I said, “Pelagaeus is Poseidon?”
He nodded. “We take different names in different worlds and situations. Speaking of situations, have I explained the present conundrum in sufficient detail for you to see the gravity of the matter? Certain members of the Board of Visitors and Governors were present during our recovery of you children. They saw you become a centaur; they heard Mr. Nemo cast back part of Mrs. Wren’s curse, they saw Mr. mac FirBolg’s rather prodigious leap. And no one could mistake the meaning of the vessel waiting for Miss Fair. You see, had it just been kept among us here at the school, I might have been able to hush up the matter quietly. As it is, some show of severity is required. It has to be severe enough that even people like Lord Dis will think I am too strict. I trust you comprehend what I am saying.”
“You are asking me to cooperate?” I said, astonished.
“No. I am telling you, Phaethusa, that if you deduce how to escape from the cell into which you are about to be dragged, you should fear to do it. If you deduce how to escape, don’t escape. I will harm you and my other children if you do. We are gods; we control the sidereal universe. The only result of a second attempt will be that the Olympians will take you away from me and press you into a slavery which will be far worse than study hall and being required to wear school uniforms.”
“You said ‘my children.’ ”
“Ah. Did I?”
“We’re not your children. We have real parents.”
“My students. I meant to say ‘my students.’ ”
Apparently I had not been grabbed enough that day, because now he put out his hand and took me by the upper arm again. “Come along!”
I dug in my feet, and made him drag me a few steps. I really, really did not like the idea of going into a cell.
I was leaning far back, digging my reluctant boots into the floorboards, being yanked, and stumbling, leaning back again. He was pulling me toward the door that hid the bell tower stairs.
I said, “What’s the other hand?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said, on the one hand I am a monster. What’s on the other hand?”
“Ah. On the other hand you are a confused little girl who has gotten too big for her britches, and perhaps the only thing you need is some stern correction. In fact—!”
Now he smiled, and stepped towards me. Since I was pulling against him, the sudden relaxation made me stumble a step or two and I caught myself against the balcony railing.
Headmaster Boggin stepped around me and seated himself on the rail. My elbow was still in his fist, I was pulled half-turned around, not quite facing him.
“In fact, to throw a monster who tries to escape into a dungeon is a good policy, but it is clearly not the right thing to do to a girl who breaks her word and tries to break open a teacher’s head with a rock.”
“What are you going to do?” I said. There was a gleam in his eye. Call it a Grendel gleam, but I have seen it in Colin’s eye, too.
I knew from that gleam what he was going to do. But there are some things that just come out of your mouth, no matter how dumb they sound, whether you want them to or not. The only thing possibly stupider to say in a situation like this is something like, “You wouldn’t dare!”
Boggin looked deeply into my eyes, as if pleased at the uncertainty he saw growing there.
“Miss Windrose, our agreement was not that you would not make me ashamed of you. Our agreement was that you would do nothing to make me regret my decision. I have a terrible headache because someone hit me in the head with a rock. Surely, I am right to regret that?”
I would have had as much chance resisting the force of a wild stallion as I did resisting the strength of his arm.
He pulled me facedown across his knees. The railing he sat on was high, and I could not reach the floorboards with my feet. My hands flailed in midair a moment, and then I grabbed the poles of the railing, which were to my left.
“I must see to it that you regret it, too, and in a fashion which will bring home to you quite forcefully that you are not as old as you think you are.”
I was breathless; a shy feeling was actually sending tremors through me. All my skin trembled with goose pimples as all my little hairs stood up. This made my skin more sensitive; I could feel every nuance of the texture and fabric of my skirt, which suddenly seemed quite flimsy and thin on my bottom. I could feel the air on my exposed upper legs. I could feel the muscles in his legs beneath my stomach.
I said the dumb thing again, “What are you going to do—?!” It did not sound any better the second time around. Higher-pitched. More girlish.
He did not bother answering that, but he held one hand on the small of my back, and waited while I kicked my legs in midair. There was nothing within the range of my feet to get a purchase on.
What was he going to do? I knew what he was going to do.
I cannot say that I did not deserve what was about to happen. That little dark knot of guilt in my stomach I had felt ever since I realized that I had a duty, a duty to Victor, to bonk Boggin with a rock, that knot began to relax into a warm and pleasant fear.
Why pleasant? I cannot explain my emotions. I am not sure where they come from. But, at that moment, I felt a strange combination of fear and gratitude.
Why gratitude? Because I did feel bad about what I had done. Clonking my red-haired savior angel with a rock. This man has raised me from a child my whole life. That has to count for something. Being saved from Grendel Glum counts for something.
This will sound like a paradox, but: if a man too big and too strong for me to resist punished me, I would be relieved of the responsibility of feeling any guilt. There is no guilt after you’ve been punished for it, right? And he is too strong to fight, so even Victor could not expect me to get out of this, right?
When you feel bad, you want to apologize. It’s natural. But you cannot apologize to an enemy in time of war, can you? That is not the way people who are serious about winning a war act.
But what if you were forced to apologize? Even the little imaginary image of Victor I carry around in my head in the spot where other people keep a conscience, even he could not complain that I was not “serious,” because I could always tell him I had been forced. See?
And there was an even darker, naughtier pleasure trembling beneath the fear and confusion in my body. Because I knew this wasn’t a teacher punishing a schoolgirl. This was a man spanking a woman. He certainly would not have done this to any man. And he might not even have done it to Vanity. It was something for me. A bad thing, maybe even a terrible and humiliating thing, but it was mine.
So I said, “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Miss Windrose, I want you to count.” There was a smile in his voice.
I could see the upside-down floor of the bell tower, and through the square gateway formed by his legs, my own legs hanging down into my view. I kicked again, but now he merely reached out and took both my ankles in his grasp. His one hand was large enough that he could close his fingers around both my ankles.
“I don’t want to count.” My voice was clearly trembling now.
His chuckling voice floated down from somewhere above and behind me. “I will, of course, go to a number twice as high, if I must do the work of counting myself, Miss Windrose.”
OK. Maybe I did not feel that guilty after all. I looked over my two options; defiance plus twice the ouch, or nondefiance…?
“Would it help if I said I was sorry?”
“If you actually were sorry, yes, it might. It might help a great deal. I suspect, however, that you are not sorry at all. Nevertheless, despite that, I would like you to say you are sorry before every number you count. I will do twenty full strokes less than I would have done otherwise.”
I was beginning to feel lightheaded. Clearly he intended a number much higher than twenty if knocking off twenty was such a light matter.
“How high am I counting?” My voice, even to my own ears, sounded sma
ll, and frail, and faint.
“It is five more than it was before you asked that question.”
After a moment, he said, “Well, Miss Windrose?”
I could not seem to catch my breath or gather my wits. My heart would not stop pounding. Had you ever been upside down on the knee of a man who you looked up to when you were a girl? Not an ugly man, not a weak one. He had that quality Victor called serious. Serious about winning. Serious about overcoming me. Serious about forcing surrender. He was going to win.
I said, quietly, “I’m sorry.”
He put his hand on my bottom. He waited.
I said, quietly, “One…”
19
Solitude
1.
No, he wasn’t kidding. Yes, they put me in a jail.
He was not even kidding about the chains. There was an iron collar around my neck, with a heavy lock on one side, a crude iron hinge on the other, and a ring just above my collarbone. A chain led from the neck ring to a staple in the middle of the ceiling, next to the light fixture. The slack of the chain described the radius of my freedom.
Directly below was a cot, fixed to the floor. To one side was the barred window, as promised. To the other, the barred door. Next to the door was a shelf for a food tray. A water bucket rested on the floor beneath. There was a tall, three-legged stool of wood.
The room was a cube of gray blocks. There was a drain in the floor. Oh yes, there was a chamber pot. Let us not forget the chamber pot.
There I lay on my stomach, both hands on my red, red bottom, tears making a little puddle in my gray-green blankets, which stank of starch.
I didn’t hate him. I could not think of him as an enemy. Mean, yes; foe, no.
I do not pretend to understand myself. I don’t know why I think certain things. But the mere fact that he had spanked me made it impossible for me to hate him. Imagine, for example, that Wellington, having routed Napoleon at Waterloo, has the Emperor of France pulled from the saddle of his white horse, dragged before the drumhead court… and told to stand in the corner and go to bed without any supper. Or imagine that Adolf Hitler, instead of committing suicide in his bunker, is hauled in chains before the international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg… and Prime Minister Churchill tans the hide of his backside with a belt strap, and washes out the mouth of Minister Goebbels with a bar of lye soap.
So I just cried. After that, I lay there, thinking about how there was nothing to think about. I cried some more.
It was the counting, the saying I was sorry, over and over, that had been so humiliating. I could not pretend I was some proud, disdainful heroine of the French Resistance, silent and unflinching as she faces her sadistic Nazi captors; or a patrician of Rome, captured by marauding Huns or Vikings, willing to perish to preserve her family’s centuries-old tradition of stoic military virtue, but not willing to cower.
It is not the way I had imagined I would behave when captured by the enemy. We were not even talking about the rack, the thumbscrews, the Iron Maiden, the boot. It was just a man slapping my bottom. Picture Joan of Arc, taken by the perfidious English, before her trial even starts, “Oh, sure I’m a witch! Let me sign the confession! Just don’t swat my behind! I’m too frail!”
Or maybe I felt so bad because I thought, deep down, that I deserved it. I should not have tried to brain the Headmaster with a rock. I hadn’t even really wanted to do it.
It was the kind of thing a heroine in a story was supposed to do. Wasn’t it? If it had worked, if I had hit him slightly harder, I would not be here now. I could have been on the outside, with my powers still active, working to free the others.
Instead of here. Chained by the neck.
It had been Victor, hadn’t it? I had been trying to impress him. I had been trying to do the kind of cold-blooded, tough-as-nails, tough-guy kind of thing people are supposed to do when they are serious.
It was hard to be serious with Boggin. It was hard to think of him as the enemy.
And Victor, I am sure, would not have been impressed with that light little love-tap I gave him. On the other hand, the idea of a rock all covered with blood and brain-stuff… Bleh. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it, had I? I hadn’t tried hard enough.
I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do what I had to do to keep myself out of this place.
I twisted to look up at the gray stone ceiling. What kind of prison was this, anyway? The Germans would have had something modern; white, spotless, with sterilized dental instruments standing by the specially designed torture chairs, and technicians in crisp uniforms. The French would have had something cunning; an ordinary-looking room, covered by one-way mirrors, microwave beams, foods containing subtle doses of sodium pentathol. The Russians would have plied insidious psychological tricks; setting clocks to wrong hours and speeds, playing tapes of distant birdsong at midnight, bringing meals at irregular times, having false messages tapped on the walls in Morse code, as if from other prisoners. But this?
This looked like a cellar dating back to the time of Bloody Mary. It probably was. A typically British jail, then; inefficient and traditional.
The damn chain looked like an antique, too. Not some modern lightweight thing made of titanium alloy or stainless steel; it looked like the links were hand cast or cold hammered out of iron.
And the collar was the same way; heavy, dull metal, also an antique. I doubt many tool-and-die shops these days are turning out slave collars too small for anyone but girls. But England has a long and glorious tradition of torture, oppression, slavery, and cruelty. If you don’t believe me, ask the Irish. (Or the Welsh, or the Scotch, or, for that matter, the Tasmanians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans. Heck, ask anyone.) So I am sure that in Surrey or Whitehead or York there were stockpiles of witch-collars and stocks and leg-irons, eye-gougers, tongue-slicers, bone bores, dunking stools, and disemboweling spindles dating from the time of Cromwell, or Elizabeth, or William the Conqueror.
Boggin probably called up one of his friends in the special “Pain Through the Ages” office of the British Royal Museum. “Hallo, Harry (or whoever)! By the by, old chap, could you ship me a gross of those old iron collars we used back in the good old days? Not the heavy big ones, no, and not the grown-woman collars, either. We need something smaller. You know those specially designed sixteen-year-old-virgin collars, used for controlling Irish maidens caught stealing potato crusts to live on, or falsely accused when they refused to sleep with their manor lords, when the young beauties were chained up in gangs to be transported to Australia as mail-order brides? Hey, and send over a chastity belt or two. You see, I have this fellow named Glum… What? No, we won’t need any whips or hanging cages or branding irons to control this one! She already was apologizing at every slap while I spanked her, and crying like a girl! Well, of course, Harry (or whoever)! Of course she is a girl! Damned if I know why she ever thought she was anything else!”
Well, the fun of thinking about how I wasn’t actually being tortured or burned as a witch wore off after a while.
Why had he made me count, damn him?
For a while, I fortified myself with the knowledge that someone trying to humiliate you, to wound your pride, is no different than someone trying to wound you with a knife. Except that, unlike a knife wound, this one can’t cut unless you let it.
That made me feel better, for a time.
Then I remembered where I had heard that idea. Quentin had been told that, when he was being comforted after his ordeal. Quiet, gentle Quentin, who, despite his fear, had spit defiance into the face of his tormentress at the time when he seemed sure to die. Comforted by Boggin. It was Boggin’s idea I was repeating to myself.
That made me cry all over again. I am not sure why. But it did.
After I went through all these thoughts and recriminations, I stared up at the ceiling some more. And then, like a phonograph record, I went through all these thoughts and recriminations again.
When that was done, I did it
again.
And again and again.
You see, it helped prevent me from thinking about the unthinkable nightmare thoughts, wondering helplessly what was happening, what was being done to Victor, Vanity, Colin, and Quentin.
2.
You are wondering why I did not simply duck into hyperspace and slide out from there, or at least slide out from the collar?
After Boggin had reestablished the boundaries which Vanity had opened for me, while I could see a little way into hyper-space, I could not move that direction, not at all.
I could “see” that the collar was only “around” my neck in the way a flat circle of inch-high bricks on a floor in a plane might go “around” someone sitting on that floor. But if that someone cannot get up that inch, that flat line is just as good as a tall wall.
And there was nothing to look at in hyperspace. It’s dark and murky, and filled (at least, near the surface of the Earth-disk) with a heavy fluid medium. Whatever sunshine there might be falls off too rapidly to reach the Earth.
And my new senses did not give me much to look at, either. My utility detector was deaf; there was nothing useful to me in the room. The internal nature of the cold iron collar was that it was heavy, merciless, and powerfully antimagical. There were no lines or strands of moral obligation reaching out from me; iron was inert, unthinking, dull. Only creatures who are free to act, can do good or do bad.
And time seemed to go slower when I stared into the dimness of the four-space. No, I did not have much to look at. And the endless distances, the volume upon hypervolume of wide, curving voids out there, an inch out of reach, just mocked me. Staring into hyperspace made me feel like a crippled angel at the bottom of the well, able to see the distant stars of the infinitely high night sky.
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