The owner of the men’s club acted very glad to see us, and eagerly got every detail of the fight from us, but he steadfastly claimed to have no knowledge of our assailants. The girls there were of no help, either, even when we offered to make anyone who helped us rich.
Judah ben Salomon was missing. He hadn’t been seen since the night of the fight.
There was no such thing as a lawyer on the Western Islands. When I first learned this fact, months before, I’d claimed that it proved that these people were totally civilized. Now that I wanted to sue somebody, my opinions were a lot different.
Adam tried to see the archbishop, but was unable to get an appointment.
I was able to see the warlock, but he maintained that he was as mystified by the situation as we were.
Even the priest who was still giving Adam lessons in the local religion couldn’t or wouldn’t answer his questions about who our adversaries were, or why they were out to do us damage. After a while, Adam stopped going to the classes.
“There is only one way that a blanket of silence this thick can be held down this tight,” I told Adam one night. “It has to be all three of the high mucketymucks working together.”
“Yah. I’ll be a whole lot happier when we get The Brick Royal in the water.”
“Me, too. I think I’ll start lending you a hand, tomorrow morning.”
* * *
A week later, in the short grey dawn of the tropics, we were all awakened by shouts of “FIRE!”
I dressed as quickly as possible, but even so, I was the last one out of the house and into the hallway. Buckets in hand, hundreds of people were streaming by, so I followed along with the hurrying crowd. The people here all had various civic duties to perform when an emergency occurred, and helping to fight a fire was one of them. I didn’t have a bucket, and I wasn’t sure where one was stored, but everyone on the island took their duties very seriously. I dared not appear to be a shirking coward because of going back to the house and searching for a fire bucket.
One wouldn’t have thought that a fire would be a great danger on the Western Isles, since the houses, hallways, and businesses were all carved out of the living rock, and thus should be fireproof. The furnishings were spare, and normally kept too far apart for a flame to propagate between them. All that I could imagine was that a warehouse somewhere was going up, and, most unfortunately, I turned out to be right.
In a few minutes, I got to a place where I could smell smoke, and I realized that the all-too-familiar smell was that of burning fuel oil. Suddenly, I knew that The Brick Royal was burning, and all our property, all our plans, and all our hopes were burning with her.
A bucket brigade was already set up, and sea water was already being energetically thrown on the blaze. The people were remarkably efficient, except that what they were doing was exactly the wrong thing to do with an oil fire!
Adam was already on the scene, and trying to take over command from the local equivalent of a fire chief. Nobody would listen to him, or to us, when I added my shouts to Adam’s. The Westronese volunteers with the buckets were all well trained for the emergency, and they didn’t need any damn foreigners trying to interfere with their noble rescue efforts.
Volunteer rescue people are like that everywhere. They train and train, working long, hard, and thankless hours, all in the hopes of one day being in the position of doing something heroic, something meaningful, something that can justify their otherwise humdrum lives. When that once in a lifetime chance finally comes, they are not about to waste it just because somebody they never met before is shouting at them. They want the shouter to get out of the way so that they can continue being heroic.
Adam went on trying to explain to them the dangers of throwing water on an oil fire, but I knew that it was hopeless. In calmer times, they would be glad to hear from him about the three classes of fires, and what to do about each of them, but not now.
I sadly shook my head and walked away. I went to a place where I could see inside the mouth of the warehouse-cave that we had rented months ago.
Everything was burning. The boat. The electronic equipment. The life raft with all its emergency stuff. The cargo that I had been purchasing. It obviously could be nothing but a total loss. I could see fuel oil spilling in flames out of the ruptured tanks in the hull, running on the floor, and being spread further by the water that the fools were throwing at it.
I saw the cathode ray tube in the old-style television implode, blowing shattered glass and burning plastic around the huge room, and out on the people who were still throwing in buckets of water. Cans and jars of food were exploding as well, with some pickles quenching a bit of the fire, and the ubiquitous cans of Spam adding their grease to the flames.
As things got hotter, I saw bits of cement crumble and fall from the glowing steel ribs of our once-magnificent ship. It was gone.
It was all gone, and there was no hope left for us at all. I sat down on the ground, with my arms on my knees and my head on my arms, and I cried.
Later that day, as Adam and I were going through the mess, seeing what, if anything, there was that could be salvaged, the warlock came by.
“I was devastated to hear about all this,” he said. “I came as soon as I could. Can you save anything?”
“Not much,” I said. “The gold and silver coins were in fireproof strongboxes, but just about everything else is gone. Great, huh? The only things that couldn’t be hurt by the fire were the only things protected from it.”
“The air compressor was out on the shore near the SCUBA equipment and the snorkeling stuff, so it’s okay, but there isn’t enough diesel fuel left out there to run the compressor for more than a day or two. I’m afraid that we won’t be able to stop your island from sinking after all,” Adam said.
“Couldn’t we operate the compressor manually?” the warlock asked. “Or better still, we’ve still got those solar cells of yours, and that windcharger you two set up for us. Perhaps we could run it electrically.”
“Maybe,” Adam said. “But we don’t have any batteries anymore, and we don’t have an electric motor left of any description, let alone one big enough. That diesel engine on the compressor may not look like much, but it puts out five brake horsepower. A fit human being can put out maybe a tenth of a horsepower on a continuous basis. Do you see a way to connect fifty people to the shaft of the compressor? Well, I don’t, not with what we have available.”
“What about the windcharger, mate?”
“That thing might be able to generate one horsepower, if the wind is perfect,” I said.
“But you two are so resourceful, I’m sure that you could come up with something.”
“There’s a certain problem of motivation,” Adam said. “This fire didn’t just happen, you know. The lighting here was electric, and there weren’t any open flames. Even if something started leaking by itself, diesel fuel isn’t that easy to start on fire. It’s fairly safe stuff, and that’s the main reason why we powered the boat with a diesel engine, rather than with a smaller and lighter-weight gasoline motor.”
“What Adam’s saying is that somebody on this island started the fire, deliberately. I’d be convinced of it even if we hadn’t been assaulted a few weeks ago, but now the pattern is all too clear. Somebody here doesn’t want us around.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “First they tried to kill us, and now they’ve burned almost everything we had. Now, I’ve got a question for you, Mister Warlock. One of your men was supposed to have been on guard here last night. We were paying for three guards to be on duty at all times, following the same pattern that you people set up when we first got here. One from the church, one from the duke, and one from you wizards. Now we can’t find any of the guys who were supposed to be here. Somehow, they are all gone, and there weren’t any dead bodies in the ashes.”
“Surely, you’re not suggesting that I had anything to do with these problems that you’ve been having!”
“It was one of your people, Judah ben Salomon, who set us up for the beating we got a few weeks ago,” I said. “And nobody seems to have seen anything of him since.”