Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  I helped with the scribe and his woman that made the parch and the ink this village used, and for my work they gave me the parch to write down what I could remember. I believed that in writing down the things I knew, I would not lose them as I had lost so much else, and if I began saying things that related to memories I could no longer see, I could write these too and hope they would somehow fertilise the barren earth that hid the record of the man I was.

  I can only readily recall my waking, as a slave, at what must have been near the start of my slavery, for what I recall begins just before my fingers being broken.

  The stinging of my bound wrists woke me, but it was obliterated with the sharp, savage pain of the guards’ cocks. I could not scream out of a mouth stuffed thick with wool. Frenzied snorting was my only resistance, my face damp from the tears that soaked the cotton hood tied at my throat, sucked tight against my nose and mouth with each intake of breath. My arms and legs were bound. On a stone floor in a large cage they took me, cracked my bones, left my gown over my back between their visits. Soon enough my fingernails were torn off and as they did it, leaving time between each nail to draw out my pain, they put their lips to my ears to tell me how good and tight I was, tell me the Droop would grind out this fine body after it had taken away the hope.

  Then all my fingers were broken, one a day, a break with each bowl of food for ten days. They were clean breaks, I’d be worthless otherwise, but for the days my hands were splinted and bound to my back, I took the oats and water like a dog, lapping at the beaten copper plate on the floor, licking the gruel down to the blue algae of the copper’s corrosion and welcoming the mercy of the harosin opia cross that had been mixed into it. The Droop. My eyes rolled back into the grey clay inside my head as each measure flowed through me. I shook with pleasure each time, let my guts go, flooding over my heels. The first measures you give a slave are the biggest, to establish the need and the despair when it fades away.

  On another day I had my irons; a giant man, one of the guards named Rygat, held me wrapped up against him as the brand was pressed in, a crescent moon, a star either side of it. I must have belonged to a Virate slaver from out east.

  I did not know this place. There were accents familiar to that same and hidden part of me, of those shouting outside; “Twenty figs the qut!” was the quivering reedy shout of some woman, a voice that a pig would have if it could talk. “Hikri Ope!” responded another. “Three risin’s fer a qut, best Juan strains only!” Lying fucker. Beyond these the general noise, the same five or so auctioneers flipping from generous, lurid descriptions of the slaves to the almost unintelligible speed with which they then voiced the bids and cajoled the bidders to recklessness.

  The little pleasure I had from the measures of Droop was soon destroyed by betony withdrawal. I recognised the symptoms though I could only guess from my colour I must have become addicted to it while a soldier. It was like drowning in boiling mud, a weight pressing me down and down and I became fevered, the cell around me and the snatches of places and people, voices, turning each other inside out so I could not tell what was outside of me or inside. I rubbed and twisted my shoulders against the wet stone floor but the itching of my skin burned me more fiercely than the kicks aimed at my legs and head by the guards. These were carefully delivered blows, not strong enough to put me out into silence. Bound still like a curled-up baby, I tried to close out the pain, and as I frantically sought refuge in memory I gasped out the measures of countless mixes and recipes I must have once been aware of. Something deep within me was protecting me as best it could.

  I kept repeating these over and over–whispering, seeing the words - even when Rygat came for my hole again. More than I could have hoped for, the Droop was forced into me, juiced. I was fucked to sleep.

  I was not dead.

  I was moving.

  My arms and legs were unbound but chained to the bars of a cage on a wagon. The blood from my ankles and wrists smeared the iron hoops, ragged bands of worn skin seeping and stinging. The sun was high but of no comfort as the caravan rattled out of the small town, the memories of why I was there writhed through and against each other, like iron bars curdling and pooling. I was overcome by the rippled stinging and cramps of withdrawal.

  Soon the world receded to a beat of light and dark. I took the bread in my splinted hands and the spoons of pigfat to sustain my value, and from a coastline far within me I saw the other slaves in the cart kick or bite me as I thrashed and spat and kicked back at them. I shat as I pleased in the wagon, hoping for beatings bad enough to put me out and spare me my withdrawal, or end me and spare me whatever the years held in wait.

  It was the far north. I had no fight for the bearskins they threw into the cart to keep us from dying of cold. The Droop would have forbidden a clenched fist even were my fingers able to obey. Idly from that inner coast I made out the fourteen others in the cart and only the children would have escaped slaughter had I the strength. I found myself thinking through the poisons I would give them, describing the symptoms, visualising them as I did so. I wanted to speak out, goad them, but the Droop decided against it, my thirst filling and swelling my tongue.

  In heavy rain I found wonder. The blacks and yellows from the far east huddled together against the icy squalls on which I could now hear seagulls. The rain found no resistance in me, no refusal of its frozen whips. The numbing cold of the streaming water over my head sank into my skull. Drops of ice vanished into my cuts and the swollen bags of my eyes, absolving me.

  It would have been Feirian’s Lock, Citadel Northsea that the carts rumbled into. Dark peaks scarred with snow filled the west. Ahead the bay was littered with whaling cogs and caravels, the dockside busier still with the ships’ masts, their furled sails arranged like battle standards in rows above the sheds on the quay.

  I couldn’t remember when I last used my legs. The cage door opened and we spilled out into the mud. Spears pricked us as we stumbled forwards to a pen already full, already heavy with the suffocating stink of fifty people and the hundreds more also in pens around us against the palisade.

  A woman to my left held a hand up to her ear, trembling like a rattlesnake, her fingers in the pus of some wound she protected. Two children held hands to my right, eight or nine winters perhaps the girl, five or six the boy.

  Rygat and two others took the girl from the pen each night and I found songs in the ash of my thoughts that could only have been from my own childhood, which I did my best to sing and hum to the boy till she was returned. She permitted no singing, would not sit but on her knees. He, perhaps her brother, submitted to her severe grooming for his lice during the hours when she fell back from the Droop.

  I slept where I stood when the Droop hit me. I dreamed nothing for a while, a silence, that something within me asleep or else had left me entirely. These spells lasted only for its flow through me. The twitching would begin as I fell, its victory against my betony withdrawal short-lived. I stamped and rubbed my forehead against the bars that burned like ice as I inevitably lost control, shrieking with the voices, the figures about me that could not have shared the pen with me, though as real as the bars themselves. The clubs and chains of the guards, the scratching and bites from the others in the pen to silence me, all saved me. I abused them all in return, their frenzy easing the withdrawal, as though some part of my suffering was being transferred to my benefit. My bound hands stopped my bitter urge to tear at my face, to rip my eyes and pull out the world from its invasions. My shivering bones seemed to rub at my insides; I wanted to tear my skin off to get at them. For these reasons I was thankful for broken fingers.

  I slept again, then was awakened, dragged out of the pen for the Droop and food with the agits, spasmics, the murmurers. Was I a murmurer now? I got more food than most, the children did too. We were separated out. We were fit for some other purpose than the mines or the drudha fodder used for poisons and other research.

  No sooner had we taken our measure we were to follow a l
ine of slaves shivering its way in a knifing wind through high gates and along a track to the raucous sheds of the docks. Men yelled and whistled over the roar of the whipping sails of the ships and cracking of the nails in the planks and masts.

  The Wayward Lady was tied up next to a sister ship on this East Quay. It was a large galley of the old black kishi wood, readying for the voyage, the flag the same design as my brand.

  The crew moved with the focus of ants about the ratlines and spars. We were marched past the guards, Rygat at their head, lash in his hand. I was stopped before the quartermaster.

  Rygat was fast. My eyes were down and my shakes were rattling the chain. The steel ball at the end of the lash gashed my eye as he followed up the knock with a hook that put me on the ground.

  “You got some bad noisies in you,” he said. “Throw your shit around on that ship I’ll open you up harder than a horse could.”

  He turned to the quarter, “Noisy one, merc got some plant in him before he was picked up. Not worth the grief in my view.”

  “He’s worth his berth,” said the quarter.

  One more fist slammed me out.

  I woke in a pen beneath deck. My hand was being bitten through the bars by some fierce buck long since drawn out to a shadow by his life.

  “’Evitt, ’Evitt, I kill you.”

  His teeth had gone deep, through the binding, and my blood dribbled clear of the holes, running to my fingertips. I pulled my hands back through the bars, forcing my foot at him in return.

  He remained there, cussing at the floor where I had let go during my time out cold. The clamour started up with those woken by this agit’s calling out.

  The hatch was opened, Rygat dropped through it, a ladder being lowered after him for his subsequent ascent.

  “You were told.”

  “He’s fuckin’ moanin’ an’ callin’,” said one from the shadows behind the beam of daylight the hatch threw at the floor.

  A few others sparked up, a one-armed woman of forty-odd winters spitting across at me from the pen opposite the buck’s. A pen over from her and it’s an old man, croaking away, licking his cracked lips with the drought we all had from the Droop.

  I was dragged from my cage into the light of the hatch. Rygat had little use for speaking in making a point, throwing me at two of his boys, who held my arms out. The lash bit firm, slicing fine lines into my back. “More!” cried that voice in me, a pebble of defiance in my gut that I feared and hissed at to stop. The bars were banging and the agits jeered as the whip handle was pushed into me, forcing me up on my toes. Quickly it was brought round and forced into my mouth. He held my nose till I was spasmic. This happened a few more times as a display for the other slaves before the sallow-looking drudhan of this ship mopped out the cuts on my back, cleaned the bite and put a roll of pasted leaves in my hole to hold the blood.

  The spitting and jeering continued for some time. Then I rose up the little the Droop allowed and fell away.

  I was not dead.

  I unravelled. The betony shakes had scooped me out, as though my skin was filled with only a sick grey porridge for innards. More light and dark, silences, Rygat and others ending their night’s brandy with the casual fucking and beating of whoever caught their eye in the cages.

  I followed, for the long hours rising and falling from their mixes, the rhythm of the timbers croaking and yawning as The Wayward Lady cut past frozen bays over the mouth of the Sardanna Straight and on past Ilana’s Hood to the western ocean. In the times I was awake I strove to avoid the register of my senses, the horror of my circumstance.

  One day I was forced out of some waking dream by Rygat hauling me awake from the pen:

  “I told you to be quiet and you wouldn’t fucking shut up. Get this hole out of its cage so I can get rid of this stiff.”

  The pens were banging, frenzied braying, a chant for Rygat, a chorus of desperate sublimation and dark relief for it was not them today. I was on my knees, leaning forward to the floor. I noticed I was muttering, speaking. I struggled to connect to the movement of words, my tongue reflexively fluttering through the sentences. Whatever the voice was it spoke darkly, of subtle tortures, vengeance.

  I was pulled upright. The straightening of my back was terrifying. My head lolled like a baby’s hanging from its mother’s arms.

  Rygat stood only in mail leggings and leather deckers. I could only stare into his eyes, perched like eggs on the vast thick cheeks of whiskers that tumbled in ropy locks to his chest. Why was I still muttering?

  He held the back of my head and brought a huge fist into my face.

  “Do you have something to say? Sounds like you’re threatening me then saying sorry to me. You getting the voices now I expect. Happens to some on the Droop.”

  I wasn’t trying to say anything but now I could hear myself, the words bubbling through the blood.

  A buckle seemed to unclasp, a light was filling me up from inside. I’m dying, I thought hopefully. Then it passed, leaving a despair all the more vivid for that moment when something seemed to change in me, a concession struck between this body and its suffering and that whispering other, waiting to reclaim me.

  The guards were under either arm, ready to support more blows. Rygat was not getting any resistance by which to fuel his rage, his hardness plain to everyone in sight. I could barely see him for the abstract confusion of my disassociated voice. I was bewildered, thinking that this other voice could be me, the me I was looking for. Whatever excitement had accompanied my sleeping disobedience of his demand for silence was dissipating quickly. He picked a girl from a pen and forced himself into her on the gangway; his grunting, her grunting and retching, and my own mumbling formed a sort of chorus then which, in my finding it oddly funny, fuelled the rage of the guards to finish me off. I couldn’t stop laughing and laughed the harder for my mouth was still trying to form words.

  Unreached by the rhythm of boots into my legs and guts I scrambled to make sense of what I was saying. There was a vigour to it, a defiance I feared and loved. How strong, how fearless had I been that this part of me belittled the agony I was undergoing. I wondered if I could be mad when I was able to realise it so. The drudhan appeared once more and moved in with rags and flasks for me and the now quivering and bleeding girl. I flapped at him as he pushed the kannabic mix to my nose. The wet sugar cane smell warmed through my throat, numbing the rest of the bruises, mercifully stilling my tongue. The agits, seeing their Droop cook, roared for their mix.

  I remember I smiled as I drifted inward, for I was rediscovering the sense of my being. I had dissolved but was aligning myself again. This new voice was one of mine.

  I was still here.

  “For fuck’s sake!”

  The words were at my ear, slicing through my slumber.

  It was a man’s voice I didn’t recognise, from the pen adjacent to mine. I was slumped at his side of the bars, he at mine. It was too black to see anything.

  “What was I saying?”

  “You lost a sister, you looked on a man die from poisoned bread and seemed pleased about it. More o’ which you won’t fuckin’ shut up! It’s like there’s five of you in there, eh.”

  I touched my chest where her necklace used to hang, then wondered if “she” was my sister and how I knew I once had a necklace. I couldn’t place his voice exactly, perhaps from Rulamna or the far eastern Virates from the tongue, as he wove the scraps of King’s Common into his lect.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Seems a merc like you, eh. What’s your name?”

  “I don’t know. They’re calling me Sand.”

  “I’m Harl.”

  “I…”

  “You’re makin’ the most sense you had in days. Your regulars were Betty mixes?”

  “Betony yes.” I tried to flex my fingers. Less pain. I didn’t have the spasmics as much, just some twitching.

  “You’re on the far side, eh.”

  I wept and then wondered what I wept
for. He was right; despite the pain that came with needing the Droop, I was able to hold a conversation.

  “How did you come here?” I asked.

  “Why do soldiers end up slaves? Never one reason is it. You got the colour of a mercenary, reds are strong so good plant. Bet you betrayed a purse then. I was caught on the losing side of an assault on bandits. Citadels give us a choker for leadin’ and half of us died being marched to the Lock. You?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  I must have slipped away again. Now it was daylight, the sound of heavy rain drumming above us. The hatch was open as was the shit hole at the far end of the deck.

  Five guards watched as each slave shuffled to the hole. Like starved caterpillars, most of the slaves swathed themselves in their brown woollens against the blue and bitter air and shivered the hours away. The hard daylight at the hole pressed the eyes back so’s you could not see past its glare.

  Then a guard moved to the hatch and started climbing. His boot slipped on a rung as he was half out and he fell. He screamed; a sharp lump of bone was pushing out at his woollen sleeve, a growing stain of blood about it.

  I repeated instructions that came out of the nothing behind my thoughts, calling my best in the rasping croaks of the drooper: “Tie rope above the bone”, “Knock the man out with opia”, “Shear some skin for sewing. Fold back”, “Kannabic on the sword and a single cut”… on and on I went, repeating it until the drudhan arrived. He started shouting at the guards, one of whom had filled the man up with Droop from a pouch while the other had a knife going at the skin. They pointed at me. The drudhan spat murder and grabbed the arm of the guard who was trying to cut free the skin of the wounded man’s arm. Another guard leaped over and pushed him back into the aisle between the pens.

  The sword fell, the guard sucked in his breath like he’d jumped into a river, the Droop taking everything else. “Kannabic paste mixing in fireweed or shredded hardhack and boiled water. Sew him up,” I continued.