Alistair’s quiet explanation came after the brief pause that follows an outburst. “We do allow for physical punishment for murders, but not a killing in response to a killing. Restitution is the primary focus of our justice system, and we will collaborate to come up with an appropriate amount for a murder.”
“That’s something we should leave to the people to decide,” said Santiago. “If we would actually move forward with my proposal, we could insure all our clients against murder, and pay out the sum they choose to their heirs should they ever be murdered. The amount to be paid will depend on how much we are willing to pay out, and how much the client is willing to pay in a premium. We can then go after the murderer for the sum we paid out; the sum our client chose.” Santiago gave Alistair a significant look but Alistair avoided his gaze.
“But buying insurance like that costs money,” Layla protested, and Gregory nodded encouragement from his seat next to her. “A monthly fee at least. Poorer workers will insure themselves for less.”
“Which makes it easier to murder a poor man than a rich one,” added Greg.
“Which is why there should be retribution for a murder as well,” said Santiago. “A man who does not recognize the right to life in others can hardly be said to have it himself.”
“How will you go after the murderer for insurance compensation if you put him to death?” demanded Greg.
“We may not,” Santiago conceded. “This too can be chosen by our client. If they want their murderer put to death right away, they will pay a higher monthly premium to cover the risk we take in making a pay out and not getting the money back. Or they can allow a five year wait until the murderer is put to death, allowing us a chance to recoup some costs and them a lower premium. Or they can make no demand for an execution and pay an even lower premium. It should be left up to the clients.”
“All academic,” said Alistair. “We are not going to execute anyone, save for in self defense at the moment there is actual danger.”
“I don’t know why you think you get to make that decision for everyone else,” muttered Giselle, and she would not look at Alistair.
“It is good to be able to have discussions like these,” said Emmanuel, and he raised his glass. “That is a true achievement, to have an open society where people are allowed to disagree. Here’s to freedom.”
They dropped their disagreement and raised their glasses.
“And here’s to our first hospital,” added Darion, with a nod to Gregory.
At that moment the maid and butler returned, the former clearing the table of the now empty platter and the latter bringing a ladle and a deep wooden bowl filled with a meat soup. He poured some into their bowls and conversation was postponed while they sampled the second course.
Five courses were served in all, and before the fourth was finished Alistair leaned back in his chair to feel the evening air, fresh and warm, as it flowed through the open second story. He had eaten his fill but not beyond, and knowing full well he would take it too far with the final course, he resolved to enjoy a moment of satiation and comfort before proceeding to torture himself with what would surely stuff his stomach. He gazed out at the land, at the black silhouettes of trees normal eyes could barely discern against the dark purple background of a sky on the cusp of night, and felt a profound peace.
This harmony was interrupted by the butler, who approached Giselle and whispered something in her ear, whereupon she, with a fleeting smile for Alistair, rose from her chair and went to the stairwell, accompanied by the butler. Gregory and the two hosts did not notice, being lost in conversation, but Santiago saw, and so did Layla, who observed the exchange with a serious expression. A minute later Giselle reappeared and ran to Layla, whispering something in her ear. Layla rose from her seat and Giselle came to give Alistair a kiss on the neck.
“Layla and I have been called away,” she said, carefully regulating her voice to seem regretful. “Darion, the house is wonderful and so was the meal. Thank you for a wonderful evening.”
“We absolutely love your home,” agreed Layla. “Unfortunately, something has just come up and we have to excuse ourselves.”
Darion and Emmanuel were out of their seats while Gregory and Alistair were busy staring at their dates with incomprehension.
“My dears,” said Darion with a fluid bow that nearly brought his forehead to the floor, “we are honored to have you here and the door will always be open for you.”
The two women disappeared, and neither so much as looked back over her shoulder. Alistair looked to Greg, who wore a frown, but the doctor just shrugged.
The Aldran ex marine rose from his chair and left the table, walking to the circular edge of the second story and a small railing. Grasping it in both hands, he leaned on it and stared at the dirt path leading from Darion’s new home to a larger trail to the south, by the side of the river. There was almost no light left, as Srillium had yet to rise, so Alistair viewed the forms below in shades of gray. He spotted the female figures of Layla and Giselle rapidly walking down the path with a half dozen male forms and a dark feeling of resentment welled up in his breast. For the rest of the evening his thoughts returned to that image, of Giselle leaving in the company of men who knew her plans, which she had declined to tell him.
Later, after the meal was finished, the five men gathered seats into a small circle near the edge of the room, inside the glow of a stand of torches, and sat in discussion. Pipes were passed around which Gregory and Alistair politely declined, and the butler stood by the kitchen partition, waiting to attend to any whim. Their voices were hushed, better fitting the hazy, soft, yellow torchlight and the darkness outside, and the conversation was desultory, pausing often when small ideas came to dead ends, during which time three smoke stacks would send clouds towards the ceiling.
“If I had been enslaved… seen my wife made a concubine… I would commit murder too,” said Santiago after a lull. He followed his pronouncement with a puff on his pipe.
Alistair had a sense the comment was meant for him, but he said nothing. It was Emmanuel who responded.
“You don’t think Iñaki went too far?”
“He went too far,” Santiago conceded, his mild Spanish accent almost undetectable when his voice was near a whisper, as it now was. “I don’t think he should be made to pay half of what he earns for the rest of his life… but yes, he went too far. I am only saying what he did is understandable. There are many among us who understand it, many who agree with it and are angry at his punishment.”
Still Alistair said nothing, so Santiago, keeping his lure in the water, spoke again.
“A wronged man is seldom satisfied with a mere just punishment, and a criminal inevitably thinks himself ill used by it. This does not bode well for our society. There will be no peaceful, reasonable, just agreement.”
“I disagree with you, Santi,” Alistair finally said.
“Do you think the punishment is too harsh?”
Alistair did not directly answer the question. “We are going to adopt your insurance idea. People can decide things for themselves, and their premiums will be set accordingly.”
“But in this case, the amount of a rape and enslavement must be subtracted from the price of a murder. Do you think they were too harsh?”
Alistair stared unblinking for many moments at the flickering flame of a torch before he finally, torpidly, shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Most of the people outside these walls do not bother with uncertainty. Half of them are certain of one thing, half of the opposite, and no argument, no matter how reasonable, is likely to change many minds. What happens if we find a just verdict, but it satisfies no one?”
“I don’t know.”
“People are segregating themselves, and some are ready for violence. Mordecai has positioned himself as a champion of the former slaves, the one who destroyed Issicroy and Ansacroy.”
“And probably murdered who knows how many slaves and servants in the pr
ocess.”
“That’s not the tale they tell on the streets,” Santiago countered. “Bedrock, almost by default, is positioning itself as the defender of the warriors. It is time to take sides in this.”
“I hardly think it fitting for a security firm to cater to one kind of client. The very idea of justice requires neutrality with respect to race, sex, class… religion. These things have nothing to do with dispute resolution and criminal justice.”
“But this is what I am asking you, Alistair. What happens when justice and practicality are not compatible in the society you live in?”
“I don’t know, Santi. Like I said before: I don’t know. Maybe we are about to find out. A society that cannot manage to be just will not manage to thrive either. Maybe there are too many old wounds for us to live through. Maybe everything is going to come crashing down around us. All I can do, or at least all I am willing to do, is offer to help interested parties discover justice, and to help administer it. If we take sides in a fight where neither side will accept a just outcome, then we are simply turning back into a government. If the ex slaves and the ex warriors cannot live in peace, then one will come under the domination of the other. It means this society was diseased, and things wouldn’t be any better with a government, they’d be worse.”
Darion, Emmanuel and Gregory were like spectators at a tennis match, turning their heads back and forth as they followed the play of the dialogue. After Alistair’s speech, Santiago was silent and the others sat blinking, waiting to see if it was over or not. Alistair, who had slowly come to sit upright at the edge of his seat, now sank back into it, a position from which Santiago had not stirred. Three more clouds of smoke went billowing towards the ceiling.
“I am not saying you should abandon justice,” the Argentinean offered after reflection. “I am just saying these are things we need to consider in the coming days.”
***
A little village sprouted up on the banks of a river, a quiet affair with dirt paths and houses of timber, some with a stone chimney, and Alistair went there to see it for no other reason than that it was there. Nothing like a city had emerged on Srillium, but around the town that grew around the powerplant, called Freetown by common consent, several satellite hamlets could now be found. Alistair guessed forty people lived in the present one. Other than the various lodges in which groups of five or six men would cohabitate, it sported a rickety dock for the small boats trafficking up and down the waterway. It lacked a Town Hall or Municipal Building, but at its center was a tavern doubling as a brothel. Every one of the emerging villages in the area had a brothel; indeed, a brothel was a seed from which a village was sure to grow if one but planted it in any random location.
The residents of this hamlet, without a name Alistair had discovered, were mainly farmers and herders with land nearby. The herders housed their animals at night in pens built on the outskirts of the settlement. There were a handful of merchants in the hamlet, men who took in feed and wool and meat and timber and whatever else was being sold and in exchange passed out the newly minted gold coins. Then, the merchants loaded their goods and materials on boats and headed downriver, or upriver, or loaded the goods on wagons. They left with the goods and returned with more gold, ready for a new round of exchanges.
This particular evening, as he strolled through, Alistair cut across the long shadows of a village whose residents, with their flushed faces and animated but dying conversations, gave the impression of having been recently stirred up. On the porch of the tavern two prostitutes reclined. A man a few yards away looked to be repairing a section of his lodging house. Naked from the waist up, he knelt down and sawed at a section of wood, oblivious to Alistair’s passage. Nearby a group of three men, all former slaves, paused in their discussion to turn suspicious glances on him.
As he passed by the tavern, he spied a piece of parchment, which was still expensive and uncommon, affixed to one of the wooden posts supporting the porch’s roof. Stopping to read what someone took time and a good deal of expense to advertise, he saw it was a poster proclaiming the virtues of Mordecai, defender of the little man, destroyer of the slave cities of Issicroy and Ansacroy, who spent long years as a humiliated slave himself.
“It wouldn’t interest your kind, warrior,” said a hard, raspy female voice.
Alistair only glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and then turned from the parchment. The two women snickered at him as he left. His ears burning, he left the prostitutes behind and headed out of the village, following a path north which took him to another hamlet. This one too exhibited the aftereffects of a great to do, but this time the populace still swirled around the streets, with people moving from one conversation to another, carrying with them their heated opinions and fiery rhetoric. They all seemed to be of the same opinion, for there were no arguments, just a lot of nodding and handshaking and black-slapping. He endured more suspicious and even angry glares from these former slaves.
A third hamlet he reached while its populace was still together, gathered around a grassy knoll outside, being infused with energy before release. A few dozen people, mostly men, gathered around a pair of speakers, both female. One stood by and nodded while her companion incited the crowd with energetic gesticulations, and her voice carried in the humid evening air only just enough to be detectable from where he was. Curious to discover the reason for this gathering, he continued towards it for a few more steps until the speaker turned and he got a better view of Giselle.
Now uneasy, he jogged until he was close enough to distinguish her words, putting him several yards still outside the throng. What she told them was a compliment to the poster he had just read. She did not mention Mordecai, but she waxed on about the dignity of former slaves, of how it was their time to seize the opportunity for justice and settle accounts. She spoke of Iñaki, the injustice done to him first by François, then by the jury. The audience reacted with approval, filling in her pauses with encouraging cheers and delivering a resounding roar after her climax.
There is no way for a disheartened listener in a crowd to make his feelings known. An angry man may yell, and a happy man cheer, but a dispirited man only deflates and shakes his head. As the crowd pressed in on the two ladies, the muscular former marine, now suntanned but otherwise the same as the day he left the corps, turned around and shuffled back to the hamlet, looking only to take the beaten path back to Freetown.
Chapter 79
A red body, sometimes as a full orb like a completely bloodshot eye glaring at the surface, other times as a slender scimitar slicing across the sky, stained with the juices of lives it had claimed, dominated Srillium’s sky. There was a bloody scythe in the sky when violence broke out below, just the sort of coincidence that leads some to believe the human story on the ground is governed by the happenings in the heavens. By the same lengthy process of accretion that produces a planet, a mob formed. A few members congregated, and their chanting and howling, which grew in hysteria in proportion to the size of the throng, acted like gravity to attract more members who, with a squawk and a yelp, contributed their own mass and decibels. It was not a solid body that formed, but a roiling, seething, fluid mass of clenched fists, bared fangs, sweaty skin and primal wails. After bubbling and fizzling for a time, some critical limit was reached, inertia defeated, and the mass poured down a beaten path and finally drained into a small camp of a dozen former warriors.
It is an obvious fact that a crowd is composed of individual and autonomous units. Each member makes his own decisions and any pangs of conscience he suffers are also his own. If a conscience, at least for some, is a mere fear that someone may be watching, then the behavior of individuals cloaked in a crowd’s anonymity is already half explained. Throw in a volatile issue and a rousing speech and the mystery is entirely gone.
The tumult heralding the mob alerted, but did not at first alarm, the former warriors. When the noise was distant and indistinct it roused only a mild curiosity. When the nature of the pr
ovenance of the sound became clearer, the men paused in their tasks but still there was no concern in their expressions. The mob finally found them standing, facing them with tools in hand and blinking eyes. It was only just before the tide swept into them, in that moment immediately prior to impact, that the men of the invaded camp realized what was about to befall them. The slaves overwhelmed the warriors through numerical advantage. Once battle was engaged, the outcome was never in doubt.
A wave that crashes onto shore must inevitably recede back into the sea. If it is large and violent enough, the shore from which it retreats will not be the same one it crashed into. When the angry mob slipped away, the camp ground was torn up, as if a rugby game had been played there. Weeds were trampled and ripped from the ground, and where the ground was bare, packed dirt before it was now kicked up, as if some gardener made a half-hearted attempt at it with a hoe. The two tents and wooden lean-to comprising the only structures of the camp were demolished. Five bodies lay on the ground, bloody and with joints twisted at unnatural angles. The face of one cadaver was pressed deeply into some soft mud. From two trees nearby, two bodies were suspended, ropes tied around their necks, still rocking back and forth from the blows with sticks and fists. One of the knots was tied by a prisoner with some competence in the matter; his victim was lifted seven feet above the ground by men standing on a pile of logs and when he was dropped, his neck snapped and he instantly lost consciousness. The other was less fortunate: a rope was tied around his neck with no more care than that given to a shoelace, and rather than dropped he was hoisted up from the ground kicking and flailing. He suffocated while his legs were shattered like a piñata by the men standing below him.
Five of the warriors managed to break free and escape. The mob left in the opposite direction, their chanting and jubilant cheering eventually fading until the only sound was the soft, rhythmic creaking of the two ropes as they swung back and forth, rubbing against the branches they were tied to.
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