even a single mate.

  A crude, stippled picture of a three-masted ship decorated one side of Jem’s token. The other had words done in the same, tiny-dotted style.

  “What does it say?” William asked. “I can’t read.”

  Jem recited from memory. “Until I gain my liberty. Seven years. J.W. 1819.”

  William gave Jem a solemn nod of approval, then tucked the carved tuppence into his pocket.

  Jem sniffled and wrapped his spindly arms around his shins. He stared out the window at New South Wales. When the snif
fles overran him, he wiped his nose with a knuckle and smeared snot across his cheek. “For some reason”—he nudged his chin toward the town painted in every shade of drab and brown—“I thought it’d look like England.”

  The lad needed to learn to hide his emotions, especially in a place like this, if he expected to survive. There was such a short amount of time left to show him, and William worried that Jem would never be able to stand on his own.

  William swabbed grime from the glass with a dirty finger. “Believe me, the only thing that looks like England is England.”

  “What’s going to happen to us when they take us ashore?”

  There will be no “us.” You’ll be on your own, and I will be searching for the black-haired woman. Because I have no other choice.

  Pangs of regret and fear stabbed hard into William’s heart. He worried terribly for Jem. Worried that Riley would be able to get to him again once they were on land and everything changed. Worried that he could never be to Jem what Alastair had been to him.

  “I don’t know,” William lied.

  “I heard one of the men say he’s running as soon as he gets the chance. Said he can find his way to China from here. Said he even has a compass.”

  William snorted. “He drew that compass on a piece of cloth. No needle even, just delusions. I don’t know who’s worse, him or the idiots who follow him. China isn’t anywhere near New South Wales.”

  This wasn’t the sole talk of escape he’d heard. Months earlier, after William had been fitted with the weight of punishment, Alastair himself—who sailed as a lieutenant on the John Barry—had secretly come down into the hold.

  “I can get you back to England, Will,” the officer had whispered. “After we arrive in Sydney I can hide you where the captain will never find you—in a barrel of flour belowdecks where he never goes. You could be back in London before summer.”

  The thought of making this arduous voyage again stuffed into a barrel was shocking enough, but not as shocking as Alastair’s offer.

  “Why?” William had blinked at the old friend who’d helped him become a man so long ago. “Why would you help me now, when it could mean your own career? Your own life?”

  Alastair had gripped William’s shoulder in the way he had when William was just a boy. “Because you’re a good man. Inside, your heart is worthy. I’ve loved you like a son for many years. Even after you…well, even after you fell on hard times. You aren’t like the rest of this lot.” He’d sneered into the cesspool of the convict hold. “You’re one of the best I ever served with. One of the most brave. You don’t deserve this end.”

  But he did deserve an end. It was time for the visions to stop, time for the Spectre to let him be. Everything must cease here, or else William was certain he would die.

  But it’s not the true end. For me, here will be a new beginning…once I find that woman.

  “Why did you do it, Will? Why did you steal?” Alastair had asked.

  Because I had to. Because I was compelled to.

  William had merely shrugged. “It is what my life has become.”

  Alastair had nodded, tight-lipped. So many sailors had been forced to leave the Royal Navy’s service in the past decade. The whole country was riddled with down-on-their-luck seamen who didn’t know how to live on land, and therefore turned to crime to survive. William had to let Alastair think that he was one of them.

  “How soon will the John Barry return to England after stopping in Sydney?” William asked.

  “Two weeks, most likely. I could try to find you, bring you back to the ship somehow…”

  Even if William wanted to accept Alastair’s offer, the Spectre would never let him go back to the country of his birth.

  He’d tried before to resist performing the tasks the Spectre’s visions and voice told him to perform. He’d defied them time and time again, but the visions had only grown stronger, more insistent. Sometimes they changed to get him to the same endpoint via a different route. The more he ignored them, the more maddening and demanding they became. They never stopped until he did exactly what they wanted.

  It would be no different here.

  If he were to escape with Alastair, eventually he would find himself right back in New South Wales, shackled to a new vision, a new crime like a noose around his neck. Of that he was certain.

  He was meant to be in New South Wales. He could not leave. Not as long as that woman lived.

  William had had no choice but to refuse Alastair.

  Now, in Sydney Cove, the wind changed course again, angling the John Barry so William could see another hulk bobbing at anchor. Had it been here yesterday or had it only just arrived, in the John Barry’s wake?

  William frowned at the white letters scripted along the hull. “Jem, what’s her name?”

  “Ah, that one’s called the Remembrance.”

  The other ship’s occupants appeared on the main deck. Colorful skirts whipped about their bodies. Long hair snagged in the breeze. The women gazed toward shore at their new home, shading their eyes with delicate hands against the blazing sun.

  Female convicts.

  William suddenly couldn’t breathe. He pressed his nose to the glass, desperate to get closer. To see each of their faces. Was she among them? Dear God, he had to know. He squinted and pawed at the glass, but only saw a frustrating, sun-washed flurry of skirts. Then the wind shifted again, turning the John Barry and setting the Remembrance out of sight. His hand on the glass shriveled into a frustrated fist, and his heartbeat thudded loudly in his ears.

  To make matters worse, he and the rest of the male convicts sat in their stinking hold another full day, sweating and anxious, before Alastair finally unlocked and kicked open the hatch. A swirl of fresh air coiled its way down through the hold and every man below turned his face up to it as though it were the face of God.

  “Gentlemen,” Alastair’s familiar voice called down. “Welcome to New South Wales.”

  CHAPTER 2

  She was dead.

  She must be…it was the only explanation. The air here smelled too sweet. The vast emptiness of this place carved into her soul, leaving nothing in its wake. The whole world had gone far, far too quiet.

  She remembered her name was Sera, but nothing else. Nothing about her life before a searing white light had swallowed her up and spit her out onto hard-packed earth beneath a shockingly blue sky.

  The light. She remembered the terrifying light.

  Passing a shaking hand over her face and hair, she tested whether she were corporeal. Yes, her skin was warm and the part in her long, tangled dark hair burned hot from the sun.

  Underneath her prone body the ground was solid and unforgiving as glass, and the sparse blades of rough grass scraped against the small patches of skin on her calves where her pants legs were hiked up. The strangely sweet air created a tingling that started in her lungs and traveled a slow course through her limbs. Blinking into the hard, brilliant sunlight, she could just make out the fuzzy shapes of trees and shrubs. In the distance came a strange warble, followed by a similar sound from another direction. An animal’s cry?

  So she wasn’t dead…but this place wasn’t her home. This wasn’t where she’d been when the white light had snatched her. She could feel it in her bones, in the way her mind rejected her surroundings. And yet…she belonged here.

  This was the hallmark of a dream, right? Existing sluggishly in a strange landscape, your mind peppered with scattered thoughts and nonsensical musings and random images?

  Come on, Sera. Wake up. Then, when nothing happened, when the sun still beat down on her body, and the trees started to sharpen and she did not recognize their shape or color, and the unseen animals started making alien sounds: Oh God.

  Did she believe in God? In any gods? How could she not even know that about herself?

  Her torso crunched, knees coming to her chest, as a cold-hot wave of sensation sliced a river through her body. Fear—of who she was, of what had happened, of
the unknown—rooted her in place.

  A rhythmic sound started in the distance. A low, creaking squeak squeak that came at regular intervals, growing louder as it slowly drew nearer. Not animal, not natural. Man-made.

  The huge, blank void that was her life cracked open a little, and through that brief opening she glimpsed a bit of her true self. She was not helpless. She was many things—not all of them good—but helpless had never been one of them.

  Though she couldn’t yet see the source of the squeaking sound, she did find a bush only a few feet away. Its thin branches were covered in waxy, sage-colored leaves, and she dragged herself toward it. Fingers digging into the dry, crumbling ground, knees pushing against the earth, she tried to hide. She curled into as tight a ball as the numbness in her body would allow, and hoped that whatever was making that sound would pass her by until her memory granted her mercy and finally spat out some answers.

  The pattern of the squeak never quickened, but its volume rose and rose. Getting closer. Other sounds came in underneath. The continual stamp and clop of something on the earth. Footsteps, maybe? Caused by lots of people?

  Though her vision was still blurry, she peeked through the scraggly branches in the direction of the sounds. There, in the center of a bright halo of sun, a long, rectangular shape lumbered toward her. It rolled on huge, uneven wheels, a fuzzy, indistinct horse pulling it across the earth.

  The presence of a horse and wagon rang all sorts of warning bells in her head. The loudest one told her: Be strong. Defend yourself.

  Sweeping a weak arm over the ground, her fingers found a jagged rock. It fit nicely in her palm.

  The hazy driver angled the wagon at Sera. He’d seen her.

  She was ready for him. Because she had to be.

  After a jangle of rope and metal, the brown horse halted, snuffling and stamping in place. Close enough for her to tell that its odor was awful. The squeak of the wheels stopped and the strange world filled with silence. The wagon was huge, looming over her. Dread and fear made her shiver.