REPOST: Besieged Fortress by A. J. Hall [post 1/2]
'Besieged Fortress' by A. J. Hall (formerly ajhalluk) is one of my favorite pieces of fanfiction. Since the first 6 parts were posted to a journal that has since been deleted, I asked the author for permission to repost them. I'm thrilled that she agreed! I'll be "properly" reccing this fic in an upcoming post (a friend asked for some Charioteer fic recs and I'm still working on the list), but for now I'll just say it's of the good and I think every Renault fan should read it :)
ETA: Post too large for LJ (ugh), so I had to split it. Sorry.

Besieged Fortress: Act I

Chapter One

Laurie/Ralph
PG-13
WIP
Usual disclaimers; these characters belong to the Estate of Mary Renault, and no money is being made out of my temporary purloining of them.

Warning: for those on my flist who may otherwise be disappointed, this fic bears no resemblance whatsoever to the summary posted earlier.

Seven years on, Ralph and Laurie have found a precarious refuge together in Gibraltar. But in the post-War world attitudes are hardening and positions becoming polarised, and they find themselves engaged in a new conflict, one in which they may not necessarily be on the same side. And then an unexpected visitor arrives -


Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again

The opening line of yesterday's film had stuck in Ralph's mind. It had, when he'd heard it, inescapably dragged him back to the first and last time he'd sailed into Rangoon, and his glorious few days' leave exploring up-country, even though (despite not having read the book) he knew that wasn't really the point.

Since that day the Japanese had torn their way down the peninsula, and been forced all the way back, step by step, by the dedicated weight of Chindits and Ghurkas and tough men from obscure little regiments from the odd rough parts of Britain, and Ralph had gloried in their triumph and never wanted to see what wounds they'd inflicted on magical Burma in the process. He kept his Mandalay safe inside his head, where no enemy could reach it.

Which, perhaps, had more relevance to the film than the simple coincidence in sound between two names, after all.

He hadn't expected to enjoy it, and certainly not expected it to be Laurie's cup of tea, but they'd had to go somewhere - that morning Laurie had had a typewritten letter from England, postmarked London and almost certainly from his publisher. When Ralph had got back from the shipping office (as ever, too many officers for too few berths, but the chance of a first officer's post on a big transatlantic mixed cargo carrier was in the offing; the owner's agent had been quietly encouraging and it was only a week or so away; the current first officer would clearly be discharged as soon as the boat touched land, and Gib was as close as anywhere, and the few days' grace was convenient, too, for Ralph's own plans) the door to his study had been firmly shut, and though Ralph had waited quietly in the living room, reading and jotting down notes in his hard-back note-book, he had heard no sound from the typewriter during the whole of the two hours it took before Laurie finally emerged. Through the open door behind he could see there was an overflowing ashtray next to the idle Imperial machine, though Laurie was a light smoker usually. The waste-paper basket was stuffed to the brim with the crumpled discards of aborted beginnings. Laurie's eyes were bistred around the orbits, and the stale cigarette smoke which hung about his hair and clothes was bitter like the taste of defeat. He looked across at Ralph as though daring him to say anything, but Ralph had already concluded by then that there was nothing he could reasonably say. There was something he could do, though, and he did it. Laurie turned, relaxing into the curve of his arm, warm against his chest, acknowledging without words his support as they made their way upstairs, where he did whatever skill and generosity suggested to assuage the corrosive pain of a long defeat.

Much later, as dusk was falling over the Rock and, through the strip of the skylight the first stars were beginning to appear, Ralph had propped himself up on his elbow, and said, "What you need is an evening out. Take your mind off things. If we hurry, we could get the last house at the flicks."

And, sleepily acquisecent (conscious, perhaps, of the need to get out of a house where the Imperial machine constantly expressed its own silent criticism?) Laurie had agreed; no matter what might be on offer at the antiquated and draughty little flea-pit down by the docks.

It had worked, too. Predictably, the film had broken down shortly before the second reel; he and Laurie (old hands by the standards of the transient Gibraltarian population) had first been among the group who had shouted advice to the hapless projectionist, and had then been the ones who piled in to assist physically with the repairs. Laurie, as it happened, had remembered the precise tweak to the antiquated and Bolshie equipment which set it right; the whole house (packed as they ever were; entertainment was scanty at this furthermost outpost of Europe) had erupted in cheers for his skill, and he had turned, caught for a moment in the projector's beam, and given the house a cheeky, gallant, sweeping player's bow: Ralph had caught his breath remembering (not that he had ever really forgotten!) a Laertes seen from the third row years ago.

And after the final credits the owner of the flea-pit, on the excuse of its being his birthday, had swept Ralph, Laurie, a handful of other regulars and the staff up and off for drinks at a bar down on the water-front, owned by Nikos, a Greek who'd been pushed out of Smyryna by the Turks in the '20s, and whom the fortunes of war had driven ever westward, so that only the Pillars of Hercules stood between him and what his remote, archaic ancestors had known as Ultima Thule. Ralph and the projectionist (who doubled as a tunny fisherman, and sometime smuggler) had got into an amused, technical argument in a mixture of English, Spanish and llanito about the last reel, and how practically one might bring off the job of scuttling a boat, leaving a corpse aboard, and getting ashore in a storm sufficiently violent to give credence to the notion of the whole thing having been a tragic accident, with Laurie throwing ever more farcical suggestions into the mix.

Very much later, when Laurie - the laughter gloriously back in his face, informing the crinkles around his mouth and the light in his eyes - and he had walked - a trifle unsteadily - back round the sweep of the harbour and up the hill towards their own house, he had congratulated himself; as someone who comes into a strange harbour beset by rocks (he remembered Saint Malo, that first time) might congratulate himself of having averted the perils the day afforded, and acquitted himself with credit.

But that had been before today. Someone had come round to the house while they were breakfasting with a note addressed to Laurie.

Laurie, having read it, wrinkled his forehead ruefully and passed it across to Ralph without comment.

Ralph took a sip of chicory-laden coffee - the proceeds of mutually profitable barter with the master of a tramp steamer registered out of Marseilles - and raised his eyebrows. "Edward Longenhurst? Cocktails this evening at the Rock Hotel? Who is this bloke?"

Laurie sighed. "He's my publisher's nephew. My publisher did actually ask if I'd look after him if he got to Gib, but I was rather hoping he'd forgotten. But in the circs -"

He spread a hand in a defeated-looking gesture which Ralph had no problem decoding: the history of missed deadlines, spent advances, and Laurie's self-evident fear that his own doubts about whether he could move beyond being the author of a critically and commercially acclaimed debut novel, now pushed aside in the public's mind by three intervening years of newer, sharper publishing sensations, were finally being shared by his publisher.

"Well," Ralph said, "however much of a stumer the chap turns out to be, I daresay we can both survive a few hours of it. What brings him to Gib?"

Laurie's voice was absolutely toneless. "He's on his way to Tangier. He plans - ah - to immerse himself completely in the culture of the country."

Their eyes met in perfect understanding.

"Well," Ralph said crisply, "in that case let's hope for his own sake he doesn't have an allergy to penicillin."

The subject disposed of, he turned his attention to considering the dying throes of the English county cricket season, in a week-old Times he had picked up at the shipping office.

Chapter Two

Longenhurst (his opening line had been "Do call me Teddy, dear boys," but Ralph had absolutely no intention of taking him up on the invitation, and had successfully avoided calling him anything for the whole of the evening so far) was in essence nothing more or less than experience had taught him to expect, but unimaginably dreadful when one came down to details.

In fact, a few hours into his acquaintance Ralph felt, in the words of Noel Coward, as if slimy things were crawling all over him.

He had not been in his presence more than a few minutes before realising that Longenhurst was one of those people who always made him acutely conscious of his maimed hand. Spud, too, was clearly on edge: there were little tense lines about his mouth and once, when Longenhurst had turned his gaze full on him, making as though he put his whole soul in the look, Ralph had seen his fingers tighten round the stem of his glass so convulsively he had feared it might snap.

And Longenhurst's attitude to Spud was without doubt the most objectionable thing about him: part hero-worshipping, part proprietorial, like a pilgrim ostentatiously performing his devotions in the shrine to a god he had invented himself.

They went from cocktails to a meal in a small restaurant overlooking the harbour whose philosophy was to catch it in the morning; land it in the afternoon; grill it in the evening. After that they moved on to Nikos' bar for more drinks.

Longenhurst, taking advantage of a brief absence on Laurie's part, leant confidentially over to Ralph.

"I'm sure someone in your line of work would know allabout the 'local colour'. So tell me, dear boy, where does one go if one wishes to make the end of the evening truly memorable, eh?"

Punching the bastard's fat face being off-limits, Ralph toyed briefly with the notion of directing him towards Alfonso's, a dive notorious even by the standards of Castle Steps.

Regretfully he abandoned the idea. It would hardly help Spud's relations with his publisher if his nephew fetched up robbed and rolled on his recommendation. Fighting back his revulsion at the assumptions about their relationship that must have driven Longenhurst to direct the question to him rather than to Laurie, Ralph fell back on the matelot's time-honoured resource of assumed stupidity.

"There's a night-club called Jackson's the Americans use a lot when they're in town," he said. "The jazz-band's particularly good, they tell me. And the cabaret girls are said to be very pretty. Not that night-clubs are much in my line, sorry."

And he smiled blandly back into Longenhurst's face, black murder in his heart, just as Laurie returned to the table.

Thereafter Longenhurst had directed his conversation pointedly towards Laurie, and confined its topic to a stream of bitchery about literary London, and its inhabitants, fulsomely comparing the giants of the literary world unfavourably to Laurie, in the face of which Spud became visibly more unhappy. In order to break up a long exposition, laced with amateur psychoanalysis and hints of intimate inner knowledge - which got broader as the wine circulated - about how an author Ralph happened to admire profoundly would never produce anything worth reading until he managed to conquer his "inhibitions and petty burgeois prejudices" Ralph said, "So - ah - Longenhurst, do you write yourself at all?"

Longenhurst turned towards him with a disbelieving expression on his jowly features, as though wondering why barbarians such as he were allowed indoors in the first place. Beside him Ralph felt Spud tense, as though just waiting for the starter's pistol to fire him into violent action. He gave him a tight, taut smile and a tiny shake of the head.

Longenhurst relaxed back into his chair suddenly, and topped up his glass. "Well, of course, I could hardly have expected you to hear about my little play. So far away from civilisation as you live - Laurie, my dear, I'm amazed you can stand it. Great talent needs a world stage on which to display itself, not some rough boards nailed together by peasants in a cowshed at the back of beyond."

He cast a glance here and there about the smoke-blackened bar; across at Niko, arguing with a couple of patrons - amiably enough but with the Levantine intensity which always makes it appear to the bystander as though knives will be drawn any minute - at Rodriguez and Philippe at the adjoining table, looking even more piratical than usual as they played backgammon and drank raki - at the motley assortment of paintings on the dark wood-panelled walls, which looked as if they had been purloinedfrom the attic of a Victorian merchant prince: an incongrous jumble in which The Monarch of The Glen confronted The Raft of the Medusa - and raised an eyebrow pointedly.

Laurie, whose clear skin always showed anger or embarassment vividly, flushed dark red.

Hatred - simple, incadescent and unadultered - flowed momentarily through Ralph's veins. He had, however, not lost his ability to become icier rather than hotter the greater the provocation offered him. And this appalling man could do Laurie harm if allowed. He made as though the by-play had passed over him completely, and put a note of polite interest into his voice.

"So, has your play been a success?"

Longenhurst turned towards him, and tittered.

"Well, a succès de scandale certainly. I had found a management who actually had the vision and the courage to put it into production. But then I got the most horrid letter from the Lord Chamberlain - saying that "it represented the foetid outpourings of an infinitely degraded imagination" and that "he could not imagine any possible changes which would make it a work which could properly be performed on the British stage" - oh, and that "he would feel he would have betrayed his office entirely if anything of that sort ever appeared in the theatre during his lifetime"."

He paused for breath and as though, Ralph thought suddenly, he was waiting for a round of applause. No doubt, when he told the story back in his accustomed haunts, he got one.

Longenhurst waved a plump white hand in an excitable gesture.

"But lots of people realised they simply couldn't stand by and let Art be ground down by these petty little bureaucrats. So they formed a network of private theatre clubs, and the cast - such dear, brave boys! - volunteered to perform for a positive pittance to show their support. Of course, everyone was in deadly fear of police raids, so the tickets had to be circulated in the most immense secrecy, and we didn't confirm the venues until the last possible minute - it felt just as it must have done for those poor, misguided, gallant people in the Resistance!"

Ralph choked back a sudden impulse towards horrified, helpless laughter. He was hardly sure whether to hope that Philippe's English was too bad to pick up the reference, or to pray that he'd understood: Philippe had lost his right eye and large parts of that side of the face when the charges he'd been putting under a set of points on the line between Toulouse and Paris had detonated prematurely, and his current residence in Gibraltar was rumoured to be as a result of post war differences with a rival group of Maquis, which had made it advisable for him to leave France in a hurry for the sake of his health.

And then another thought -a fugitive memory - struck him, and, his eyes dancing (how Laurie would love the details later, when they would have leisure to discuss it) - he murmured,

"Actually, you know, I believe a friend of mind did mention in his last letter he'd seen it - Alec, you know," he added parenthetically for Laurie's benefit.

"Oh?" Longenhurst turned eagerly towards him. "And what did he think?"

The impulse to laugh got stronger. For once in their respective lives Alec and the Lord Chamberlain seemed to be uncannily similiar in their opinions, though Alec had expressed them in saltier language. Ralph could only hope that the man had been worth it - there had to have been an ulterior motive for Alec's presence at what was evidently vomit-making tosh of the worst sort.

"I'm not sure if he got much out of it, actually," Ralph said demurely.

Longenhurst looked faintly disappointed, but before he could pursue the matter Laurie said, distantly,

"I didn't know you'd had a letter from Alec."

At the breath of accusation in the tone Longenhurst's head went up; like a shark scenting the faintest wisp of blood in the water. Ralph cursed inwardly, as his mind raced. Surely he'd told Laurie about Alec's letter, hadn't he? And then his stomach lurched - of course, it had come in a week ago, on the morning of the last and worst of their recent rows, and he'd planned to tell Laurie the gossip when things had calmed down a bit, and of course he'd forgotten -

And now blasted Longenhurst was sitting there, all ears, drinking it in all in -

"Didn't I tell you? It came in last Wednesday -" with any luck Laurie would pick up on the date and draw his own conclusions "- but he must have written it a couple of months ago - so far as I can tell the post had sent it round by everywhere including Wagga Wagga. You know, Longenhurst, I expect Nelson got his mail quicker than we do out here. That that gets here is late, and half of it doesn't arrive at all."

"And how is he?" Laurie's voice was politely interested; he'd seen Longenurst's sickening eagerness at the hint of a possible rift too, obviously. Ralph shrugged.

"OK, I think. Doing well professionally: he's got a new post as an anaesthetist at one of the big London hospitals." Ralph remembered something else, and grinned. "Being driven to distraction by some kid of a nurse who's contracted a major crush on him and won't take no for an answer."

And Laurie murmured something suitable, and it might all have passed over - one more minor niggle in the overall ghastliness of the evening - when Tómas appeared in the bar.

Had there been just a second's more grace before Tómas spotted him he would have made a pretext of going to the lavatory, and intercepted Tómas on the way, but before he could do so Tómas had threaded his way through the bar, and was grinning down at Ralph from his full six-foot two, his teeth startlingly white in his deeply tanned face.

Longenhurst was openly eating him alive with his eyes, from the crisply curled blue-black hair springing back from his brow down to his espadrilles (donned purely for the sake of propriety - Ralph had little doubt that Tómas's stong high-arched peasant feet were tough enough to walk across broken glass if need be).

Tómas paid him as little attention as the hunting leopard pays to the mosquito. He nodded civilly to Laurie, turned to Ralph and said, in English,

"Señor Lanyon? I have just come from the harbour. The levanter has been blowing since late afternoon, and its force is increasing. You may wish to check the mooring lines on your boat."

His English was perfect, but his delivery stilted. He sounded like someone who had learned his speech by rote, to convey a quite different coded message beneath bland and conventional phrases.

It didn't help, of course, that that assessment was nothing more than the exact truth.

Ralph got to his feet. "I better had go and check, Spud. Those warps aren't the newest. Catch up with you later."

He dipped a cool nod of departure towards Longenhurst. As he rose to follow Tómas he caught Longenhurst's lingering, knowing glance after them. Laurie, he spotted, had seen the glance too, and his face was contorted in fury - and, to complete the circle, Longenhurst had seen that expression, too, and was self-evidently drawing his own conclusions.

Ralph mentally shrugged, and ducked out after Tómas into the strengthening gale lashing the harbour-side.

Chapter Three

By the time Ralph had finished at the harbour the windows of the bar were dark. He made his way up the steep streets - he worried daily about the strain on Laurie's knee, but the house had fallen available so opportunely, and now he could imagine nowhere else as home - and saw that the light was spilling out through the gaps in the shutters onto the wet cobbles.

Laurie looked up as he entered, his expression reserved rather than accusing. Nevertheless, Ralph felt his voice sounded a little too hearty as he divested himself of his streaming jacket, and said,

"Sorry I had to leave you with that incredible piece of work. What can his parents have been thinking of, not to drown him in the waterbutt before his eyes opened?"

He strode across to the sideboard and poured himself a stiff brandy, gesturing enquiringly with the decanter at Laurie, who, unexpectedly, accepted.

"He tried to persuade me to 'open my eyes' about you and Tómas."

Laurie's voice had gone toneless again. Ralph made his own voice as brisk as if he were reassuring some middy two weeks out of Dartmouth that there was nothing to fear from an Atlantic storm.

"Oh? I trust you told him Tómas has a wife and family on each side of the Pillars of Hercules?"

That got a reaction. Laurie reddened in annoyance.

"Oh? And how was I supposed to do that without being able to tell him what you were doing together?"

There wasn't, particularly, anything he could say to that. He shrugged. Laurie's colour got more intense.

"Anyway, after I'd told him three or four times that I really didn't intend to talk about it, eventually he patted me on the hand and said that I had broken his heart, but that his illusions would have been shattered forever if my idealism hadn't matched my beauty. And then he burst into tears."

"God!" Ralph felt his face twisting with disgust. "If I'd been there - So what did you do?"

Laurie shrugged. "Well, he was pretty much stinking by then, of course. Nikos was on the point of shutting up, and he and that Negro bouncer of his - Ali Bey, you know - helped me get Longenhurst back to The Rock. Where we dumped him, and fled. Exeunt, severally, in divers directions. I just hope he didn't do anything horrific after we left him. Like make a pass at the doorman."

"The staff there are used to it," Ralph said. "Henri-Auguste claims those aren't wages he pays, they're hush money."

That brought a very faint thawing about Laurie's lips. He compressed them again with an effort and said, "Well, anyway? What did the two of you decide? I suppose you're going tomorrow, then?"

The accusing note was back in his voice.

Ralph made himself sound as non-committal as possible.

"Yes." The wind was banging the shutter - something was loose up there. He'd better fix it in the morning before Laurie tried doing something stupid in his absence. That leg had no business up step-ladders; he'd told him before. He nodded towards the sound. "That'll have blown through by tomorrow night, and there's no moon. Expect me to be away a couple of nights - no, make that three for luck."

"And you have to go?"

It was not, Ralph knew, a true question; rather as with a pair of chess players who have matched themselves against each other for years, and know each other's game inside out it merely represented a conventional opening move in an argument which could (and had, over the last year or so) run through any number of well-worn variants.

With the benefit of long practice, and mindful of the strain which was apparent in every muscle of Laurie's face (and no wonder; praise for his work from a moral imbecile like Longenhurst must have eaten deep into the fragile places of his soul) Ralph selected the most gentle of the available counters.

"You shouldn't fret so, Spud. I know you can't help finding three sides to any given question, but here and now, as we are, I can only see one. Less than two miles in that direction - " he gestured towards the North-West - "is one of the oldest civilisations in Europe, a place where they had piped water and street lighting, scientifically based medicine and optics when the princes of England were sleeping in draughty barns with filthy rushes on the floor. And now look at it! There are dirt-poor countries in Africa better off than Spain is today. And all to shore up the ambition of a man who let Hitler use the most beautiful cities of his own country as practice bombing ranges."

Long ago, it seemed now, Ralph had spent a weekend's precious leave in Le Havre with a chance-met Cambridge undergraduate who'd thrown up his studies on impulse, and was on his way to Spain. The boy had spent the whole weekend - when not otherwise occupied - trying to persuade Ralph to desert his ship and join the International Brigade with him. And Ralph had laughed, and wondered once again at the perverse human facility for throwing away all the shining gifts placed in easy reach in front of one in favour of chasing some will-o'-the wisp on the edge of vision; almost impossible to catch and bound to disappoint if you succeeded.

But then Ralph had seen the devastating effects of the bombardments on the great ports of Spain, and, later, the corrosive day-to-day hopelessness of living under a dictator's iron hand, and the dictates of a mediaeval and rigidly authoritarian Church.

He wondered, briefly, if the young man - what had his name been? - would be touched to think that a decade later his words had born fruit. If he'd survived, of course.

Laurie shrugged, his tone dismissive.

"So - to keep the lamp of civilisation alive - you ship them tobacco and french letters?"

Ralph tried not to let his anger colour his voice; Laurie had had a far worse day than he, and if Laurie thought he'd managed to conceal that the leg was obviously giving him gip then he didn't know him as well as he thought he did.

"I don't run anything I'm ashamed of. There are cargoes I've shifted on Merchant Marine boats I've felt a damn sight less clean about being involved with. I've spent all my adult life getting cargo from A to B. It's what I do. And, Spud, that's all we're talking about. And the fact that the Generalissimo isn't seeing a penny of duty on any of it makes me happier than you can possibly imagine."

The air of wounded disillusionment which hung about Laurie's lips deepened.

"And you don't think that a decorated war hero should aim a bit higher?"

Ralph's voice came out terser than he'd meant.

"Actually, from where I was standing at the time, 90% of the Battle of the Atlantic was an exercise in getting groceries from one place to another in the teeth of opposition, too."

Laurie made a small noise of exasperation.

"Oh, drop the false mdoesty! No-one else would compare two and a half years in corvettes to delivering groceries."

Ralph exhaled. He considered telling Laurie that he hadn't intended it as a comparison, simply a description, but he couldn't think of a way of expressing that without its sounding snotty. Those who hadn't been on the Atlantic convoys - even the best of them - never really got the point. But you only had to see how quickly the decencies and niceties that one took for granted deteriorated beyond human comprehension when supply lines failed, to realise that "grocery delivery" was a damn sight more elevated a calling - damn near spiritual, in some circumstances - than anything a pampered ass like Longenhurst - who no doubt had sat out the war in a reserved occupation complaining about the scanty monotony of the food on his plate, without ever sparing a thought for those who had got it there - had ever managed to contribute to the sum of human happiness or the preservation of civilisation.

Anyway, the reference to the war had diverted Laurie onto another tack.

"I only wish you'd taken the full commission they'd offered you at the end of the war."

This, too, was an old argument.

"What? And driven a desk in Pompey for the rest of my career in the Navy?"

Something else he recollected from the mix of gossip and news of old friends in Alec's letter prompted him to add,

"However short that might have been, these days."

Laurie looked sharply across at him.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Ralph shrugged. "It wasn't just missing fingers the Navy was prepared to turn a blind eye to when they were desperate for commanders. Awkward questions somehow never got asked. But things are coming more to a point these days. It wouldn't take much. A word in the wrong ear. Someone commenting that he hadn't seen me bring anyone to the Victory anniversary ball or any other official gala day, ever. Or something being picked up on one of those random background checks the Yanks are insisting on, if you're doing anything remotely hush-hush with their people."

Laurie nodded, unhappily, acknowledging the point. And then he got round to what Ralph had known he was driving towards all along.

"If they catch you, you could end up being shot."

"I doubt it. Smuggling in these parts has been part of the fabric for hundreds of years. Have you ever read the Treaty of Utrecht? The Guardia Civil are doing too well out of bribes to start turning it into a blood sport this late in the day. The worst that's likely to happen if they catch us is that we'll lose the launch, and we'll have to bribe our way out of jail."

Actually, given what he and Tómas had discussed about their cargo this time, that was not strictly true. But there was no point in worrying Spud, and Ralph had no intention of getting caught, in any event.

Unhappily, Laurie nodded. By way of changing the subject, he recounted some absurdity of literary London which Longenhurst had shared after Ralph's departure. Ralph, playing along, topped up their glasses again, and told him the rest of Alec's gossip. Under the yellow of the lamplight the evening petered out in the sleepy warmth of settled companionship.

Chapter Four

Ralph came up on deck fully prepared to give their passenger the tongue-lashing he deserved: though yesterday's levanter had blown through it had left its legacy in the form of a steep, tumbling, confused sea. Nor - though the tide was running with them, and the lethal race would not form until it turned - were the overfalls off Europa Point anything to play games with in these conditions; if it wasn't that the inshore passage was less open to the scrutiny of prying eyes they'd have been standing four or five miles out to sea by now.

As if to emphasise the point the sole of Ralph's sea-boot skidded a little under him. He swore under his breath. The passenger's shoes - originally craftsman-made to the standards appropriate for a distinguished professor of philosophy, formerly of the University of Salamanca, then self-evidently hoarded, and mended and resoled for years more than their owner could possibly have imagined would be necessary when they were newly bought - would have all the gripping power of polished glass on the steel deck, awash with the spray kicked up by their rapid passage. If their passenger were to go over the side now, God help him in this sea and in the darkness of the new moon.

But the man's attitude as he stood gripping the launch's rail, looking back at the almost invisible bulk of the land behind them, caused the words Ralph had been planning to utter to die unborn on his lips. Being forced to choose between exile or death must be bad enough for anyone, and the man was, after all, nearing seventy. He had lost everything over the last few years: family, position, an audience for his writings, and his chances of ever seeing his homeland again must be scanty.

He pitched his voice to carry, and said, in Spanish, "Don Miguel! I am sorry, but I must ask you to come below at once. You cannot safely remain on deck in these conditions."

Don Miguel Muños Guittierez turned, moving rather like a sleepwalker. Ralph put out a hand to steady his steps, and held the heavy door open for him. As he passed through he looked back over the port quarter to Spain for one last time, and murmured something: not, this time, in Spanish.

Ralph found himself automatically translating the familiar words in his head.

But if you go forth, returning evil for evil and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy, for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us. Listen, then, to us and not to Krito.

As easily as though he were continuing a conversation which had been going on for some time, Ralph said, "But perhaps, if it had been the Thirty not the Demos who had condemned him, Socrates might have answered Krito differently? He could hardly say that he had made any covenants with the tyrants who usurped the Government of Athens, or that he had voluntarily chosen to live under their laws without compulsion or deception."

The Professor turned sharply towards him. He spread his hands apologetically.

"Forgive me, señor. I am intruding on your thoughts."

Guittierez shook his head. "No, on the contrary. It is I who should ask for forgiveness. It occurs to me that I have been a most awkward passenger, and that when the risks you are taking for me are not trivial. Like the Thirty, the present Government of my country is not gentle with those who defy its dictates. But you are not - if you will excuse my saying so - the sort of man I had expected to be engaged in business of this type."

There was nothing Ralph could reasonably say to that. He did his best.

"Well," he said, "it's something that's been said to me before. Usually accompanied with an earnest request that I stop." And he grinned.

Guittierez inclined his head gravely, but there was a hint of laughter, too, about the finely carved lips in the austere patrician face.

"For my part, I am glad that that request has - to date - been declined."

The old man was looking weary, though, and more than a little nauseated. Ralph showed him to a bunk, fastened his lee-cloth for him, and went to relieve Tómas at the helm. It was a long haul to Oran, even at the speeds the launch could achieve, and he foresaw there would be little time spare to discuss the dialogues of Plato. But the seas, away from the influence of the Strait, were already beginning to calm, and the stars were coming out: the thick-sprinkled broken-glass glitter one only saw on moonless nights well out from land. He was humming from sheer-lightheartedness as he took the wheel.

Two days later as he climbed the hill from Gilbraltar harbour Ralph still felt like humming. Guittierez had been safely consigned to the plane to Paris (by now those who had funded his flight into exile would no doubt already have received him with open arms). Financially the trip had been more than worth it: he was, by now, appreciably nearer the day when he'd be able to wrest himself free of ship-owners and their whims forever. There was much one could do, in this post-War world, plenty of chances to get in on the ground floor. All it needed was capital. And the French - even in their North African outposts - still knew how to live. His duffle bag was packed with tangible evidence of that.

So early in the morning there was nothing more than the odd cat stirring in the streets. The sky had a pale pearly sheen; the day would be hot, then. Perhaps he and Laurie would go swimming, later.

Ralph turned the corner which led towards his street and almost stumbled over someone standing there peering helplessly at the street sign; a man, too heavily dressed for the weather, in a thick well-worn British overcoat, a battered suitcase resting against his legs.

He looked up.

"Excuse me? Do you by any chance speak English? Can you tell me -" and then his voice changed, the polite nothingness to a chance-met stranger shattering, turning into something sharper, more desperate. "Oh, thank God. It is you."

Ralph managed to get his arm out just in time to catch him as Alec, the effort of holding himself together suddenly becoming impossible, crumpled muzzily where he stood.

# Act I: chapters 5-6 + links to the rest of the fic.