Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [27]
Creedy must have seen Granger’s expression change, because he grabbed his arm and whispered, ‘Fucking hell, Colonel. Don’t even think about it. You’re not Granger no longer. What happens in wartime happens. This has nothing to do with you now.’
The woman was sobbing. ‘Please help her.’
The grip on Granger’s arm tightened. ‘Not a good idea, Mr Swinekicker.’
Granger wrenched away from the other man. He walked up to the administrator’s desk and laid down his tickets. ‘Give me these two,’ he said.
The administrator didn’t even glance at the tickets. ‘I’m sorry, sir. These prisoners have already been claimed.’
‘What difference does it make?’ Granger insisted. ‘They’re randomly allocated.’
One of the men standing nearby glanced at the sobbing peasant woman, then turned to him and said, ‘She’s supposed to come with me, but I don’t need the trouble, mate.’ He held out his ticket. ‘I’ll trade you.’
Granger swapped tickets with the man. Then he approached the jailer holding the young girl. ‘What do you say?’
The other man made a dismissive gesture. ‘Forget it. I ain’t queuing up again.’ He handed his prison ledger to one of the administrators and stood there, studiously avoiding Granger’s eye. The administrator looked at the ledger, then looked at Granger.
Granger leaned close to the jailer and said, ‘One prisoner is as good as another.’
The other man shook his head. ‘I told you,’ he replied weakly. ‘I’m not interested.’ He rubbed sweat from his brow and stared intently down at the desk. Still, the official did nothing. The sun beat down on the plaza, on the administrators’ desks, on the assembled crowds. Finally the jailer turned to Granger and whispered, ‘I got another business to run, you know?’ He moistened his lips. ‘I can’t trade her for some old man.’
‘You paid extra for her?’
‘You know how it is, man.’
Granger placed his remaining ticket and his ledger on the desk. ‘Sign her over to me,’ he said to the administrator.
The administrator gazed blankly at the scrap of paper.
‘Do it,’ Granger hissed, ‘before I start using words like corruption and prostitution. Those terms are quite clearly defined in the Evensraum Convention.’
The jailer threw his ticket down. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Have her. What do I care?’ He snatched up his ledger and stormed away into the crowd.
Back in the launch, Granger felt like shivering despite the sun. What had he just done? His heart seemed to stutter as it wavered between feelings of responsibility and regret. He clutched his prison ledger in bloodless knuckles. Creedy steered the boat across the plaza, wrapped in a disapproving silence, while the two prisoners huddled together in the bow. Hana held her daughter tightly under a spare whaleskin cloak. She kept glancing over at Granger, a question burning in her eyes. The girl, Ianthe, stared absently across the brine, as though she wasn’t really seeing anything at all, as though the world around her didn’t really exist. She hadn’t looked at Granger once.
Nobody spoke until they’d left the open water and plunged into the canals of Francialle, when Creedy suddenly said, ‘Big mistake, Colonel. They’re prisoners, for god’s sake.’ He picked up his boat hook and pushed the hull away from a wall with an angry grunt. ‘They’d have been better off with anyone else in Ethugra.’ He let out a sarcastic laugh. ‘And it’s against the fucking law.’
Creedy was right, of course, and it shamed Granger to think he had finally fallen so low. His own father would have raged and beaten him over it, would have forced him to hand Hana and