The Song of Phaid the Gambler

by Mick Farren

  This and many other tribunals were working overtime as the uprising gained strength. Despite their not incon­siderable achievements, the rebels were as jumpy and paranoid as the President's Court. Many of them saw spies and enemies of the people in every shadow, complaints and denunciations flew like hailstones in a storm. Each one had to be investigated, and to simplify matters the tribunals handed down only one penalty, and that was death by hanging.

  Some members of the underground objected that the revolt would destroy itself by carrying out its purges before it had even achieved victory, but their voices went unheeded. The tribunals ran at full power, and the turnover was rapid.

  Phaid had only been in the Angel of Destiny for a matter of two hours when a pair of stern faced guards informed him that he had been denounced as a parasite, traitor and spy. He'd been locked in a storeroom over­night with a bunch of other depressed and frightened individuals. In the morning he was marched in front of the tribunal to discover what he'd intuitively known and feared. It had been Makartur who had denounced him.

  The tribunal had convened in a small back room of the Angel of Destiny. When the place had been a regular roadside tavern, it had probably been the manager's office. It was now used for the rebels' less public business. Despite the cramped conditions, a further half-dozen people had crowded in to watch the proceedings.

  The revolution hadn't been running for long enough to have developed its own ritual or ceremony. There was, however, a certain dignity to it, the kind of dignity that comes when a length of rope and a high place to hang it from would perhaps become the fate of one of those present.

  Phaid looked carefully at each of his judges in turn. It needed a three to two majority one way or the other to either hang him or set him free. All this had been carefully explained to him by D'Wan, the middle-aged woman who seemed to be acting as chairperson of the tribunal.

  Looking at Blue Eyes, he felt that he could count on some measure of, if not sympathy, at least understanding from the small man. He hoped that he could expect a measure of the same from Flame. D'Wan seemed deter­mined to be absolutely fair, but the two northsiders were harder to gauge. Their faces were grim and impassive, and Phaid feared that they might simply decide to have him hanged for running after the kind of good life that had alway been beyond their grasp.

  Standing guessing, however, wasn't going to do him very much good. D'Wan was already beginning to look a little impatient, so Phaid took a deep breath and launched into the defence that he hoped was going to save his neck.

  'I wouldn't attempt to deceive any of you by claiming that I have led a blameless life. I have lived as a drifter and a gambler for most of my days. Sometimes I have had to use sleight of hand and deception to survive.'

  D'Wan looked up sharply.

  'By sleight of hand and deception are you saying that you cheat?'

  Phaid nodded.

  'It's happened.'

  'So Makartur's testimony is correct?'

  'In that respect, yes. What he neglected to tell you was that we first met in the steerage class of a land crawler, how later we had to work the veebe herds because we didn't have the price of passage as far as the Republic. Does this sound like the behaviour of someone who would throw in his lot with courtiers and aristocrats?'

  D'Wan glanced at Makartur.

  Markatur nodded woodenly.

  'Aye, it's true, but . . .'

  'That's all we need to know at the moment. Please continue, Citizen Phaid.'

  'I was born among simple hill people where life was hard. I ran away when I was a kid and since that time I've made my own chances. I may have been luckier than some . . .' he glanced significantly at the two northsiders '. . . but I took what breaks were offered to me. I've travelled across half this world. I've crossed the icefields and the burning plains, and met literally thousands of people. I admit that there are some whom I've cheated and some whom I might have robbed in my wanderings, but they were always the ones who would have done the same to me. It's always the greedy who are the easiest to cheat.'

  One of the northsiders who had been staring intently at Phaid jumped in with a question.

  'This is real moving stuff, but it doesn't explain why you have been seen in the company of courtiers. You don't deny that you have contacts among those people, do you?'

  Phaid shook his head.

  'I don't deny it, I know some courtiers. I've already told you that I live by my wits. It's natural I should go where the pickings are the richest.'

  Flame brushed her luxurious red hair away from her eyes.

  'Do you count the women of the court among these pickings?'

  'Some of them are very attractive, and some have been attracted to me.'

  Marden the northsider scowled.

  'They make sure they have the best of everything.'

  Flame glanced at him and then gave Phaid a hard look. 'So you didn't object to being a plaything of court whores.'

  'I wouldn't have exactly put it that way, but I confess I find it hard to reject a beautiful woman.'

  Phaid smiled directly at Flame as he concluded the answer but her expression didn't soften. She totally ignored the implied flattery. D'Wan also didn't seem amused. Phaid hoped that the men, at least, were falling for the way he was selling himself as a freewheeling, likeable rogue.

  Those hopes were shattered as Lank tapped the wallet that Roni-Vows had given him with a thick index finger.

  'How do you account for this money you just happen to be carrying?'

  'It was given to me by a courtier named Roni-Vows.'

  Every face in the room registered shock. It was D'Wan who put the shock into words.

  'That man is one of the worst of our enemies. That you accepted money from him is a serious admission.'

  Phaid knew that he was running a desperate gamble, but it was too late to stop now.

  'He owed it to me.'

  'He owed it to you?'

  'I whipped his ass at imperial hazard. When I go after the rich I go hard. Would you have it any other way?'

  To his relief, Phaid saw four of the tribunal noticeably relax. Marden and Blue Eyes even permitted themselves faint smiles. Only Flame seemed unconvinced.

  'Are you sure this wasn't your payment for being a presidential agent?'

  Phaid, feeling that he had the others at least halfway on his side, gave Flame a contemptuous look.

  'Those are my winnings. The only way I could prove it would be to call Roni-Vows as a witness, and I doubt that he would recognise this tribunal, even if we could get him to attend.'

  Phaid was now certain that he had most of the room on his side. When D'Wan asked him if he had anything else to say in his defence, he almost told her that he hadn't. It was only a last moment caution against over confidence that prompted him to keep going.

  'I'd like to ask my accuser, Citizen Makartur, a few questions.'

  'Ask whatever questions you want.'

  Phaid turned to face Makartur. The hillman looked as if he could happily tear Phaid's head loose from his shoul­ders.

  'What do you want to ask me, little man?'

  Phaid screwed up all his courage. It was time to play his only card and find out if the dream was anything more than an anxious nightmare.

  'I'm wondering why you've chosen to denounce me in this way. We travelled together and even fought side by side. I don't recall doing anything to harm you, and yet you're doing your damnedest to get me hung. I could ask you a lot of questions about why you're doing this, but it's neither the time nor the place.' Phaid paused for effect. 'All I want to know is where you got the idea that I was busy selling out the revolution.'

  Makartur regarded Phaid with cold, murderous eyes.

  'I meditated on you.'

  Phaid's jaw dropped. His rhetoric completely deserted him.

  'You meditated?'

  'For many long nights. You always disturbed me, and I went to my ancestors for answers. They finally came to me and I was taken t
hrough the first gate; it was then that all became clear. You were marked as the betrayer. There is death between you and me, Citizen Phaid.'

  Phaid felt a terrible internal cold. The dream was something out of the primitive, mystic past. It was fright­ening and yet it had also given Phaid an unbeatable advantage. The spectators were already nudgine each other and nodding towards Makartur. All he had to do was resist overplaying his hand.

  'So it was your dead ancestors who put the finger on me?

  'You may mock, but the truth will come out in the end. A death still lies between the two of us.'

  Again Phaid felt the chill, but quickly shrugged it off. He faced the tribunal with all the deference he could muster.

  'I don't think I have anything else to say.'

  D'Wan nodded.

  'If you will remove yourself from the room, the tribunal will make its decision in your case.'

  Escorted by two guards, Phaid was led outside. Even though he was certain-that he had it made, it wasn't a comfortable feeling standing around in a passage that had originally led from the bar to the men's room while five people decided whether they were going to hang him or not. The guards studiously avoided his eyes until the door opened and Phaid was summoned back inside. Everyone looked very serious. For one hideous moment, Phaid wondered if it had all gone wrong. Had they decided to hang him after all, just to be on the safe side? Then D'Wan was addressing him.

  'The tribunal has taken a vote and, by a majority of four to one, we have determined that you have not acted against the people's interests and are therefore not an enemy of the people. You are free to go . . .' D'Wan hesitated and held a muttered discussion with her col­leagues, '. . . at least, you are provisionally free to go. We do feel that you have fallen into error and we recommend that you attend a course of political education to ensure that you don't fall into such error a second time.'

  Phaid missed most of the part about political education. He wasn't paying attention. He was trying to figure out which of the tribunal had wanted to see him hang. This wasn't purely an academic interest. There was always the chance that whoever it was might feel like short circuiting democracy by taking a private shot at him. He hadn't quite made up his mind when one of the spectators leaped forward brandishing his fist in the face of the tribunal.

  'Outrage! You are as bad as him! You all ought to die!'

  The objector was an awkwardly tall, angular individual, in an overcoat that would have disgraced a scarecrow. His face was haggard and crazy eyes stared out from deep hollow sockets. He waved a spindly arm towards Phaid.

  'He has no right to live! He is a parasite, as bad an oppressor as anyone inside the Palace. When Day One comes he and all those like him will be eliminated.'

  D'Wan angrily got to her feet.

  'If you people were allowed to execute everyone you thought was an enemy of the people, the city would be turned into a ghost town.'

  It might have been the truth, but it wasn't the best way to calm down a Day Oner. His eyes flashed with an even crazier light.

  'We will do what is necessary. Day One is all around us.'

  He fumbled under his shapeless overcoat and dragged out a long barrelled blaster. He swung it wildly towards Phaid. Phaid threw himself flat on the floor. The blaster went off, and showers of hot ash cascaded down from the ceiling. Phaid found himself enmeshed in a tangle of legs as the Day Oner was wrestled to the ground and dragged away howling and protesting.

  It was only when he was sure that there was no chance of the madman coming back for a second shot that he risked getting to his feet. The tribunal was leaving the small, and now smoke filled, room. As she passed him, Flame shot him a glance of the purest venom. Phaid jerked back from the realisation that it had been she who had tried to vote him to death.

  With alarming suddeness, it all fell into place. He thought about the red hair and the pale, freckled skin, then he thought about Makartur and cursed himself for not making the connection sooner. They probably both came from the same background, the same cold hard hills. They might even belong to the same tribe. There was a good chance that they even shared the same ancient, outlawed religion.

  Although Phaid had come through the tribunal with his head intact, there was still the problem of Makartur. It wasn't going to go away. It was a terrible feeling to know that the ancient rituals could still operate in this huge urban sprawl. He knew that Makartur wouldn't rest until one of them was dead. He didn't hold out too many hopes that he could kill the big warrior. The first thing that he should do was to put as much distance between the two of them as possible.

  While Phaid stood, still turning all this over in his mind, one of his erstwhile guards tapped him on the shoulder.

  'Come on, Jack. It's time to get going.'

  Phaid grinned.

  'Damn right. I got to get out of here.'

  The guard looked surprised.

  'Out of here? Where do you think you're going?'

  It was Phaid's turn to be surprised.

  'Back to the city centre, of course.'

  Sensing this might not have been the most tactful thing to say, he quickly added a weak explanation.

  'That's where I can be the most useful.'

  'You ain't going anywhere out of this area.'

  'Huh? The tribunal cleared me.'

  'The tribunal recommended you for political education.'

  'Yeah, but wait a minute, I . . .'

  'You're joining a study group whether you like it or not.'

  'What happens in a study group?'

  The guard smiled nastily.

  'You'll find out.'

  Over the next few days he found out. At first Phaid had asked himself a dozen times how bad a study group could be. Studying had to be a breeze for anyone with a few smarts and a good memory. Then he had discovered that these particular study groups didn't do too much studying. They were a euphemistic name for the labour gangs he had seen working around the place when he had first arrived. The only thing they taught was an appreciation of backbreaking toil. The students dug trenches, hauled garbage, carted building materials and sometimes, after the rebels had made a foray into the centre of the city, they even burned the dead.

  The groups were the result of a compromise between the Day Oners and the rest of the revolutionary factions. To stop the Day Oners instituting their programme of mass extermination, the other factions had offered to run courses of re-education for the less desirable recruits to the insurrection.

  The Day Oners had grudgingly agreed to the deal provided that the central theme of the curriculum was dirty, exhausting work.

  There were, however, certain consolations. Work was regularly interrupted by what were known as instruction periods. These consisted of lengthy harangues by anyone who felt like it on obscure points of political philosophy.

  Phaid had quickly discovered that the revolution had no coherent intellectual basis. The majority of the so called instructors made it up as they went along. Some en­visioned a glorious, egalitarian Utopia dedicated to aesthe­tic pursuits, others dreamed of a grimly dreary dicta­torship of the proletariat. Whenever a Day Oner was giving the lecture it resounded with blood, death and executions.

  Phaid did find that it was quite possible to prolong the lectures and thus cut down the work time by asking long, detailed and generally irrelevant questions. The subject of either androids or boohooms was always good for an extra hour sitting around rather than blistering his hands or busting his spine. Others of the group realised what Phaid was doing and fell behind him. On Phaid's fourth day in the study group, they managed to prolong an instruction period with an elderly and particularly verbose instructor from just after the morning rollcall almost through to sunset.

  The ploy even worked on the Day Oners. They seemed all too ready to expound at length on their hideously gory concepts of social reorganisation. This was the way to get past the Day Oners. In every other way, they had the study groups sewn up to be as unpleasant as possib
le. They had installed a supervisor among the guards who watched each group. As far as Phaid could see, these supervisors had been picked solely on the basis of their capacity for their blaster happy vindictiveness. They effec­tively put a stop to all but the wildest escape plans. They also prevented night-time sex between members of the study group.

  Nobody had bothered to split the politically undesirable men and the undesirable women into separate groups. The idea, after all, seemed ridiculous to most of the rebels. Phaid had noticed at least three politically unsatis­factory ladies in his group with whom he wouldn't have minded getting better acquainted. The Day Oners, however, had a serious prejudice against sex between men and women. They reinforced this prejudice by keeping an armed supervisor on duty in the storeroom in which the study group slept. The penalty for any student bed jumping was summary execution.

  There was one other drawback to being in a study group. The tribunals that recommended re-education didn't specify just how long the process should take. It was left to the supervisors to decide when each member was fit to rejoin revolutionary society. All Phaid could hope for was that there'd be some sort of outbreak of confusion that would give him the chance to make a break.

  After six days, no confusion had come along to save him. Phaid was starting to get desperate. Rumours were going around that the Day Oners were no longer satisfied with the study group system and were pressing for a selection process whereby those who weren't making satisfactory progresss could be taken out and killed. Life in the revolution had not only become drab and unpleasant, it was once again starting to move into the lethal.